High School English Classes

I love the English language
I love learning new words
Uping my vocabulary
With words like licentious
Or efficacy
I love taking those words
And creating new worlds
With lines of prose and poetry
Or just a short story
But high school
Is killing creativity
We beat meanings out of poems
And make symbols out of simple descriptions
We write essays that have to be a certain way
Shape
And form
The books we read
Rarely hold our interest
But if we don't read them
And write an essay with 3 to 4 sources
And utilize a rhetorical device
Analyzing the story of someone's life
We fail at school
And are doomed to fail in our future

We beat a message out of something written for you to enjoy
When is the last time an author wrote a book hoping that an English teacher would tie it to a chair and ask their students to torture a confession from it
Remove that authors emotions
Remove the reader's enjoyment
And beat a meaning from it

When was the first

A high school English class is like a giant water bug to a frog
It sucks out the creativity
The imagination
The enjoyment
Instead of discussing the deeper meaning because you want to make sense of a poem you love
You are forced to make sense of someone's life
We see a symbol where there was not supposed to be one
We see a deeper meaning when it was meant to be taken at face value
We have destroyed the joy of reading
And by now
We cannot go back
High school English classes have corrupted us
And we no longer know how to simply enjoy ourselves

This poem is about: 
Me
My community

Comments

Additional Resources

Get AI Feedback on your poem

Interested in feedback on your poem? Try our AI Feedback tool.
 

 

If You Need Support

If you ever need help or support, we trust CrisisTextline.org for people dealing with depression. Text HOME to 741741