• who's speaking in the poem (the poetic subject/poetic voice)?

Who's the
"instructor"? Are there characteristics that mark their difference?

The person speaking would be the college student. The instructor is the
professor that assigned the activity for the student to do. The biggest
characteristic present in the text is that the student is black and the professor is
white.

• what's the tension between the poetic voice and the instructor?

The professor told the student to write something out of him and that would be
true, but the student debates that what would be true for himself could not be
true for the professor, as they come from different backgrounds and live totally
different lives with different value, but at the same time it’s not only because
they are from different races that they have to be completely different, after all
he recognizes that he probably has some similarities with white folks, like liking
the same things, and that could be because they have things in common like
both being Americans.

• based on the poem, what are the meanings of culture?

Culture has to do with one’s habits, likings, and even history, but one person is
not stuck with only one culture, so they can share those similarities with other
people.

• read the poem and pay attention to its rhythm: are there relationships you
can think of between the rhythm and the "theme" of the poem?

I don’t really understand much about rhythm yet, but I feel like some paragraphs
are somehow not very much “organized” visually, so when I was reading, I felt a
little bit of confusion of how the rhythm of the poem should be followed, so maybe
it has a connection with the confusion that the student was going through in his
mind, about race, about what makes him different and also about what makes him
similar to the professor and other white people.