Analysis Of Poem For Christian My Student

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The education system today has the whole pedagogical process down to a science. Take a certain percentage of the student’s multiple choice score and then multiply the free response score by a seemingly random string of digits, then consider the weighted average, so and so forth. Then after crunching the numbers out comes the perfect student: One who can write the proper essay, the correct lab report, correctly perform an experiment, correctly, proper, right. But the system rarely stops to consider producing the best person. If the educational system does not consider the student as an individual, then do teachers? Should they? These are the questions Gail Mazur seeks to answer in “Poem for Christian, My Student.” Through her rhetorical questions and comparison, Mazur creates a speaker full of regret and helplessness when she realizes Christian needs a genuine teacher while she is bound to her role as an educator. “He [Christian] reminds me of someone I used to know, / but who?” asks Mazur’s speaker, though it becomes increasingly apparent that this …show more content…
Conversely, Mazur does not joke with students the same way Wagoner does. In fact, Mazur is curious and seeks to help her students in any way she can. Despite this, she feels helpless when looking at Christian’s situation, clear in her use of rhetorical questions which characterize the speaker in a way where the reader can identify her feelings: “What can I do? Who does he remind me

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