The school where I teach has a different way of approaching the Language Arts and history cores. We combine them into a single course. It's twice as long, but it covers both curricula and gives me a chance to dive a little deeper into our coursework as a result. There are immense advantages to this, but there are some downsides. One of them is that my Language Arts instruction is, strangely enough, subsumed most of the time.
When I was in college, I studied how to be an English teacher, gaining ideas for writing projects, how to read books, and discussing literature in great depth. Those are skills that I leverage now in my current courses, and I think they're some of the best tools I have. But I also designed content around some of the more nitty-gritty stuff, like grammar, different types of creative writing, and poetry. I don't have the opportunity to teach most of my sophomores about that type of "English" stuff nowadays.
Proof positive of this deficiency is the fact that I had my students write some poetry for the ending of our World War I unit. Having gone over the information about the war for just over two weeks, it's nice to have a culminating project that isn't a test or a bunch of essays to read. Instead, it's a chance to have the kids try to write poetry about important topics--in this case, war.
Sadly, because of how I structure my classes, I didn't have time to talk to them about how to write poetry. Sure, I gave them a crash course which they promptly forgot, and since we study poetry in context (i.e. reading poetry) and not in praxis (i.e. writing poetry), there's still exposure to the idea of poetry even when it doesn't get directly taught. So I'm not remiss in my duties, but I'm not emphasizing it the way I wish I could.
Normally, I scratch that particular itch with my creative writing class, where we spend about a month looking at different poetry and trying to write our own. (This isn't to say that I teach it well, just that I teach it for a long time. There's a difference.) But after receiving some very valid and honest tries on the poetry front, I realized that I was leaving a hole in their understanding that college-me would be shocked at. Of course, professional-me is a lot less convinced that he can change the world with his perfectly prepared project on the power of parallelism or pluperfect-peppered paragraphs. I've grown a lot as an educator, so I don't think that I'm necessarily in a worse off spot. But what I don't do is help the students write better than they do when they come in my door. And I certainly don't do much when it comes to writing poetry.
I should say, there are always a few kids who get into the wavelength of good poetry, and a handful have even written some pretty cool slam poetry that we've competed with. But I think every teacher has a kid or two who gets inspired despite the teacher's best efforts and comes away with a broader understanding and passion for the world and all the richness it has to offer. I can't really take credit for that sort of thing.
Proof positive: I had one student who confessed she didn't understand poetry, didn't know what was going on there, and generally hated it. That was my chance to help her see what was so incredible there...but I totally blew it. It could have been Freedom Writers but it turned into a Boston Public.
There's always a reason for this: The history that I'm teaching right now is something that I feel really strongly about (namely, the World Wars and their subsequent tragedies), and so the literature takes a back seat. Indeed, my year is built in such a way that I have heavy literature before the Winter Break and then heavy history after. Is there a way I could revamp that? And if I managed to do that, would it work in a way to let poetry in? I don't think so, but the idea that I'm afraid to try speaks more about my own misgivings than does the potential value of the change.
As so often happens when I'm thinking too closely on something, the possible answers become so multifaceted that I become paralyzed. The best conclusion is, I guess, that teaching is hard.
Especially when it's poetry.
When I was in college, I studied how to be an English teacher, gaining ideas for writing projects, how to read books, and discussing literature in great depth. Those are skills that I leverage now in my current courses, and I think they're some of the best tools I have. But I also designed content around some of the more nitty-gritty stuff, like grammar, different types of creative writing, and poetry. I don't have the opportunity to teach most of my sophomores about that type of "English" stuff nowadays.
Proof positive of this deficiency is the fact that I had my students write some poetry for the ending of our World War I unit. Having gone over the information about the war for just over two weeks, it's nice to have a culminating project that isn't a test or a bunch of essays to read. Instead, it's a chance to have the kids try to write poetry about important topics--in this case, war.
Sadly, because of how I structure my classes, I didn't have time to talk to them about how to write poetry. Sure, I gave them a crash course which they promptly forgot, and since we study poetry in context (i.e. reading poetry) and not in praxis (i.e. writing poetry), there's still exposure to the idea of poetry even when it doesn't get directly taught. So I'm not remiss in my duties, but I'm not emphasizing it the way I wish I could.
Normally, I scratch that particular itch with my creative writing class, where we spend about a month looking at different poetry and trying to write our own. (This isn't to say that I teach it well, just that I teach it for a long time. There's a difference.) But after receiving some very valid and honest tries on the poetry front, I realized that I was leaving a hole in their understanding that college-me would be shocked at. Of course, professional-me is a lot less convinced that he can change the world with his perfectly prepared project on the power of parallelism or pluperfect-peppered paragraphs. I've grown a lot as an educator, so I don't think that I'm necessarily in a worse off spot. But what I don't do is help the students write better than they do when they come in my door. And I certainly don't do much when it comes to writing poetry.
I should say, there are always a few kids who get into the wavelength of good poetry, and a handful have even written some pretty cool slam poetry that we've competed with. But I think every teacher has a kid or two who gets inspired despite the teacher's best efforts and comes away with a broader understanding and passion for the world and all the richness it has to offer. I can't really take credit for that sort of thing.
Proof positive: I had one student who confessed she didn't understand poetry, didn't know what was going on there, and generally hated it. That was my chance to help her see what was so incredible there...but I totally blew it. It could have been Freedom Writers but it turned into a Boston Public.
There's always a reason for this: The history that I'm teaching right now is something that I feel really strongly about (namely, the World Wars and their subsequent tragedies), and so the literature takes a back seat. Indeed, my year is built in such a way that I have heavy literature before the Winter Break and then heavy history after. Is there a way I could revamp that? And if I managed to do that, would it work in a way to let poetry in? I don't think so, but the idea that I'm afraid to try speaks more about my own misgivings than does the potential value of the change.
As so often happens when I'm thinking too closely on something, the possible answers become so multifaceted that I become paralyzed. The best conclusion is, I guess, that teaching is hard.
Especially when it's poetry.