Schoolsville, Essay Example

This poem written by Billy Collins describes the thoughts of a teacher who is reflecting on his or her career. The speaker opines about his place within the town of Schoolsville, presumably an imaginary town as well as his niche in the entire universe, which is intrinsically linked to his profession as a pedagogue and all of the students he has taught throughout. The tone of the poem is a humorous one as he describes his feelings for his students and pedagogy in general, which the speaker conveys through various literary devices. The scene that the speaker paints is quite ludicrous as he describes several stereotypical situations in which he situates his students predicated on hyperbolic manifestations of how they were in high school. The student who was preoccupied with pleasing others becomes a leader of the town and a business mogul.  The speaker describes this student as always raising his hand, which is an example of a hyperbolic statement. The speaker also describes a girl who would always sign her completed papers with her lipstick, which is a another example of how hyperbole is used in this poem. While the girl did not actually use her lipstick to sign her paper, this description intimates that she was so preoccupied by her external appearances that the pedagogue assumed she signed her paper with lipstick. The hyperbole so evident in the poem is amplified by various allusions, such as the reference to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Hyperbole and literary allusions through enhance the humorous tone and the nature of the speaker’s nostalgia as he looks back on his storied career.

Such a humorous tone conveys a sense of despondency and hopelessness. While the underlying sarcasm is conveyed in the speaker’s descriptions, the majority of his portrayals of his students are overwhelmingly pejorative. Students outwardly “sweat the final” despite the fact that they have been writing poorly organized and written papers for so many years. He describes the students as walking around without a purpose or direction, using particular diction to suggest that they cannot walk a straight line because they lack a clear goal in their lives. He laments at one of his female students who brushes her hair in a mechanistic manner, which indicates that she lacks human rationality, emotion, and feeling. The speaker waxes poetic about students posing inane and trite questions about unimportant matters such as whether or not they should double space their papers. It appears that none of the speaker’s student achieved anything great, although this notion, it is assumed, manifests because the speaker elides any mention of students who achieved anything great. As such, there is a multi-faceted tone in this poem, as both humor and despondency can be traced through various poetic devices.

However, it is reductive to conclude that the speaker decried his experiences as a teacher. He never imparts a condescending tone, which suggests that his own existence is one and the same with his students. In the final stanzas of the poem, the speaker describes himself rather than his students. He resides in a stereotypical American community in a white colonial home that is located at the corner of Main and Maple. Moreover, the speaker discusses that he may have lost his handle on reality, and he teachers to students that are wholly absent. This notion bolsters the absurd nature of his actions because he is not teaching to anyone, and his actions sound quite negative. He lectures his students, forces them to take mundane tests and quizzes, and censures his students on a quotidian basis. While the students seemingly are not impacted by the speaker’s teaching, it is clear that they have profoundly affected the teacher, as the speaker conveys that his psychological devolution is attributed to the absent students he has taught throughout the years.