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Perhaps the way we, as teachers, can improve upon the reputation of poetry is to improve upon our teaching of poetry. This paper is dedicated to that purpose. My major objective is that teachers will
|Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute||Home|
Perhaps the way we, as teachers, can improve upon the reputation of poetry is to improve upon our teaching of poetry. This paper is dedicated to that purpose. My major objective is that teachers will use this paper to give them the confidence in themselves to try poetry in the classroom of the middle school.
Poetry, for many teachers, is something that is left for someone else to worry about. Or it is one of those subjects which often gets pushed aside due to lack of time in an admittedly tight schedule. Worse yet, poetry becomes like writing book reports. Teachers tend to assign book reports without the usual dialogue that serves as an introduction to many lessons. Then the order is given to “Write A Book Report.” Is it any wonder we are disappointed by the results of such undertakings? Perhaps, what this paper might do for just one other person would be to enlighten him about the many ways in which poetry can be introduced to the student so that “When the Teacher Says, “Write A Poem,” the end result will not be what is described here by Mauree Applegate in her book by the same name.
How best to counteract this student reluctance and the equivalent teacher reluctance is another major concern of this paper. The poems that I used have been “tested” by me in my classroom on children much like yours. They are aimed at students with limited reading abilities and underdeveloped vocabularies. The poems themselves are not overbearing, or super-sophisticated, nor are they veiled in mysterious classical allusions bound to confound and confuse the casual reader. Instead they are poems aimed at today’s urban youth, straightforward, hard-hitting, and unpretentious, while delivering an urgent message.
- Do you get a sinking feeling in your middle?
- Do you saw your worries out across the fiddle?
- Do you sit and scratch your head?
- Do you get down sick in bed?
- Do you wish that you were dead?
- As a kid’ll?
- Do you call upon your friends to do it for you?
- Do you cultivate school “Brains”-
- Who often bore you?
- Do you cover up with jokes?
- Do you snap at all the folks who adore you?
- Do you go out with the gang and cut capers
- While your mother’s waiting up with lighted tapers?
- Do you weep? Do you implore
- That you’ll do it never more,
- When Dad meets you at the door
- With morning papers?
- When your English teacher says
- “Write a po-em,”
- Do you say, “No, thank you, Ma’am;
- I just can’t go em!”
- But now you’ve time to look
- At the pages of this book,
- If you swallow line and hook,
- You can show’em!
An example of the type of poem of which I speak follows. It is written by Rachel Schofer, a sixth grade girl, and appeared in the March 1979 issue of Language Arts Magazine.
The kind of poetry that should be examined at the middle school level is the type which Alice Brand speaks about in her article in The Middle School Journal titled “A Poetry Process for Young Adolescents.”
- “Please wait,
- I will come,” you said.
- But you did not come.
- I waited and waited.
- You never came.
- You broke a promise.
- I will wait some more.
- “Please wait,
- I will come,” you said
- But you did not come.
“Poetry just sneaks up on you,” she says. “... my poetry unit eludes standard programming, its central objective is to explode the myth that students can be brought to poetry as to a shrine. Therefore... read lots of humorous poetry to your class,....light material relaxes and takes the academic edge off the unit.”2
To illustrate this technique let me relate a classroom incident. During an engaging discussion of the differing views on the origin of the universe, I found that we had, as scientists long ago had, come to a difficult point at which only conjecture or religion can assist. Not wishing to dampen their enthusiasm for knowledge, but wishing to make them see that others had grappled with this problem and came up blank, I offered this poem, titled “The Answers” by Robert Clairmont, to take the academic edge off the unit as suggested above.
To be able to respond to a situation like this with an appropriate poem that reflects the moment takes a special person willing to teach poetry occasionally or even incidentally but certainly not casually or indifferently.
- “When did the world begin and how?”
- I asked a lamb, a goat, a cow.
- “What’s it all about and why?”
- I asked a hog as he passed by.
- “How will the whole thing end, and when?”
- I asked a duck, a goose, a hen.
- And I copied all the answers, too:
- A quack, a honk, an oink, a moo!
It is therefore necessary that some things be presumed, or hoped, to be true. First, the teacher must possess a keen sixth sense, atuned to what is going on in the room and knowing when the right poem will help the situation. Secondly, he must have at hand a repertoire of poems readily available to turn to should the need arise. I encourage teachers to do as I have done over the years and embark today on collecting and sorting poems, so that when a time arrives, as it did to me when I prejudged a little girl and lumped her in with everyone else, you could get out of a sticky face-losing situation by hand-deli