Very good poems.  I have nothing of the sort to offer in response but 
rather I will describe I very clear and immediate memory that, reading 
them together, they evoked from me.

At about the same time you posted, on Thursday morning, I was peddling 
down a wide, spiral staircase at the college where I teach.  It was 
break and I was thinking over a conversation I'd just had with some 
members of the class. One had asked me simply, "What do you think is the 
fastest way to learn this for the test?" He was talking about New York 
City geography.  And one more time I had taken the occasion to stress my 
belief, based on my own experience, that the sooner one humbles them 
self before this task, and recognizes that a certain foundation of 
knowledge must be memorized by rote, the easier and faster it becomes. 
"The first thing I did was go to the store and buy fifty sheets of blank 
paper" is a pivotal line in my monologue.

Of course this is exactly what my audience doesn't want to hear.  And 
not without reason.  Many of these guys, (occasional gals,) are here to 
give taxi driving a try precisely because they lack the temperament and 
bookish skills to learn in a classroom.  Many are poorly able to even 
make the connection between book knowledge and field knowledge, let 
alone trust in it enough to make the classroom effort.  And for many 
that effort is septic with discouragement.  Memorizing something by 
writing it out ten times is hardly so efficient if forming the very 
letters is a painful process.  Neither do they trust the process of 
establishing a foundation of raw knowledge which then can be integrated 
in different ways to answer different questions.  Instead, if there is 
any memorizing to be done, they want to memorize already-integrated 
answers to known questions.  Because the hurtle at hand is the Test, and 
field knowledge is now located in readily affordable GPS devices.

And so, I sank through that spacious stairwell, and juxtaposed in my 
mind the thought of the impoverished class of men we've become, 
overwhelmed at the prospect of memorizing a gross or two of facts, when 
perhaps in an earlier age whole books or passages, multiplication tables 
or navigation tables were recited without question.  And yet with GPS, 
an individual might be productive in a way he never was before.

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