Wednesday, December 4, 2013

More Poetry #hashtag

I created this poem while thinking about my teaching philosophy. One of my classmates liked it, so I thought I would share. I think it needs a few more stanzas. Feel free to make comments on additional lines.

Teaching

The goal of a teacher is to make oneself obsolete
to help young minds to become complete
to help young students meet their ambition
and to show them the value of metacognition.

Other poetic posts: Poetry 1Poetry 2Poetry 3, Poetry 4


On a related note, I am a poetaster. Now, poetaster is not one of those neologism that I so despise. According to Merriam and Webster, it has been in use since the 16th Century. It seems like a more modern compilation of "poet" mashed with "disaster", but apparently people have been adding the suffix "aster" to denote poor quality for hundreds of years. There are the words "medicaster" (quack doctor), "philosophaster" (bad philosopher) and "politicaster" (redundant word for petty politician) out there, too.

While trying to type in politicaster to the dictionary, I stumbled badly and typed in a jumble of words that lead to a suggestion of "Are you looking for poliodystrophy?" I was not looking for poliodystrophy intentionally, but I did find that it was an interesting word. It is the "atrophy of the gray matter especially of the cerebrum." Hopefully, by being a poetaster I am avoiding poliodystrophy; even writing bad poetry requires a fair amount of cognition.

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