Evan Nave Poem 17

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Evan Nave writes: “I was / too busy calculating my / mortality to bother solving / for the value of x.” (lines 15-18). In these few lines, someone can easily think of a time when they were in school and they had other things on their minds besides the actual subject of school. It can be difficult for students to focus on the subject of school when they are facing personal problems in their daily lives. Students are often forced to disregard personal problems or face the consequences of their grades suffering because they brought their issues along with them to school. In our education system, there is not any room for a student to bring their personal lives with them once they enter the doors of the institution. The poem, “17” by Evan Nave …show more content…

Each line of the poem reads as an incomplete thought, except for lines 1 and 10, which read: “I am choking /.../ I was not well” (Nave). Even though these lines can be considered complete thoughts, they are still choppy and short in content. These two lines introduce us early on to the student’s internal conflict versus the setting that the student is currently in. Besides the fragmented thoughts, the poem as a whole appears as one large stanza and there are not clear breaks where a new stanza begins or ends; or in other words the syntax of the poem is difficult to cipher through. In order to help piece things together, I broke it up into four stanzas for each sentence of the poem. Three out of four of the sentences begin with “I,” while the other begins with “my algebra teacher.” This is important to note because the student, 75% of the time, is thinking about his personal situation rather than the subject of class. The disjointed thoughts throughout the lines of the poem standout in the last couple of lines of the poem. Evan Nave writes: “my thoughts are not / math.” (lines 19-20). These two lines exemplify how our educational system is focused on what a student can bring as a statistic. It exemplifies this because math is a black and white subject, and one can infer that these lines are saying …show more content…

Through the use of this short structure and being concise to depict the setting and emotional state of the narrator, the reader is able to identify with the turmoil and conflict what the narrator faces. One can easily relate to the difficulty that students face trying to achieve academic success with little to no emotional support in the school environment. The poem, "17", by Evan Nave holds substantial evidence to support the obvious disconnect between a student's everyday life and a student's "school life" in our educational system. It also makes a point to show that our educational system does not provide room for a student's emotional needs. Instead, students are seen as numbers based on their individual academic achievement and what they bring to the district in statistical data of school achievement. The reader can feel this obvious disconnect and need for change in order to meet the students needs by the authors use of language, word choice, subject matter and overall structure. Upon reading this poem, one should hope for a better way of helping students with all of their needs. Perhaps, through structural changes schools will be able relate students personal lives to their academic lessons in order to produce well rounded individuals that are able to cope and contribute to society upon entering the real world at their time of

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