Daily Poem 14: Korean Form

The Form of Education in Korea

Excessive expectations nullify education

Whenever examiners utilise categories:

Ostracised philosophical understanding abdicates.

A student drew this picture of me on the back of her exam... Bonus marks!

This  poetic exercise is written in a traditional Korean form based on syllables.  In Hangul, each line has four words composed of a specific number of characters each (every character is one syllable):

3 4 3 4

3 4 3 4

3 5 4 3

When my students first told me about this form, I thought it would be difficult to use in English because of the excess of monosyllabic words, but with a quick brainstorming session of related polysyllabic adjectives, nouns, and present tense verbs the poem did not take long to write at all.