! ! English Teacher Poem by Michael Shepherd

! ! English Teacher

Rating: 3.2


bumped into my grandson's English teacher yesterday
at the football, and in between shouting like teenagers
I moaned about the state of A's Eng. Lit. not to mention Eng. Lang. -
you know, you've heard it all before... in my day.....never regretted....
he agreed, but said go easy on the lad he's only thirteen
they all want to be fifteen and grown up at that age,
they can't be seen by their peer-group to be 'for' anything too much
so they ridicule everything, it's either pretentious crap if it's modern
or stupid ancient crap if it's more than a generation ago...
they even call Shakespeare a sad loser until
someone says he wrote the screenplay for that film
though they're fascinated by the idea that Marlowe
was a spy as well as a crap writer not that they've read him anyway

but you know what he said
put them up on stage in the annual Shakespeare and make them
speak his lines, and they'll never forget it,
they'll not say anything about it to me except in private but
they'll remember it to their dying day it's things like that
he said that keep me in this bloody job.


(revisited)

COMMENTS OF THE POEM
kskdnj sajn 12 March 2006

It is a wise teacher indeed, that can teach through experience, and leave plenty to reflect on. Nice read!

0 0 Reply
sheila knowles 17 February 2006

Michael, this really struck a chord with me. It's so easy to give up, bang your head on the wall, throw in the towel but this character puts his finger right on the heart of what makes it all worthwhile. So very true too. I still remember my part in the play we made of The Highwayman :)

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Gina Onyemaechi 17 February 2006

Well what do we expect, Mikey? School is, after all, little more than an annoying interruption to the social lives of the young...unless you make learning real to them as the protagonist of this poem occasionally manages. Wish it could be like this day-to-day. Warmly, Gina (or to you, Miss Onyemaechi) : -)

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Michael Shepherd

Michael Shepherd

Marton, Lancashire
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