(Note: This is a revised version of a blog I did 2 years ago, updated with student samples from this year. I was going to write a new explanation, but when I looked this one up, it said so exactly what I wanted to say, I could only think of wordier and less interesting ways to say it.)
Imagine a PE class where students where students watched videos of great athletes, learned rules, and memorized terms, but never actually played the game. Imagine a music class where students attended concerts, studied music theory and music history, but never actually sang or played a note. Imagine an English class where students read great poets; learned literary terms like paradox, assonance, and metaphor; and never actually wrote a poem.
Oh, wait…that was my class for much of my teaching career.
But turning students lose to write whatever they wanted didn’t exactly promote learning—the poetry was either Dr. Seuss-ish rhythm-and-rhyme or else emotive rambling. No one was learning anything. I did try it, but I quit.
Then I realized that as a volleyball coach, I didn’t just set up the court and say, “Have fun.” (Neither do PE or music teachers.) I taught terms, strategies, rules, plays. We watched each other, other teams, and ideally, professionals. And we tried it ourselves. That was the goal. Some of us learned that we have a gift for this, and doing it well is satisfying and fun. Some of us simply learned that it’s a lot harder than it looks. All of us grew in our appreciation for seeing it done well.
This is exactly what I want for my students out of a study of poetry!
So here’s what I do: After we’ve done a close reading and annotation of a poem, I give the students a generalized template of what the poet did, and ask them just to try a rough draft. (Scroll to the bottom of this blog for samples.) They share their rough draft with their table group of three or four, and at the end of the reading part of the unit, I ask students to choose one rough draft poem to publish as a final draft. I also ask them for a paragraph reflection on why they chose that poem to publish and what they learned in the process of writing it.
Here’s one student’s poem, modeled on the style of Federico Garcia Lorca’s poem “The Guitar”:
It sings, the Piano sings.
The strings are the singers, the hammers are the conductors.
Hammers flinging, strings singing, ears hearing.
It sings, the Piano sings.
All 230 strings singing in symphony,
Singing as strong as a father, as soft as a mother.
It sings, the Piano sings.
Feet pumping motion, fingers breathing emotion,
Music resurrecting from sheets of gladness.
The Piano is a language,
Heard by all, known by all, spoken by all.
It is untenable, it is irreplaceable.
It is an infinite language.
Here are some of the things students said they learned writing these poems this way:
This poem was actually fun to write, which is surprising because I dislike poems. I felt like I was able to show my thoughts in extremely short simple statements (which also fit with the theme of the poem; each line is short in a way that reminded me of text messages). When writing this poem, I found myself just listing down all of the first world problem type things that I wanted to write about, and that was the comfortable part of writing this poem. The hard part of writing this poem was putting everything in an order that makes sense. I had a ton of things that I wanted to write about, but not all of them really connected to the next.
I chose to do this style of poetry because it looked pretty simple. However, during the writing process it became harder and harder to make lines that sounded how I wanted them to sound.
While writing this poem my biggest obstacle was figuring out what the poem would be about and how to make the audience feel what I’m feeling about it. Surprisingly, coming up with the words and lines to fit and make sense wasn’t as hard as I thought. Out of the three we wrote for me this one was the most fun, but not the easiest. I noticed that as I wrote my lines the words I used ended up being rhymes and you can see that it happened many times. I enjoyed writing this poem and my interest in poetry has definitely been shifted to a more positive perspective.
I love classical music and out of all the instruments, the piano creates the base, or the platform of the piece which is very important. Without the piano the whole piece would sound like a child talking with a missing tooth. I wrote this poem thinking of the smooth movements of the fingers and every single bit of sound that comes out of the instrument. I described it as the keys “dancing” because I truly feel like it does. How the keys move up and down from right to left seems like they’re dancing! And I concluded it as the piano, being a feeling in our hearts because I felt like the waves and sounds of the piano can be hidden inside of us..and it might be something we never refer to, but also might be a simple, clean way of describing ourselves.
One thing I love about that last reflection is that the student transferred to her prose writing her practice of observing and using similes, metaphors, and symbols in poetry!
How do you negotiate the learning-doing connection in your classes?
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