The Girl is a poem that was written by Jamaica Kincaid in 1978. In the poem it talks about a parent telling a child what all to do, and how to do it. Some of the material discussed is how to
wash the clothes, how to smile at someone you like, and how to set the table. While there are some similarities between the training of the child presented in the poem to my training, most of the training discussed was completely different from mine growing up and how I would want to raise my own kids.
The following is a list of some of the similarities between the teachings in the poem and my parents' teachings. One very big similarity is that both the poems' teachings and my parents' teachings stressed the importance of proper manners. In The Girl
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One of the main differences between the two teaching styles is that the parent in the poem comes off very harsh when it comes to her technique of teaching her children while my parents were polite when it came to teaching me new things about life. Another difference between the two teaching styles is that the adult in the poem tried to micromanage the child's life, while my parents let me experience a lot on my own.
I believe that her culture and language had a huge impact on her writing. In the first few lines she wrote about washing and cleaning the clothes and using rocks to dry the clothes. Also, a lot of the animals and dishes
that were talked about were not from the United States but from her native country. An example of her language having an effect on her writing is that she uses words that are not very common when it comes to America.
I can relate to a lot of the things that the poem was teaching. However, there were also a few instances that I did could not relate to at all. I did not understand why the adult came off so harsh in her teachings. Her upbringing seemed stricter than one would face in America which was probably reflected in her