Voices from the Middle - Volume 10, Issue 2, 2002

Every summer for four to five weeks, a corner of Corbett Hall at the University of Maine is more alive than an ant colony on a sugar buzz as teachers share their lives, teaching expertise, writing, struggles, laughter, and—I have to admit—lots of great food. Though some participants drive in for each day’s work, many of us come from across Maine and live together in a dormitory.

Like Janeczko and Dickey, I love poetry. Place me squarely in the ranks of teachers who want adolescents to enjoy poetry. Yes, I’d love for them to come to value poetry, to see how just a few words can break your heart, make you laugh out loud, or recognize that someone else has experienced your most private thoughts and feelings. I’d love teenagers to appreciate the way figures of speech cause us to see the world in different ways. But, truth be told, I’d settle for student enjoyment as a start.

So I am teaching my high school creative writing class—listening to a few “moon-June” poems; a response, perhaps to “Mother to Son” by Langston Hughes; or a question about the next major project—when Marina, a girl not too far removed from the Ukraine, shyly reminds me this is “Presentation Day,” and could she read her poem?

We have begun a poetry unit in the seventh-grade language arts classroom, and Simon’s journal entry displays his frustration. He is a recent Sudanese immigrant, and this is his first year in our school and only his second in the United States.

Emily Dickinson once wrote, “If I feel physically as if my head were taken off, I know that is poetry.” Upon reading these words, Village School seventh grader Eleanor Unsworth replied, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I run around screaming, ‘Ahh! Where’s my head?!’”

I’m a blue-collar poet. A down-home regular guy who finds poems hiding in the streets, mills, hills, and lakes around my home. I never miss a chance to remind my students of this simple fact. Telling them that I have one foot in the Maine milltown where I grew up, the other in the big north woods that surrounds the town, is how I convince my kids of the possibilities for poetry in their lives.

Randi discusses her seventh-graders writing poetry with young children.

Chris discusses bullying.

If you are doing literature circles in your classroom, chances are you have run across a set of tools called “role sheets.” These handouts, adapted from standard collaborative-learning practice, assign students a set of jigsawed tasks to perform while reading and meeting in their book clubs.

Several years ago, Lindsay confirmed for me what I knew instinctively from my other students, knew experientially from my own years as a student, and heard clearly from the many contemporary poets I now enjoyed reading: “Don’t teach poetry. Share it.”

Some days are better than others. This had obviously been one of the others. When he dragged himself home from school that afternoon, it was obvious that the last thing he wanted to talk about was how his day had been. So, naturally, I had to ask …

Good, effective, powerful teaching is no accident. It is the natural result of conscious, thoughtful planning that juggles the needs of the students, the school, and the state.