Published February 6, 2012
Points:
Time spent:
IP address:
Canary word: Present
Possible AI signals:
Original Text:
Are you sure you want to delete this comment? This cannot be undone.
Mark this comment as a review? Points will be awarded to the poster.
Your comment was posted, but it wasn’t long enough to count as a review. Reviews need about four complete sentences (at least 250 characters). Try writing another review that explains your thoughts in more detail — the author will appreciate it, and you’ll earn points for it.
Hi there! This was a cute little poem with a good message at the end. I agree with BlueAfrica's first post, and the rhythm is indeed off, as is the rhyming pattern. Definitely fix that. As for a title, I have a few suggestions:
Thankless Task
Appreciation
Not Just a Teacher
That's all I have for now...good luck!
~Jess
thankss...
P.S. As for a title suggestion, since the point mainly seems to be the teacher, maybe a title that gets that across so we know what to expect when we start reading?
Well, as a future teacher, I liked the message of the poem. I also thought you had a very strong beginning, particularly the first stanza. After that it felt more awkward, however - sometimes you had to sort of twist things around to get your lines to rhyme (often a problem with rhyming poetry; that's why I prefer free verse), and then in the fifth stanza your rhyme scheme changed from AABA to AABB, and then in the last stanza it went to AAAA. So that was also awkward, especially because the initial rhyme scheme was not a particularly common one and was therefore more interesting and less annoyingly singsong.
What I would suggest is either picking a single rhyme scheme to keep up throughout the poem (if you choose this I suggest the AABA) or else switching to free verse, which is more, well, freeing than rhyming poetry. Either way you go, this will take away the apparently random changes in rhyme scheme (which are rather distracting to the reader), which in turn will make the whole poem more enjoyable.
I also suggest adding more concrete imagery - you started off so well with the clock and the butter sandwich, but once you got to the part about the teacher (which is apparently the most important part), you lost all imagery and figurative language, which was disappointing after such a strong beginning. It also kind of bothered me that the teacher was neglected until the sixth stanza when the poem was mainly supposed to be about her and her thankless job (as far as I could tell) - I thought at first that the poem was going to be about someone struggling with something (from "going to school is an every day fix," since "fix" is usually used with "drugs" in this sense), then I thought it was just going to be about high school (as you went through the school day), and then suddenly it was about the teacher. On the one hand, it makes sense that you neglected the teacher, as the teacher in the poem seems to be neglected, but on the other hand, it just didn't tie in very well with the rest of the poem. So even if you can lengthen this and bring it back around to the next school day and the kids in the halls and stuff to tie the whole thing together circularly, I think that could work.
Also, I really did not understand "no thank to any blue,/ no thank to any Jew." That really just seemed like fishing for rhymes. (No thank to any Jew???)
But like I said, really strong opening stanza, and I got a very nice sense of the high school day - something any of us who are in high school or above have been through, easy to relate to, etc.
Hope this helped!
~Blue
thanksss...
How about the School of Life ? n.n
thankss.. i'll think...