(This may or may not be fun, but it sure isn't math. Should we stop?)
Mike Stay also said that Alan's original had better meter. I don't disagree, but don't care that much either. These are not the days of Tennyson, and the idea that a lyric poem needs iambic tetrameter is, to me, anachronistic.
I completely agree that these days (where "these days" have been in place for a century or so) poetry is in no way required to have regular metre. But I don't think that applies to light comic verse, which is certainly the genre of Allan's ditty and I thought was what you were aiming for too. There are exceptions, but the only ones I can think of are either parodying specific poems or poets (and hence mimicing their diction) or _using_ metrical oddities for comic effect (e.g., something perfectly regular concluding with a last line that's 3x longer than all the others). And, comic or not, other than that last case it's super-unusual for a poem to be _mostly_ in strict metre and then abandon it for one line.
"Due to COVID-19, spring and summer terms have been cancelled. If COVID-19 cases persist until fall, classes will be cancelled again, and students might not be able to graduate."
Changing the language slightly or adding a meter and rhyme scheme does not really fix the problem that the subject matter is prosaic. We are disputing what poetry really is, not the constraints it could obey.
There's much truth in the last sentence. I don't think prosaic subject-matter is a problem in comic verse, which often gets some of its effect from the combination of "high" diction with "low" material. Consider one of Ogden Nash's: I think that I shall never see A billboard lovely as a tree. In fact, unless the billboards fall I'll never see a tree at all. If you paraphrase that in prose then it likewise comes out as prosaic and pedestrian. "Trees are nicer to look at than almost all billboards -- and there are so many billboards that one can hardly see any trees these days." But as a piece of comic verse it works just fine, and would do even without the deliberate reference in the first two lines (though presumably that was its original motivation).
My idea was to introduce some ambiguity into the word choice, and allow for multiple valid interpretations. This can backfire, but oh well, no harm in trying. I still think the two alternatives are roughly equal.
This is a thing done often enough in "serious" poetry, but again it seems out of place in comic verse. (Of course, you absolutely could write a serious poem about the effect of the pandemic on education, but it wouldn't look at all like either yours or Allan's.)
So if some grammatically-incorrect rapper comes up with a few interesting lyrics on his or her experience, should we then complain about formalism, or that the writing is not mathematically clear due to non-standard usage?
Nope (and the only person so far asking for anything mathematical in this discussion has been you, with requests for _proof_ that one poem is better than another). A good rap should obey (or break for deliberate effect) the conventions that apply to rap. These are different from the conventions that apply to English-language comic verse (though they have a thing or two in common). Perfect grammar is not among those conventions, nor is mathematical clarity. -- g