102 Gallons Of Water In His Body By Naomi Shihab Nye Analysis

Analyzing Parental Relationships Have you ever watched the show “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” In modern education, younger generations seem to be surpassing their parents very quickly. In the poem “My Son Swears he has 102 Gallons of Water in His Body” by Naomi Shihab Nye, a son argues with his parents about what the reader can only assume to be homework in the form of a mathematical problem yet still deals with them despite the knowledge gap. In this poem, the conflict first appears whenever the child and his parents start arguing over a school problem in which he “did the problem [in school] and [his] teacher said [he] was right” (Nye 3-4). Although he insists he is correct, his parents continue to argue over questions, even though they are far away from fully understanding what the answers truly are. The parents state that “[light] strokes the dashboard. We are years away from its source” (Nye 5-6). In saying this, the parents are insinuating that they are “years” away from knowing what their child knows, even though he is much younger than them. While the parents are admitting that the boy is correct, they say that they are “idiots without worksheets to back [them] up,” which implies that the child is able to prove that he is correct due to the worksheets that he receives from school (Nye 9-10). While

And while they are trying to help, the child is also helping them. Whenever a parent ends up being incorrect in an argument with the child, the child is teaching them the true answer. The author compares parents to “streams, sweet pools, something to dip into with an old metal cup” (Nye 17-18) rather than “carrying giant waterfalls inside” (Nye 16). Instead of being a constant source of information for their kid, the parents can only help him with certain