Poetry Is an Acquired Taste

Poetry is an acquired taste, kind of like roses.

Often, we don’t appreciate certain things until we acquire a little maturity.  That is certainly true of me and poetry. When I was a kid, like brussel sprouts, poetry was foreign to me.  It had a suspicious odor about it, and I instinctively knew that I wanted no part of it.

This week, as I continue teaching a unit on poetry with my freshmen, I’ve been thinking about why I hated poetry so much as a kid.

I’ve narrowed it down to three reasons:

    1.  No one taught me about enjambment.

That’s the term used to define when a poetic thought runs from one line onto another before it ends.

I thought that when you read poetry, you had to stop at the end of each line.  After all, it often rhymed there, and that was the way the teachers frequently read it to us.  

No wonder I couldn’t make sense of what the poet was trying to say.

    
 2.    It didn’t make sense to me. 

a.       See number one. 

b.     No one taught me about rhythm or scansion.  Knowing the concept that lines had specific numbers of syllables with specific stress patterns might have helped me understand why some words were used in place of others.  That knowledge would also have helped me smile, rather than scowl perplexedly at syntactical shifts.  Now, I like to imagine myself as a kid scoffing at a line, knowing its bewildering word order was simply created to form a spondee instead of an iamb.  I would have held the power, not the poem.

     3.     I didn’t read the footnotes. Were there even footnotes in our literature textbooks back then?  If I had, I might have understood how a teacher could infer so much about the true meaning of a poem, while I had no clue about the meaning of an archaic word or an allusion, much less the entire jumble of words called a poem. 

This week in class as we read more poetry and continue to write our own poems, you can bet we will be talking about enjambment, rhythm, and archaic words and allusions.  Maybe my students will come away being more appreciative of the beauty and inspiration poetry can offer than I was at fourteen.  Maybe they will even compose a little poetry for their dear ones this week in honor of Valentine’s Day.

As for me, I am still working on appreciating the roses.

How about you?  What's your adult take on poetry?

Something Fresh

Teaching is a lonely profession. 

Especially when you are an English teacher. 

This weekend, I spent about nine hours grading essay questions from a poetry test.  Grading them well takes my full attention.  Oh, I can listen to some instrumental music while I grade, but I can’t have the distraction of a television program or music that might tempt me to sing along.  It wouldn’t be fair to students to have my mind wondering if Bigfoot is real or when Meghan Trainor will release a video for “Dance like Yo Daddy.” 

Teaching is lonely at school, too, because mostly we teachers close our doors and carry out our plans.  Once every few weeks an administrator might wander in and observe for a few minutes, but mostly, we are on our own with our students for 45, 55, or 85-minute chunks of time each day.  And we repeat this several times before we go home.  If we have a prep period, we often spend it in our empty classrooms planning, grading, and creating new materials for the next day, week or unit.

That’s why having a student teacher is such a blessing. 

A student teacher gives a seasoned teacher someone to talk to, someone to reflect with, and someone to plan with.  Having a student teacher reminds teachers of why they went into the profession years ago.

My student teacher and I talk about pedagogy every day.  We discuss our students’ needs, both individually and collectively, and how we can best meet them.  We discuss the time we have to address specific skills and topics, the range of abilities our students have, and how best to engage our students in those topics.

We kick around ideas and generate new approaches together. And something fresh always results.

Last week, my student teacher and I were looking for a new way to use vocabulary flashcards with
our students.  Here was our conundrum: We know our students benefit greatly from physically making their own flashcards with color- coded words, but it takes them two or three sessions to create them. How could we have students produce them more quickly to get more use from them?

As we chatted together, I had an inspiration about how to vary an approach we were already using.  We kicked it around, tested it, and plan to implement it this week.  I am eager to see what happens.

The point is that often it takes a little give and take to be inspired. That’s the benefit of having other colleagues to chat with, struggle with, and challenge us. 

If you aren’t lucky enough to have a student teacher, find other ways to seek out teachers to challenge you.  Write or follow a teacher’s blog, join a discussion on a professional forum, like NCTE, or come to an event like Indiana Writing Project’s Write Time.

Just find a group of teachers to kick around ideas.  You, your students, and your colleagues will be the happy beneficiaries.