From a reader:
To a Teacher Whose Work Has Come to Naught
Consider Ms Jones, putting her best suit on,
chalking her name once more on the board last September,
and think of that first giddy moment a kid connected
to a Sexton poem. Think of the difference it made!
There above are the computers crimping verse into rubrics
and here are the shocked admins pumping past the doomed classroom
and think of the innocent test-
takers who are not doing well.
Larger than software, over the fog
and the blast
of the econometricians, she goes.
Admire her reckless bravery!
Feel the Gatesian fire at her neck
and see how casually
she gazes up and is caught,
a deer momentarily blinded
by ed-reform’s headlights. Who cares that
she scored inefficient?
See her acclaiming the poet and
come tumbling down
While her sensible principal
replaces her with a TFA.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This Is Genius: A spoken word poem by Ryan Lotocki
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That spoken word piece is powerful, thanks for sharing.
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Thank you for the student poem. The child’s poem reaches out toward a possible future.
The reader’s poem, ‘To a Teacher Whose Work Has Come to Naught’, portends defeat.
a sad demise.
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I wish I could be poetic in my response, but I would be doing a disservice to Ryan’s genius. Just “Wow!”
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Thanks for always actively posting 🙂
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Nice! Keep writing, reader, come what may.
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I don’t about anyone else, but THAT poem REALLY cheered me up . . . .
I feel so much better now. . . .
Now if only someone would submit a piece exhibiting hopelessness and pure defeat instead of all this Hallmark card banter . . . .
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Thanks for this poem “To a Teacher Whose Work Has Come to Naught”. Sometimes verse can better portray the intensity of reality than prose ever could.
Having taught in the school system for 27 years, and having seen many sincere teachers targeted and isolated (even before the hammer-blows of the “reforms” that have destroyed what was left of what should have been the temple of public education) and having seen my own labors over the decades turned repeatedly towards — if not “to” — naught, I can empathize with the sentiments expressed.
I have always practiced and advocated resistance to the inanitiies that afflict the school system, but there comes a point when one asks how much longer one can remain sane and functional amid criminal madness.
One begins to understand how the horrors that swept Europe during the 1930’s and 1940’s took place. When “decent” folk act like sheep, then the indecent ones are the wolves that prey.
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I have come to understand how easily fascism and fascist “mob think” comes to rule. We live in frightening times and are paying no heed to the lessons of history. Trouble ahead…Thanks for your post.
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Regarding the spoken word poem — it is a strong and needed statement against what has come to be the expected or desired norm in the schools. That said, one should also say that there is a place in the schools and outside them for both formal, structured education — the sequenced study of the traditional and emerging disciplines created by our species — and for the informal, often unstructured, education that has always been the base on which all else is built.
There should be room for both structured study and unstructured exploration, for work and for play, and school and college should not dominate the lives of children and adolescents, just as the job from which one gets one’s material sustenance should not dominate the lives of adults.
But one should not attempt to overly structure play and exploration. It is better to leave the students (and their teachers) with time to do this on their own, as they wish, without the reward and punishment structure that increasingly pervades both our schools and our places of work. This basic human genius, evident in the most “primitive” of societies, is increasingly threatened with extinction in the more “advanced” ones, which are driven by economic structures that lead to this extinction.
Compulsion and supervision, reward and punishment, might have some small place when we are dealing with small children who are prone to tantrums and whims and have not yet learned to respect others’ rights and carry out their responsibilities. But these things become increasingly stifling, counterproductive and obscene when they are used to make older children and adults do what others want them to do.
In every factory on this planet, and in every school that mirrors the factories, you can see what compulsion and supervision, reward and punishment, can accomplish and what it cannot.
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http://thedailypoet.blogspot.com/2015/03/clock-alarms.html
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Great poem!
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Absolutely BEAUTIFUL.
May I add, if you can find Daily Kos somewhere on the internet, watch Mr. Rogers address Congress to defend children’s programs on PBS. It states you will cry, watching it. I did. I think you may also.
I believe that there is a congruent message which both this poem and Mr. Roger’s talk addresses in the fight for quality education.
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Spring break is next week. When we return, I have a new student: a child from the kindergarten. Finally, after 6 mos. of forcing this kid to comply with the Kindergarten curriculum, he has been placed into a special ed course because he is supposedly still at a two year old level. Little speech that I know of and poor fine motor skills, he has been scribbling his way through a curriculum that was too hard for him. I know what they will say to me: he must still follow the curriculum. I say BS. He needs language, patience, and play.
I refuse to pressure my students beyond their present moment. I have yet this year had even one administrator come into my room and spend a few moments observing what my assistant and I do.
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Hauntingly beautiful poem. Thank you, reader. For those of you who have only been teaching long enough (& I salute you all, & am working w/others to end this testing) to be caught in the “teach-to-the-test” curriculum, I say, in summary–taught naught.
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Brilliant. And heartbreaking. And true.
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