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Pass/Fail Poem Analysis

505 Words3 Pages

Roughly “15% of life is spent at school” in the United States (“What percentage of”). Humans are in school during the early years of development, thus the education system impacts their thoughts, choices, and overall wellbeing. It promotes discovery, but still confides the students to certain rules. This concept is explored throughout many poems including “Pass/Fail,” “Trouble with Math in a One-Room Country School,” “Zimmer’s Head Thudding against the Blackboard,” “The School Room on the Second Floor of the Knitting Mill,” and “Fork.” An overall negative attitude emerges from the themes that discusses how education and schooling impact you, for better or for worse. In the poem “Pass/Fail,” by Linda Pastan, the idea that dreams of taking …show more content…

Her teach mistakes her asking classmate for help with a math problem for insubordinate behavior. The main symbol is the “monumental desk” of the teacher (Kenyon, 9). It gives the image of a throne as if it the divine right of a teacher to have absolute authority over classroom. The education system control our childhood starts to emerge as the underlying theme. The author remembers the image of the “furnace closet” where only the worst boys were put and how “the warmth, the gloom, the smell/of sweeping compound clinging to the broom/soothed” (Kenyon, 13, 16-18). She invokes the five sense to give the readers an idea of what the closest was like. It adds to her stance of how the situation leaves her “blinking/ and changed” because it provides the reader with details about the closest (Kenyon, 24-25). This adds the the overall theme that school impacts ones childhood. It tell students how to act and if one does not follow directions one gets punished. This changes children for better or for worse. Again, a positive and negative attitude

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The poem, Useless Boys,is one that portrays a feeling of indignation, rebellion and finally, understanding by two boys who grew up with bitter views of their fathers’ onerous jobs. The narrator believes that the only reason his father stays at his job is for the money. In his naivety the son does not realize that at times living selfishly is the way things have to be. Sometimes commitments are made in a self-sacrificial and cowardly manner. No matter how “wrecking” his father’s career, he stays in order to provide for his family.

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In “The Sanctuary of School” Lynda applies her personal life to the fact that some people think cutting down budgets for public schools will benefit when times get tough. Also that art, music and the creative ideas will be the first to go when budgets are cut. Lynda had a rough childhood where her parents had money issues and family members that needed temporarily to stay at her home (Barry, 721). The lack of attention from her parents made her look for attention elsewhere in this case the school. Lynda saw her teacher Mrs. LeSane as a mother figure.

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What is school really trying to do with our lives? The article “Against School” by John Taylor Gatto is an article that talks about the problem of schools and how the goals are not what they say they are. First. the author talks about how the school system creates boredom and what could be done to fix it. He then talks about how school is not needed in its required class times, what the schools say the goals are for the students, and where our school system originated from.

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The essay will consider the poem 'Practising' by the poet Mary Howe. It will explore how this poem generates its meaning and focus by analysing its techniques, metaphorical construct and its treatment of memory. The poem can primarily be seen to be a poem of missed opportunity. In this way is comes to form, alongside other poems of Howe's a study about a certain kind of loss and the recuperative efforts of memory, alongside the certainty of the failure of this recuperation. The paper will begin by giving a context to the poem with regard to Howe's life and work and will then proceed to analyse it directly, drawing attention to how it can be seen to fulfil this thesis about its content and meaning.

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The 1970s were a rough year for African-Americans, still fighting for social and political rights in the United States. Consequently, women still did not receive equal rights. However, in 1972, “Congress approved the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to the Constitution, which reads: ‘Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex’ (History.com Staff).” Out of the thirty-eight necessary states only twenty-two ratified it right away, it was relieving for the moment because the feminist advocates had been trying to be ratified since 1923. The First African-American woman elected into Congress was Shirley Chisholm.

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“What I Learned and What I Said at Princeton” by David Saderis and “Against School: How Public Education Cripple Our Kids, And Why” by John Taylor Gatto both relate to school using the experience that they encounter in the system. Both writers give example of how the education can affect the student reflection. In “What I Learned and What I Said at Princeton,” Saderis mention how his dad was in character of his school, “He had the whole outfit: Princeton breastplate, Princeton nightcap; he even got the velvet cape with the tiger hanging like a rucksack from between the should blades (Saderis 197).” Failing was not an option for Saderis; his dad is constantly bloated about him as a Princeton student. In the second essay, “Against School:

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