

Stanza 1
The poet begins by saying, “Nothing” and adds that he has missed
nothing as they (teacher and students) realized that he (the absentee)
was not there and hence they were sitting quietly for two hours. with their
hands on the desks. It is a kind of sarcastic answer.
 Stanza 2
In the next stanza, the teacher’s anger comes out. He tells the absentee
that he taught the lessons which covered 40% of the term syllabus and
also assigned the students a quiz which is worth 50% of the term paper’s
marks.

 Stanza 3
The tone again shifts to sarcasm. According to the teacher, he (student)
missed nothing as the course has no values or meaning. So he should
remain absent as all the activities that take place in the class have no
purpose for himself as well as for the absentee.

 Stanza 4
In the 4th stanza, the poet says that shortly after he began teaching an
angel just appeared that told about the ways to attain wisdom for the life
and also that this is the last class after which they will have to spread the
good news to the world.

This stanza is a satire on the religious faiths like Christian and Jewish
religious practices and beliefs. It was believed that angels descend from
the sky to impart knowledge to the clergy who afterward spread that
message (good news) to the commoners.

 Stanza 5
The tone again reverts to sarcastic. the teacher asks the student how
anything can happen in the class without him (student) being present
there.

 Stanza 6
In the final stanza, the teacher says that the classroom is a world full of
human experiences which were assembled for him (student) to grab,
examine and understand. It was an opportunity which he has lost now.
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“Did I Miss Anything?”

How did the poem come to be written?

This poem arose because this question that students ask is really quite an aggressive
question, although many students are unaware of this aspect of the words they utter
when they speak to the instructor after they’ve been away from class. Every teacher
spends hours preparing a course of instruction, thinking hard about the best way to
present the material that she or he is going to impart during a certain class session.
Besides reviewing or setting out for the first time the details of the lesson, a teacher
will be considering the optimum manner to introduce, develop, and summarize the
content of the lesson. A teacher may evaluate how he or she has conducted a class on
this topic in the past, and figure out some methods to revise or tweak the upcoming
session for maximum effectiveness.

Then, during the class itself, a teacher is constantly monitoring the effect of her or his
presentation—am I holding the students’ interest? Are they nodding off, or distracted?
Does it look like at least my main points are getting across? A teacher will be thinking
about how to best use voice and classroom aids like blackboard or whiteboard or
computer projections. Also, the teacher will be considering on the fly when and how
long he or she should speak, when to ask questions of the class, when to let the
students ask questions, whether small group work or individual student desk work is
appropriate. And when a class is over, a teacher can’t help evaluating the pros and
cons of that day’s session.

Then an absent student shows up and asks whether “anything” happened in the class.
The assumption behind the question is that all this work by the teacher doesn’t really
amount to “anything.” So the question—intentionally or not—belittles all the effort
the teacher has put into doing his or her job. Thus the question can provoke a flash of
rage on the teacher’s part, the same rage anybody feels when important work they do
is airily dismissed by somebody else as not really amounting to “anything.” Students
can feel the same anger when an assignment they have really and truly toiled over is
breezily dismissed or otherwise put down by an instructor.

My poem is a compilation of all the answers I wanted to give to students who asked
the question during one semester when I was teaching at a community college in a
Vancouver, B.C. suburb. I never actually gave these answers, but I sure thought them.

Why do you think the poem has been so widely

reprinted?

Because of the anger and hate in the poem’s sarcasm, the poem—to my surprise—has
become a favorite with teachers at all levels, and is the most widely reproduced of
everything I’ve written and published during more than four decades. The poem has
been in countless teachers’ newsletters, and on innumerable course outlines, and
posted on office doors, office walls, and teachers’ staffrooms. One college teacher
friend of mine who used it on a course outline had a student come up to the front after
the class in which the outline was handed out. The student complained that the poem
couldn’t have been written by anybody called “Tom Wayman,” because his math
teacher in high school had handed out the poem, and the teacher said the poem was
written by Anonymous. One bootleg version of the poem circulates on the Internet
formatted as centered (like a wedding invitation) and another version has the poem
written out as a block of prose (no line breaks or stanza breaks).

Can you say something about the form of the poem?

The use of a recurring indented stanza is intended to show the speaker is swinging
back and forth widely in his or her sarcasm, between answering “Everything” or
“Nothing.” At the back of my mind was that these would be different answers given to
different students who ask the question that is the title. Though the speaker is shifting
wildly between extremes (“everything” and “nothing”), there is supposed to be the
same amount of nasty sarcasm in each case. But the indented stanzas are meant to
emphasize how the speaker is bouncing back and forth in his or her replies to the
question.

How would you categorize the tone of the poem?

The speaker in the poem (as I say in the paragraphs above) is quite out of control with
anger and hate, and is swinging between extremes of everything and nothing, since he
or she feels driven to the edge by the assumptions behind the repeated use of this
question by students. The speaker is freaking, pushed too far, at the end of his or her
rope. The speaker realizes that what she or he is teaching isn’t really anything divinely
important. But what the teacher makes happen in class is not of zero value, either, as
the question so strongly implies. So the speaker is really mocking the question that
has been asked of him or her once too often.
How is the theme of religion used in the poem?

The theme of religion appears partly as a component of the exaggerated bit about the
appearance of the angel. But I use it, too, because there are strong links between
learning and religion. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, religious leaders had to be
educated to read holy books, conduct religious rituals properly, etc. The first
universities were religious institutions to train clergy and religious scholars—an
offshoot of the kinds of activities that went on at medieval monasteries: collecting,
copying and studying ancient and holy texts, learning and teaching languages needed
to study these texts (Latin, Hebrew, Greek, etc.), memorizing and carrying out
religious rituals, and so on. A lot of the silly clothes that university faculty wear on
formal occasions—the gown and goofy hat—are descendents of clerical garb. Also, in
one sense, any divine revelation—such as the angel appearing in my poem—is a sort
of high-speed education. Supposedly all at once some truth or truths are revealed,
instead of a person having to painstakingly discover truths about existence via years
of study and thought and experimentation.

What does the poem really mean? That is, what

hidden meanings are present in the poem?

There are no hidden meanings in my poems. They are meant to be straightforward

statements. Of course, the poem “Did I Miss Anything?” has a mocking tone, and
when people are angry they say things they don’t mean. For example, the sarcastic
speaker in my poem is pretending to answer the student’s question honestly but in fact
is taking a round-about way to say to the student that there’s something wrong with
the way the student has phrased the question.

Language is tricky that way: in certain moods, we often say the opposite of what we
mean, or at least mean something different than what we say. “What-ever” used as a
 put-down doesn’t really mean the speaker is fine with what has been said or done.
“What-ever” actually signals that the speaker doesn’t agree with what has just been
said or done, but at best is resigned to the stupidity (as the speaker sees it) of what has
just been said or done.
In my poems, the only hidden meaning are the meanings we hide in language all day
long. One of my models for poetry is the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who won the
Nobel Prize for Literature in 1971. In one interview, the questioner mentions that
Neruda frequently refers in his poetry to doves and guitars, and asks Neruda what
these references REALLY mean in his poems. Neruda says: “When I use the word
‘dove’ in my poem I’m referring to a bird called a dove, and when I use the word
‘guitar’ I mean to indicate a musical instrument known as a guitar.” I’ve always loved
that answer.

Do you think your poem has a good effect on

students?

I stopped showing the poem to my students, because when I did they became more
aggressive. The sentence they used after they had read the poem became a declarative
one, rather than an interrogative. After they missed a class or classes, they’d say to
me: “I didn’t miss anything, did I.” The last two words were uttered like a dare.
ABOUT TOM WAYMAN

Tom Wayman's long writing career includes more than twenty poetry collections, two
collections of critical and cultural essays, three books of short fiction, and a novel. His
honours include being named a Vancouver BC literary landmark. Visit Tom's Bio for
more.
RECENT NEWS

 New Poetry Collection, Watching a Man Break a Dog’s Back, Out in Spring 2020 from
Harbour
 Honours for If You’re Not Free At Work, Where Are You Free?
 Literary Building Supplies Workshop in Cranbrook BC, Feb. 22 to 24, 2019
 Considering a Story or Poem’s Setting, Nakusp, BC, Feb. 9, 2019
 If You’re Free… Reading at Vancouver’s Book Warehouse Main St., Nov. 6
BIG THANKS TO

Heather MacAskill for creating this website; see more of what she does so well
at LuxRaven.ca.

Thanks as well to Bradley Higham of Collabo Consulting Inc.

Material on this website is

© Tom Wayman, all rights reserved.
© 2019 TOM WAYMAN · AUTHOR
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