Commentary on Poem 3

reflecting on:
-the theme that you are exploring in the poem.
-how you developed the theme in your poem.
-the effect/s that you would like to achieve in the poem to impact your readers and how you went about doing it.
-the extent to which you think you have been successful

The poem is about a student and a teacher's lives in school. Students tend to be stress when they had failed for any of the tests or exams. Teachers taught students almost everything in five days a week. When they get home, they had to plan how to teach us the next day a different subject a different way or we would get bored and not listen in class. In this poem, I mentioned the common mistakes students make in school. Teachers who mark essay written by students like Tan Geok Peng will be driven madly by them. As the usage of their grammar, tenses, vocabulary and usage of English words are so poor even though the teachers had taught in class before. Teachers had repeated every thing over and over again for more than a week, but we still can make the same mistake for not listening in class. I developed my poem by composing what happen to a girl in her 16s going to sit for General Certificate Examination in three months time. But still writing compo like a primary school kid and the teacher who taught her was driven madly by her.
I would like my readers to have the feeling of stress encountered by teachers and students in school when they are reading the poem. Letting them know how difficult it is to be a teacher teaching students like Tan Geok Peng. To let the readers know that kind of feeling, I composed about what the teacher usually focused on when they teach us English. Also writing what mistakes we are always making. We had wasted our teachers and our time for all this. We could make full use of time to lear things from what the teachers had taught us.

Composed individually based on a story of our choice from Catherine Lim's Little Ironies

The Teacher
Teacher teaching us subjects
Everyday except for weekends and holidays
Not a day can they rest

going to sit for General Certificate of Education
In three months time
But her English was still not improving

Teachers teach us Vocabulary, Grammar, Tenses and usage of English
But we never take their teachings serious
Still the same
Writing essay with lots of mistakes

A secondary four student
Seem timid on the outside
Wrote an essay on the title ‘My Happiest Day’ and ‘My ambition’
Out of the whole essay,
Only had one sentence correctly written
If called by teacher to answer a question
She will be ready to faint in fright any minute

Her composition was getting worse everyday
The teacher hop to help her
Call her in for some extra coaching
But in vain she had to give her a F9

News reached the school fast
the girl committed suicide
By jumping down from the eleventh floor
The teacher wanted to help her
But she was too shy and timid to speak up

Composed in a group during the Poetry Slam Coaching

I woke up at 5am
before the day break
365 days,
a non-stop routine
Have a wash up
and two pieces of plain bread for breakfast
Though I know that two pieces of bread cannot last long

I had to hurry to set up my stall
in the middle of the hawker centre
Collect the freshest ingredients
before it is all being wiped out
I work for 14 hours a day
Only having 30 minutes of break

I'm always the one working hard behind
People at the front will never know how hard I work
Although I always had a smile on my face
I was actually sad on the inside
I got fed up at every little mistake I make
And blamed my partner if anything goes wrong

I had once thought of giving up
but after many thoughts of it
I decided to erase that thought of my mind
I keep thinking why I need to work so hard
I needed to keep my family going

It is a very tiring job
Every time I reach home
I would sit on the chair
Wondering why I am here,
working as a chef in the hawker centre
and not in the restaurant
I regretted for not studying hard
when i was a teenager

Composed individually during the Poetry Slam Coaching Clinic

~will be undated ltr~

Introduction

I am Esther Lim from class 1E3. Born in 7 December, 1997. Happy to be a huayi'an.