Tag Archives: Language Arts

They Were Poetry

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Last week, I began to sketch out the current poetry unit I am teaching in the seventh grade. I am still not ready to share the “paper work.” You now the objectives, essential questions, assessments, and criteria. I have it all planned out, but I don’t feel the need to document that part of the story on my blog just yet. I want the story of this unit to be like the work with my students; we are still trying to pry ourselves away from the literal. English is not their first language you see, so they are having a difficult time allowing language to set them free. They still cling to what they know and write exactly what they see. They cannot see that poetry is the key that will free them from the shackles of language acquisition.

Yesterday, we spent some time playing with metaphor, simile, and personification. We returned to the shared Google .Doc we created last week and began to explore the phrases we found there. I did not teach a lesson on figurative language or literary devices; I didn’t want to confuse them. I simply showed them how to do it and let them practice. I am starting to think this may be a better approach. There is no need to know what a simile is to write one, so why not practice first, get the hang of it and then say, “Oh by the way, what you just did there- comparing two things using the word like is called a simile, or see how you made the sun drink and laugh? That is called personification.”

We played on the document for about forty minutes. “Find a nice spot on the document and carve out your space. Take an idea and give it some life. Describe the flower or give the bee  a personality.” They are getting really mature about using a shared space like Google .Doc. At first there was a lot of giggling and erasing words and what not, but now we are all business. “We are not doing anything with this document for a while. We are not writing poetry. We are just describing the world. Don’t be afraid to take chances and be weird. Weird is good. Write what you think and let it flow out of you. Don’t think so much” I don’t want them to get caught up in the concept of poetry. I just want them to do it.

The next day, I handed out some photographs from a box I have called Poetry Starters. They are provocative sensory rich images, but nothing one couldn’t create from Flickr, and told them to practice what they did yesterday, which was to write freely using sensory language as well as personification, simile and metaphor. Of course, they do not know that is what they are doing. Most struggled. Many of them simply wrote exactly what they saw.  We  work on. I have done this before and know that it is a long haul, but we will slowly take one step at a time.

image by theilr

Next, we started a book called Love That Dog,

Love That Dog is the story of Jack, his dog, his teacher, and words. The story develops through Jack’s responses to his teacher, Miss Stretchberry, over the course of a school year. At first, his responses are short and cranky: “I don’t want to” and “I tried. Can’t do it. Brain’s empty.” But as his teacher feeds him inspiration, Jack finds that he has a lot to say and he finds ways to say it.

We just started it.  There is a a section early on when he is discovering rhythm and rhyme. As we read it lifelessly, I had an idea. A spontaneous revelation hit me,  so I ran with it. “I want this half of the class to read lines 1, 3, 5, 7 and this side to read 2, 4, 6, 8. Ahh come on you can read with more life and energy than that. Can’t you feel that? What is that called? Yes! Right! Rhythm, now feel it and read like you mean it.” We went back and forth, each time reading with more intensity. “Now follow me.” I started tapping out a beat on the table. They followed. “Come on louder! Don’t be shy. Beat that table. Feel that rhythm.” We were groovin’ now. “Good now read the poem and tap. Feel it don’t read it!”

It was awesome. They were smiling, laughing, reading, tapping. They were poetry. I quickly hit record on Garageband and recorded a take. Next class I want them to play on Garageband and experiment with beats, until they can record a nice tight little passage. Next we right a few lines of our own to read, sing, rap over the beat. Poetry is not a skill set to be learned and assessed. It is a lifestyle to be lived. We are on our way…

English Teacher

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As a teacher who understands and champions the benefits of using new media, social networking, or for lack of a better word- technology in the classroom, I think I often lose sight of what it is I am actually teaching. With recruiting season fast approaching, I have found myself immersed in the painstaking task of marketing myself.

While updating my resume, highlighting my innovative skills, or writing cover letters stressing my ability to be adaptive, collaborative, and visionary, I noticed how little I was talking about my love of the subject I teach- Language Arts.

It seems there is very little room in modern job recruitment for simply talking about why one chose to teach the subject of their expertise. Perhaps, I have gone about selling my career all wrong. Perhaps, administrators are not looking to see that their teachers are able to work in dynamic collaborative environments for the purpose of improving student learning. Maybe they just want to read why a certain teacher loves literature or science, or whatever the case may be. Perhaps, the only thing they would like to hear us discuss is how we can transfer our love of Steinbeck or Fitzgerald to students who are, more and more rapidly, becoming disengaged from the written word.

It is conceivable that after all the talk about our philosophies, skills, and technological know how, we as teachers should sit back and reflect upon what it is that we love about the subjects we teach everyday.

There is something indescribable about the feeling of sitting in a comfortable place, highlighter in hand, reading a great book. That feeling of kinship, understanding and bonding that is formed between author and reader is the epitome of social networking. We spend so much time and energy discovering new tools to help connect our students to information and to each other, that we sometimes forget that truly understanding a great piece of literature, having the ability to deconstruct, analyze, and synthesis text, and finally being able to produce a carefully crafted critique of a work can be just as effective of a skill to have as say blogging.

The poster children for how not to teach a class in the new age of technological pedagogy is the old chalk and talk, lecture from the podium, teacher as expert, been teaching Macbeth the same way for twenty years, thinks he or she is a professor, English teacher.

While I have spent much of my career, arguing that this style of top-down, teacher centered teaching is ineffective, lately I have been thinking that maybe simply teaching students how to read effectively is the most important thing we can do as Language Arts teachers. If our job is to teach literature then perhaps we need nothing more that the text. Everything else sometimes seems to be nothing more than a dog-and-pony show designed to keep students entertained, but not actually focused on the work.

I entered teaching because I wanted to help young people understand the world around them, in hopes that they would feel obliged to contribute to its fate. I chose to teach English because I see art in general, and literature in particular, as the greatest tool humankind has produced to help us connect and communicate with each other.

Photo by nozomiiqel

Students may need to use blogs and other web based tools to share what they find, and connect with other students, but ultimately all they need is a good book and an inspirational teacher to guide them through it. Collaboration is great, but reading is often a very solitary act. Connection with a great piece of fiction needs only three things: author, reader, text. Everything else is secondary.

Reading over my resume and various cover letters, I am afraid that perhaps my devotion to technology is perhaps overshadowing my love of Language Arts. I am first and foremost a lover of books. My goal is to arouse this level of worship onto my students. I want students, parents, and administrators to know that I am not an IT teacher. I am a Language Arts teacher who realizes that the new web is a fantastic place for learning. I have chosen to use as many tools as I can to accomplish this task, but I am in no way convinced that technology is the only way.

I am not sure anyone feels this way. It feels like teachers are being forced into these dialectical relationships, where either you are an integrated teacher, or you are a dinosaur. I refuse to buy into this. As I try to show prospective employers why I am the best fit for the English teacher position, perhaps I need to find space in my CV to highlight these factors as well.

What do you think? Is your teaching sometimes overshadowed by the tools you use? Do you find yourself more excited by a new web application then say a Nabokov novel?