It might be highly ambitious of me but I’m going to the Dean of Students about my poetry teacher. I walked into that class with the same knowledge I have now, and I don’t know why my education should suffer just because my TA sucks at her job. It shouldn’t. So my plan of action is this . . .
-Talk to the main professor of the class to let him know that she isn’t doing her job
-Ask for an extension on the craft paper we have to write
-Seek out how to speak to the Dean of Students for the University, or at least the Humanities department
Why do I care so much? Because I’m a dedicated student and I’ve been wasting my time in this lame course, “taught” by a graduate student who’s not really doing anything. I’m getting stressed out because she expects us to write a 3-5 page paper on something that she hasn’t taught us yet. Seriously, all we’ve been doing since the day I walked in there in August is
-”workshopping” our classmates poems which means we’re supposed to be reading their poems and giving a critique saying what works and what doesn’t . . . except she never spent time teaching us HOW to do that. So basically, we’re giving our opinions . . . on a subject we know nothing about. AND she doesn’t even check to make sure we’re doing it.
-Reading poems from random poets that she keeps assigning, but we never really go over it in class. She asks us what lines we think don’t fit, and then we move on. Not to mention the fact that she made us buy 5 books for this class even though we’ve only used one of them to look up poems and one other one that was a novel written in verse (stanzas or phrases vs. paragraphs) about gay sex. . . this pertains to poetry, how?
-When I went in to have a required conference with her, she hadn’t even read my poems. Like she literally skimmed the two shortest ones in front of my face and then began marking them up telling me what I did wrong. Not only that but she kept me late so she could read me five other poets’ work that she thought I’d enjoy or could imitate. Thanks . . . write down the names and let me sound out the vowels later teach! It’s a poetry course, not story time at the community center.
But why I’m really mad is because we have to write a craft paper which means analyze a poem in a 3-5 page paper using only one element such as tone, imagery, voice . . . but she hasn’t shown us what any of those terms mean. She writes them on the board and gives a vague definition but never shows us what that means in an actual poem. And she told us about it last week b/c she didn’t want to tell us about it a week before it was due (I only have this class once a week). But then she told us she’d help us out by giving us an example of a craft paper. She waits like three days to send that and when she does . . . this is what is says: (it included the poem but I didn’t add it here)
The heavy, repetitious use of rhyme in the poem enforces the impression of the coercive force of artistic inspiration. In the first stanza, four of the seven end words rhyme with “reft”; in the following stanzas, many of the end words continue to echo the same sound, with variation: “breath” and “comfortless” (stanza two), “flesh” (stanza three) “wrestlers” and “rest” (stanza five). As the poem develops, new sounds are introduced, like themes, to be echoed in later rhymes and off-rhymes: for example, the “slake” sound in the third stanza (“take, flake, unawake”) returns as “break,” “shake,” “hesitate,” “waits,” “strain” in later stanzas. The effect of these rhyming sounds accumulating in successive layers mimics the action of a wave, an image introduced in the second-to-last stanza: “sound surging upon sound / makes my brain blind; as a wave-line may wait to fall…” The alliteration of “brain blind,” as well as its vowel-sound-similarity with “wave-line” enacts the assonant “surging upon sound” mentioned. This enactment reinforces the buildup of the speaker’s internal pressure. Throughout the poem, the emphasis is on the tension, the potential, of the moment; as the speaker says of the wave’s crest, she is “(waiting for its falling).
Does ANYONE know what that means? And WHY is that only a paragraph? We asked for a sample paper so we would now how to stretch our answer out over 3 pages, not so you could show us how intelligent you think you are with your heavily worded sentences.
Now I have to waste my time going to her office hours when she should have been teaching me this throughout the semester.
-I haven’t learned ANYTHING in this course. And it sucks because there are like five other TA’s, why did I get her?
I seriously think Satan chose my classes and teachers this semester . . . I hate them all. >:/
Please pray for me because we start picking our classes for next semester, next week. Please pray with me that I get good classes, afternoon class times AND good teachers.
