Expectations [Edit 1]

[Alic Elliot]

Sitting at home
Feeling alone
Homework piled high
I stare at it and sigh
Heightened expectations
Crippling limitations
I have to do well
Or end up in a living hell
And a job I hate
Doomed to my fate
I set my bar higher than I can reach
“You can do it"- Time to practice what I preach
No mistakes 
Limited breaks
Have to work faster
Push myself harder
To meet expectations
There's no exceptions

Edit 1:

I stare up at my homework, piled oh so high
Wanting to do anything else, I rub my eyes and sigh
Each year brings higher expectations
Yet each day brings new limitations
School has become emotionally draining
I'm finding fewer and fewer things entertaining
I've become a working machine, fearing failure
This causes me to constantly feel like manure
I'm spending more and more time inside
With my insecurities that I'm forced to hide
Because with above average intelligence
Comes the pressure to achieve excellence

[rowens]

Everything between I have to do well and To meet expectations can be cut. You start off fair enough, but it doesn't get any better. If you could put something more original and interesting between the start and the finish you might have something.

[stampede331]

Don't worry about the papers piling high.  Eventually they'll just topple over!  

I want to take a different attitude toward my critique because I was too harsh before.  

First of all, I think using couplets is a good idea for new, aspiring poets.  It provides a framework and structure to your work.

Another point: How can you transform this anxiety about the future into very concrete concerns about the present?  The stacks of papers point to some sort of tendency toward procrastination?  Could this be what the poem will ultimately be about?

My old self relates to the fears and concerns of this poem.  It wasn't too long ago that I believed the score of my next test could somehow have far-reaching consequences on my future.

[Achebe]

Sitting at home
Feeling alone
Homework piled high
I stare at it and sigh
Heightened expectations
Crippling limitations
I have to do well
Or end up in a living hell
And a job I hate
Doomed to my fate
I set my bar higher than I can reach
“You can do it"- Time to practice what I preach
No mistakes 
Limited breaks
Have to work faster
Push myself harder
To meet expectations
There's no exceptions

Hello Alic. You said that you'd started writing a few months ago. This is not bad  for someone who's just starting out. Yes, if you don't do your homework you could end up bagging groceries for a living, so do it and become a banker.
Since you're just starting out, it's good for you to try and write to an established form, such as a sonnet. it imposes a certain discipline in rhyme and meter. As you can guess, your current poem is not interesting for a general reader, content - wise, it's just a plain old lament. What is good is that you've tried to follow a rhyming scheme, however basic.
Good luck.

[Lizzie]

Hi Alic! I have a couple of thoughts for you. Overall, I think this is a really good first attempt. I see potential here (as long as you follow my instructions, of course ) Kidding. Ok, here we go.

Sitting at home
Feeling alone
Homework piled high
I stare at it and sigh -- I think these four lines are good to place the story (home, sitting, staring at homework). I get the feeling of exhaustion and overwhelm from the sigh.
Heightened expectations
Crippling limitations -- These two lines need more show and less tell. What expectations? Who do you feel them from? What kind of limitations? What are they crippling, your emotions, your mental clarity, your sleep cycle, anything concrete. Right now I'm having to guess at what you mean, and I don't like that. Readers are lazy -- you need to spoon feed us.
I have to do well
Or end up in a living hell
And a job I hate
Doomed to my fate -- I like that these lines detail the fears associated with the heightened expectations.
I set my bar higher than I can reach -- 'setting the bar high' feels like a cliche. I'd try to re-word this. And maybe show what the standard you're trying to achieve looks like, what it would feel like to achieve it.
“You can do it"- Time to practice what I preach -- practice what I preach is a cliche as well. Also, you don't tell us what it is that you preach, so its not connected well to the rest of the piece.
No mistakes 
Limited breaks -- I don't think this line adds much. I feel like it's only there to provide the rhyme.
Have to work faster
Push myself harder
To meet expectations
There's no exceptions -- I think the ending works well. It's forward looking, which is good and it leaves the reader with a bit of tension about whether the speaker will "make it" or not.

I like that you're making use of rhyme.

I think you have a lot of room to expand with more metaphor, simile, images -- push yourself to come up with evocative details that set the scene or provide some kind of backstory for this struggle. I'd like to hear more about how this struggle came to be and who the players are. I feel like what you have here is the backbone, the initial brainstorm of the poem and now you need to go into the details and really flesh it out.

Hope this helps some,

lizziep

[CRNDLSM]

I was actually thinking of this one throughout the day, i think this block of words could be shorter, fewer lines, read like a mantra.  But i also want two more blocks of similar rhythmic style of alternate view of the same pile of work, why the work must be done, or what it took to get to this pile of work.  Also, i dont like using the same rhyme twice (expectations), but to each his own if you must

Sitting at home
Feeling alone
Homework piled high
I stare at it and sigh
Heightened expectations
Crippling limitations
I have to do well
Or end up in a living hell
And a job I hate
Doomed to my fate
I set my bar higher than I can reach
“You can do it"- Time to practice what I preach
No mistakes 
Limited breaks
Have to work faster
Push myself harder
To meet expectations
There's no exceptions

[Alic Elliot]

Edit 1:

I stare up at my homework, piled oh so high
Wanting to do anything else, I rub my eyes and sigh
Each year brings higher expectations
Yet each day brings new limitations
School has become emotionally draining
I'm finding fewer and fewer things entertaining
I've become a working machine, fearing failure
This causes me to constantly feel like manure
I'm spending more and more time inside
With my insecurities that I'm forced to hide
Because with above average intelligence
Comes the pressure to achieve excellence

                                                                       

While I wasn't able to shorten it all that much, I only kept a few fragments from the original poem. That's mostly because looking back, it was far from my best work and had much room for improvement. I stayed with the expectations/limitations thing, expanding on it as @lizziep suggested. I scrapped the short, choppy line length because was hard to get what I was thinking into a line of one or three words, while avoiding repetition. 

I also attempted to make this a bit more interesting and with a more disciplined form, but I couldn't manage to make it a sonnet. The sonnet ended up being really one sided and I scrapped it. I hope this is more interesting, though.

Anyway, thanks for the feedback! I built on it best I could

Alic.

[rowens]

If you don't give your poem layers you're only talking in rhyme. Stringing comments together. Your thoughts and feelings are getting expressed, but you're not doing anything interesting with language. Lots of people can read this and relate to it, but that's the problem. If eighty people in the school were asked to write a poem on this subject it would all come out about the same. Most of it probably except for that above average intelligence line.

[Vox_Nihilis]

Edit 1:

I stare up at my homework, piled oh so high 
Wanting to do anything else, I rub my eyes and sigh
Each year brings higher expectations
Yet each day brings new limitations
School has become emotionally draining
I'm finding fewer and fewer things entertaining
I've become a working machine, fearing failure
This causes me to constantly feel like manure
I'm spending more and more time inside
With my insecurities that I'm forced to hide
Because with above average intelligence
Comes the pressure to achieve excellence

Alic, first off, thanks for sharing this! Your poem has a lot of potential. I think what would help you the most, though, would be abandoning the rhyming couplet structure. If you're not ready for free-verse yet, I completely understand, but in my opinion writing in only couplets adds a childish undertone that I'm not entirely sure you're looking for. Writing a Shakespearean sonnet might be worth your while—that's the form I was most comfortable with when I first started writing poetry.

I really like your last couplet. That to me is the center of gravity here, the negative side-effects of genius and ambition. While your poem as a whole speaks to that, I think you could do so much more with language and phrasing. Play with how laboring night and day to make an A affects you as a person by painting a mental picture with words. My rule of thumb is that if I can't clearly see an image (assuming the poem is not meant to be unreasonably esoteric) then the reader won't be able to either. It will be a lot easier to do if you're not relegated to rhyming couplets.