Education

Few people living today have ever experienced education in a "one-room country school." But many can identify with the first half of this poem's title, "Trouble with Math." These days we say such people suffer from "math anxiety." There's hardly anyone who cannot recall having some sort of trouble in school: with a particular subject, in being misunderstood and suffering the consequences, in finding oneself "alien" to the approach of a particular teacher, with the social dimension of school, or even with conventional schooling in general. This poem is not the only one in Kenyon's corpus that expresses her unhappiness with school. "Three Songs at the End of Summer" ends with a memory of standing scrubbed and neat in new clothes, "waiting for the school bus / with a dread that took my breath away,"

holding ... the new books—words, numbers, and operations with numbers I did not comprehend...