Blog 7: Poetry and Written Expression

Reading, Writing, and Rising Up Ch. 5

Ah, poetry...my nemesis. How I despise thee. This has been my mantra for the majority of my teaching career, but I never let it get in the way of trying to teach my students to love poetry in a way I never have. I do believe that it's okay for some people to like poetry, to write good poetry, and to enjoy analyzing short lines on a page. I'm just not one of those people. I gave poetry a fair shake in high school and even had some poems published in my school's literary magazine, but I never truly enjoyed poetry. I can pick poems apart and teach my students to analyze them for rhyme scheme and symbolism, but all the while, I have to keep my secret hatred for most poetry to myself. Christensen says, "Poetry allows students to crawl inside their own lives as well as the lives of literary and historical characters...through poetry kids can give voices to people whose voices usually don't find ways into classrooms or textbooks, including their own" (126). I couldn't agree more. I've been lucky to instruct MANY students who truly loved writing poetry. It was a break from the norm for them and I always encouraged their desire to write and analyze poetry.

One specific point I found interesting dealt with how teachers use and discuss poetry in the classroom. "The discussions that follow student poetry are simply more engaging than those in which Bill and I provide all the questions and answers" (Christensen 128). What a unique point that is. Christensen has her students not only write "free verse" poetry based on any given topic, but she has them write poetry about the literature they are discussing. Now there's an idea I never pondered before. Christensen provides numerous examples of how her students wrote poems from the perspectives of various characters and how they really got inside what those characters were thinking and feeling through poetry. After reading that, I have a bit of renewed faith in poetry and its place in my own classroom. Christensen details about a need for teaching students to deal with "their volcanic emotions" (132) and I couldn't agree more. I think once I teach my students HOW to write poems that don't rhyme (my 12 year olds think rhyming poems are the ONLY kind that make sense), and we discover how to use poetry as a companion to the reading we're completing in class already, that some of them will start to use poetry as a much-needed outlet. Isn't that what we hope for all along? That students will take the skills they learn and put a personal twist on them? I see that as a valuable reason to include poetry in my classroom this year...maybe I'll just give it another shot.

Image Grammar Ch. 7-9

And here I am, writing the last blog portion about grammar....my OTHER nemisis. =)
I really enjoyed reading about how Noden breaks down the story parts into smaller chunks that are easier to teach. Story grammar is something that I've always taken for granted because there is always at least one student in each class period who can show me the "story hill" and explain the point of the various parts. Noden broke this down further into typical patterns, such as The Quest or The Romance, to help students better understand what they read. Another section I found particularly interesting was scene writing. "When students write scenes designed to stand alone, they often capture a slice of life that doesn't generate a story question. Such scenes help students learn to focus on a limited period of time - a significant incident that creates a mood or highlights a memorable life experience" (Noden 150). This is precisely what my students do when they write their memoirs. We review a few examples that are limited to one scene, or major event, and the authors recreate that scene and the feelings and emotions they had during that time. I'm sure I'll look back on Noden's suggestions next year when the time to write memoirs arrives - I've turned down this page in my text as well.

To help students deepen their writing, Noden offers a variety of strategies. While I find all of them useful and helpful, I especially liked the bulletin board photo collection strategy. My student teacher created a writing assignment similar to this, but what I like about the bulletin board photos is that students are responsible for brining them in and they are a continuous circulation of options for students to write about. They can write a scene, a dialogue, a short story, a narrative, and it offers an option for displaying student work as well. This is another idea I can see myself using, especially when I want my students focused on creating something almost entirely from scratch. I think having an image to start from would be beneficial to my reluctant writers.

A strategy that I hadn't thought about in a while that Noden discusses in Chapter 8 is experimenting with forms. This involves students reworking a piece of writing in another genre. Although I do this a few times throughout the year, it wasn't a "strategy" that I'd put a lot of thought into in the past. This is where the dreaded poetry could come in. I have a ton of ideas that allow my students more freedom on written expression based solely on their ability to rework something into a different genre from what we originally studied. One form of this is the found poem, which I've asked my students to do over the past few years. I use this with a novel we read and students are free to determine the mood and words in their poem as they pull significant lines from the text. I was so impressed with their work the first time I tried this strategy that I posted more than 30 examples in the hallway for others to read. Many teachers commented to me, "I didn't know he was capable of such feeling in his writing" after they read one particularly difficult student's work. What can I say? He found something he liked and ran with it. I know I was impressed with it as well and if it weren't for this strategy, I never would have known his true capabilities.

What I've learned the most from Noden is that it's not the specific rules of grammar that I teach, but rather how I can make them applicable in my students' writing and useful for the rest of their academic careers. I don't remember diagramming sentences or studying the parts of speech in depth when I was a student, but I do remember some of the writing that I completed. I think that's what I'd like for my students: to remember the writing they complete and that sense of accomplishment for a job well done instead of worry over the rules of grammar. I think if I incorporate several of Noden's techniques into my own classroom, my students will only benefit from it in the long run.