Last week, my stepfather sent me a box of pictures and school papers from when I was in elementary school. Among them was this undated assignment, from probably 2nd or 3rd grade:

A bed of leaves

My yard is full of leaves today.
Brown yellow and red
I think i'll rake them
in a pile. higher than my head.
Then I'll pretend it is my bed
I'll jump in very quick.
And pile the leaves up over me
for covers soft and thick,
I'll just lie ther[e] so nice and warm
And look up at the sky
And watch the leaves that float
down on me
To rake up by and by.

Now, in the original, this wasn't a skinny little column down the page. No, this was printed in big letters, all the way across the page, in pencil. The line breaks above are where I hit the right margin. Or, in printing terms, it was fully justified (an effect I can't seem to duplicate in HTML). Yessir, this was a solid page worth of artistic expression.

How did I do? Well, the teacher made a couple of spelling corrections, including the final line, which she changed to:

To rake up bye and bye.

...even though my spelling in that case was correct. Ahem. But, the big insult, and probably the ultimate root of my overactive cynicsm and distrust of authority, was her comment at the bottom of the page, in red pen:

Chris, you didn't write this as a poem

Whaaa?? Not a poem? Of course it's a poem! I know it's no sonnet, but come on; by any reasonable definition of "poem", it's a poem. If this is a poem, what I wrote is a poem. Sure, it's not a great work of art. Sure, I wasn't obviously destined to become the next William Carlos Williams, or Shelly, or Wordsworth; but in my unbiased opinion, it's a decent showing for a seven year old who couldn't even spell "there". Ugh. Such potential stifled, at such a tender age.

So to you, Ms. Forgotten Provincial Teacher, I say: