Sheryr Sonia
CODE 121
Dr. DeSpain
22 October 2024
Reflection 5
I chose the poem Standardized Achievement because it stood out to me. I read this poem multiple times and thought about deciphering each line and who the speaker and audience are. This poem talks about a student’s life in school and the pressures that come with it. This relates to parents’ heavy expectations and goals when the student just wants to be good enough and accepted. Lines three and four of the poem state, “A rigorous seventy-eight question test That quantifies our devotion & grief.” This perspective of the student is that they believe that this test is everything and is a life or death situation.
This reminded me of myself; for my entire life, I was a perfectionist and always a straight-A student. Then college came along, and everything changed; this took a considerable toll on my mental health because I always held myself so highly. This was the main reason why this poem caught my attention; my entire life, I have always told myself that these were my expectations. I was so hard on myself regarding grades because I did not want to disappoint my parents, and I strived to make myself and my parents proud.
Reading a literary analysis was different than reading other texts we’ve read because it focused on how the author wrote the piece instead of what it was about. This analysis also gave me a different way to look at writing pieces since I now tend to think about the way the author structures their writings or what type of rhetoric they use to pull in their audience. I can apply what I see in the text to our CODES theme: for us to actually make the change we want to see for ourselves and our communities, we need to actually see for ourselves the problems and talk to the people living through them daily. We can’t rely on machines or ChatGPT to tell us what’s best; we need to see and understand for ourselves to resolve our problems as best as possible.