Emory D. Jones

ENGLISH TEACHER, OR AN INSTITUTIONAL NIGHTMARE

English teacher—
it sounds so much like prison guard
with students serving sentences,
exercised in grammar—
the dull round of verb, noun
pronoun, compound direct object.

We serve them with papers,
haul them in by their principal parts,
block them off in regimented rules,
and then expect instant rehabilitation—
we coerce them into Received Standard,
at best a dream that never was.

We have kept watch too long,
drained away their lives and ours,
replaced it with pure prison pallor—
surely, there is a better way.


Gerald So reads "English Teacher...":



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Emory confesses: "I am a retired English teacher who has taught in the middle school, high school, and community college level. This poem is my personal observation of how English has been taught."

Dr. EMORY D. JONES is a retired English teacher who has taught in high school and in several community colleges. He has four hundred and twenty-eight credits including publication in such journals as Voices International, The White Rock Review, Cotton Boll/Atlanta Review, Writer’s Digest, SNReview, Jellyfish Whispers, Wild Violet Magazine, Smokey Blue Literary and Arts Magazine, Stepping Stones Magazine, Peninsula Poets, Down in the Dirt, The Light Ekphrastic, Old Red Kimono, Common Ground Review, Free Xpressions Magazine, The Storyteller, American Poetry, Big Muddy: A Journal of the Mississippi River Valley, Belle Rêve Review, The Common Journal, The Ibis Review, Deep South Magazine, Modern Poetry Quarterly Review, Gravel, Pasques Petals, The Pink Chameleon, The Cumberland River Review, and Encore: Journal of the NFSPS. He is retired and lives in Iuka, Mississippi, with his wife, Glenda. They have two daughters and four grandchildren.