Summary Of Marks By Lindon Paston

Most students today, no matter what level of education they are at know the feeling of getting a report card back, only to see that they 've received poor grades or even worse, grades that don 't reflect the time and effort that were put in to the class. In today 's society the grading in an educational system can cause a great deal of controversy as to whether students are actually receiving the grades they deserve and whether grades are measuring the student 's true adroitness. In the poem Marks, the author, Lindon Paston uses a controlling metaphor, diction, and tone to portray a woman 's feeling of confinement and restriction when being graded as if in an education system, by her own family as a stay at home mother. We witness the speaker

In this poem the controlling metaphor permits the reader to gain a connection to the speaker and feel as if they can relate to them, especially for females. When paston wrote this poem in 1978 women were supposed to do everything around the house and in Marks the speaker was a stay at home wife and mother during this time. The controlling metaphorreally alters our perception to the family and represents the significance of the mother 's emotional defeat. First, her husband, the start of the poem and who is portrayed as "the leader of the house". Paston uses letter grades when talking about her husband and there is a great deal of significance behind this. Schools often times don 't use grades until you are further along in your education, when you are young and not very advanced they don 't feel it necessary to employ grades just yet, and although they do use them in middle school it doesn 't really indicate too much about your skill level, but once you get to high school and college letter grades demonstrate where you really stand in your education. In the poem he is the only one to use letter grades, proving that her husband asserts himself as top priority and his opinion is the one that means the most out of all of them.

Marks is very notable for the way it refers to particular words for each family member. "My husband gives me an A for last night 's supper." Instead of using the word dinner, Linda Paston decides to use supper instead. The word supper was much more popular during the 19th century and the use of it has declined drastically since the 1900 's, claiming to be "old-fashioned". So, are we as readers surprised she utilizes this word as something the husband says? No, because he himself is stuck in the old- fashioned sort of norm for society when husbands worked all day and came home to a clean house and "supper" on the table from their stay at home wives. As for diction when interpreting her son, " My son says I 'm average, an average mother, but if I put my mind to it I could improve" The denotation of the word improve is considered as "develop or increase in mental capacity by education or experience" but she doesn 't mean it in a way of gaining more experience in being a housewife, she 's had enough of that, she wants experience in her own education and in her own job that doesn 't revolve around doing chores for everyone else in her life. She doesn 't take pleasure in being trapped in the house all day and knows she has more to live for than that. Not to mention, she is baffled by the fact that her son is willing to even say this