For each school day of the past three years, I've started my ninth-grade English class with a poem. When I first made this commitment, I feared that I might not have the stamina (or enough engaging poems) to sustain us for the full 184 days of class. And I wasn't the only skeptic. Each year, I get a few sideways glances and furrowed brows when I explain our daily opening routine for class. But before long, students are starting English class with Billy Collins and Mary Oliver and Robert Pinsky, Rumi and Basho and Shakespeare. These voices, contemporary and classic, have helped define my classroom culture to such an extent that on the rare occasion when I postpone the “Poem of the Day” until later in the class period, my students interrogate me about it. I confess that it makes me smile.
So if this year's National Poetry Month inspires you to give daily poetry a go in your classroom, maybe even just for the month, consider these four reasons why starting class with a poem each day will rock your world. Just for good measure, I've included a few poem suggestions as well.
1. Poems Are Short
Time is a teacher's most valuable currency, and though it sounds cliché, there is never enough. In fact, a teacher's first reaction to the idea of beginning each day's class with a poem might even be, "Where will I find the time?"
But remember, poems are short. Not all poems, but I never committed to starting class with pages of Milton's Paradise Lost. Even the shortest poems can lead to potent discoveries.
After we read a short poem twice, I invite the students to engage in what I call microanalysis through an interpretive sentence frame. They fill in the blanks in my sentence: "When the poem says _______, it suggests that _______." Students can find plentiful interpretations in just a few lines of verse. And the best part is that a short poem can be read, dissected, and discussed in just a few minutes, providing an excellent warm-up in a lesson on close reading.
Other times, I lead a lesson on word choice with a poem that is less than 15 lines long, like Carl Sandburg's "Fog" or Anne Porter's "Wild Geese Alighting on a Lake". We identify and discuss the mood created by the poem, and then I challenge them to change the mood dramatically by changing just five words and the title. The results are hilarious, focused on the lesson's objective, and quick.
The short poems "Keeping Quiet" by Robert Bly, "The Balloon of the Mind"by William Butler Yeats, and "We Wear the Mask" by Paul Laurence Dunbar have all generated particularly rich discussions in my classroom. Their brevity makes them sharp, but their themes are provocative and appealing to adolescent readers.
A novel may take chapters and hours to establish an emotional connection through the characters and plot -- poetry can do so in seconds. Even reluctant readers can be captured quickly by the right combination of words arranged into a powerful rhythm.
Each year, I incorporate "Shock Week" into our poetry routine. I advertise it as "more intense than Shark Week,” which piques the curiosity of my Discovery Channel crowd. We read "Tariff" by Michelle Boisseau, a short, blistering poem about guilt. We read Wislawa Szymborska's "The Terrorist, He Watches", a poem chilling in both subject and tone, giving us pause about the dark ramifications of being a bystander when others suffer.
Even funny poems can be intense. Students always enjoy this kinetic typography rendition of Taylor Mali's spoken-word poem "Speak With Conviction". While it makes us laugh at ourselves, it also urges us to scratch at the underlying issues that may cause our lackadaisical patterns of speech.
3. Poems Connect (to Other Reading)
Poetry can open a door to discussing those meatier, longer works of fiction and nonfiction that often define our curriculum.
Try using Gwendelon Brooks' classic poem "We Real Cool" to introduce an underlying conflict in S.E. Hinton's The Outsiders.
Rumi, the 13th-century Persian poet, has written some poetry that beautifully echoes specific lines in Romeo and Juliet, that standard freshman introduction to Shakespeare. Incorporating writing from a completely different culture that speaks to the same aspect of the human condition sends a powerful message about inclusion and diversity.
I once used a haiku about a falcon by An'ya, a reclusive naturalist poet from the Pacific Northwest, to draw a comparison to Atticus Finch's treatment of his children in Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. The discussion was brief, but the haiku gave us a lens through which to evaluate Atticus and his actions, leading to more specific close-reading that we would have achieved without the poem. (The fact that both texts allude to a bird was just a happy accident, by the way, but the kids loved pointing that out, too!)
4. Poems Inspire (Writing)
Poems make such excellent inspirations for writing. When we share poems with students and invite them to respond with their own ideas and musings while imitating the writer's form or style, we empower them to develop a voice, to work at something that will eventually become their own. A colleague in my school district, Elizabeth Jones, introduced me to Elizabeth Coatsworth's poem "Swift Things Are Beautiful", and I challenge you to read this poem without immediately wanting to write about finding the beauty in other opposites and inversions. Our students have chosen things to write about that are small and large, rough and smooth, foreseen and surprising, and they always uncover beauty as they write.
Penny Kittle, of Book Love Foundation fame, first introduced me to Anis Mojgani's notable spoken word poem "Shake the Dust". Its message of kindness and welcoming cadence provide an invitation to write about the people in our world who are not given a voice. In so doing, your students can find their own.
In truth, I could write for hours about the positive experiences that I've enjoyed with students over the past three years of using a poem to start class each day. If this is a strategy that you ever wanted to try, I encourage you take a test drive during National Poetry Month 2016. I suspect that you (and your students) will be hooked!
You may never be as funny, approachable, or creative as your favorite teacher — the key is to try
Christophe Vorlet for The Chronicle
By Rob Jenkins MAY 31, 2016
Roughly a year ago, I wrote a column on "The 4 Properties of Powerful Teachers,"and named "personality" as one of those qualities. While recognizing that everyone is different, and that personality isn’t necessarily something we can control, I was attempting to identify key characteristics that most of my best teachers, from kindergarten through graduate school, had in common.
When I say "best teachers," I’m not just talking about the ones I liked best. I mean the teachers who had the greatest influence on me — the ones whose names I still remember to this day, even though in some cases it’s been more than 40 years since I sat in their classrooms. They are people I’ve tried to emulate in my own teaching.
What made them good teachers? I can’t offer any empirical answers to that question, but I do know that personality was a key factor in all of them. Perhaps we can measure effectiveness in the classroom, to some extent, but how do we really determine quality? It seems to me that we’ve been trying for years, through various evaluation metrics, without a whole lot of success. I’ve known some bad teachers who were able to manipulate the metrics, and some good ones whose excellence wasn’t immediately apparent on paper.
We may never be as funny, approachable, or creative as our favorite teachers. But simply by recognizing those traits as desirable, we can become more approachable, creative, and, yes, funnier than we would be otherwise.
In any case, the following observations are based entirely on my own experiences as a student, professor, and former midlevel administrator who has seen many good teachers (and a few bad ones) practice their craft. My hope is that, even if this list is somewhat subjective — not to mention incomplete — it won’t seem entirely unfamiliar.
They are good-natured. The best teachers tend to be approachable, as opposed to sour and forbidding. Grouchy, short-tempered, misanthropic curmudgeons can sometimes make effective teachers, too, if for no other reason than that they prepare us for grouchy, short-tempered, misanthropic bosses. I had some grouchy teachers myself, especially in graduate school, and learning to cope with them was a valuable experience I would not wish to deny anyone. But most of my very best teachers were pretty easy to get along with — as long as I paid attention in class and did my work.
They are professional without being aloof. Most academics tend to keep students at arm’s length — the obvious message being, "I’m your teacher, not your friend." Clearly, professionalism requires a certain amount of boundary-setting, which can be difficult, especially when dealing with older students, where the age gap is often not all that wide and, under different circumstances, they might actually be your friends. My best teachers always seemed to effortlessly walk that very fine line between being an authority figure and being someone I felt I could talk to. I didn’t even understand what they were doing — or how difficult it was — until I had to do it myself years later.
They have a good sense of humor. They may or may not be ready for the Improv, but they don’t take themselves or their subject matter too seriously. Few things are more off-putting than faculty members who think they’re much smarter than anyone else in the room (or any room) — unless it’s those who think their subject is the most important of all and expect students to feel the same way, other classes be damned. My best teachers not only understood that their course was just one of several we were taking, but also had a great, self-deprecating wit, often making jokes at their own expense and even sometimes making light of their subject. Funny how an ounce of humor can sometimes help students grasp the material better than a pound of gravitas.
They seem to enjoy what they do. Some faculty members don’t really like students. They are the academics who constantly whine about their workload and complain about how rude or unprepared their students are. I’ve often wondered: Why are such people even in this profession? What did they expect? The teachers I remember as the very best were those who clearly loved teaching and got a kick out of associating with students every day. After all, no one wants to feel like a nuisance, which is exactly how some teachers make their students feel.
They are demanding without being unkind. Some academics take great pride in being disliked, wearing their unpopularity like a badge of honor. They naturally assume it’s because they’re so "tough" and "rigorous," reasoning that lazy students dislike rigor and transfer their dislike to the people who demand it. In my experience, however, most students want to be challenged; they don’t mind if a lot is expected of them. They just don’t want their professors to be jerks or insufferable know-it-alls. My best teachers were demanding without being mean-spirited.
They seem comfortable in their own skin. Perhaps one reason students tend to like these faculty is that they like themselves, without being in love with the sound of their own voices. This is related to not taking themselves too seriously, but it goes beyond that. The root cause of bad teaching is a fundamental lack of self-confidence, leading teachers to overcompensate by being unreasonably demanding, aloof, or condescending to students. Paradoxically, professors who appear arrogant and narcissistic are often trying to cover up what they perceive as profound deficiencies in their own personalities and abilities. The best teachers are confident without being arrogant, authoritative without being condescending.
They are tremendously creative. They are always willing to entertain new ideas or try new things — sometimes even on the fly. "Innovation" is a buzzword nowadays, but the term seems applied almost exclusively to the use of technology. My best teachers, though, were truly innovative, coming up with creative ways — sometimes on the spur of the moment — to help us understand, internalize, and remember what they were trying to teach. What made those teachers innovative was not tools or technology but their minds.
They make teaching look easy. We all know it isn’t. Ultimately, great teachers are like great athletes, dancers, or musicians. We may know, cognitively, that what they do isn’t easy, but they seem to do it so effortlessly that we’re lulled into thinking it’s no big deal — until we try it ourselves. Then we learn quickly just how difficult it is to play a sport or an instrument — or teach — at a very high level. I didn’t fully appreciate that until I became a teacher myself and discovered how easy it is to fall short in the classroom.
Most of these things I’ve mentioned here are personality facets. We can’t control whether or not we have them or to what degree. No doubt, there is some truth to the idea that certain people are just born teachers because they happen to be blessed with these traits in abundance.
At the same time, even if we are not "born teachers," we can work to develop the qualities of those teachers in ourselves. We may never be as funny, approachable, or creative as our favorite teachers. But simply by recognizing those traits as desirable, by acknowledging that we don’t possess them to the degree we would like, and by committing ourselves to working on those areas, we can become more approachable, creative, and, yes, funnier than we would be otherwise. It’s the journey of self-improvement that makes the difference.
Rob Jenkins is an associate professor of English at Perimeter College of Georgia State University and author of Building a Career in America’s Community Colleges. He writes monthly for our community-college column and blogs for Vitae. The opinions expressed here are his own and not necessarily those of his employer. You can follow Rob on Twitter @HigherEdSpeak.
"Make use of the fact that you don't doubt yourself too much right now. As we get older, we get more realistic and that includes about our own abilities or lack thereof. That realism does us no favors." -Harvard University, 2015
"It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default." - Harvard University, 2008
"Death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life." – Stanford University, 2005
"It doesn't matter how far you might rise. At some point you are bound to stumble. ... If you're constantly pushing yourself higher ... the law of averages, not to mention the Myth of Icarus, predicts that you will at some point fall. And when you do I want you to know this, remember this: There is no such thing as failure. Failure is just life trying to move us in another direction." - Harvard University, 2013
"Nobody else is paying as much attention to your failures as you are. You're the only ones who are obsessed with the importance of your own life. To everyone else, it's just a blip on the radar screen, so just move on." - University of Wisconsin, 2003
"Nobody cares how tough your upbringing was. Nobody cares if you suffered some discrimination. And moreover, you have to remember that whatever you’ve gone through, it pales in comparison to the hardships previous generations endured — and they overcame them. And if they overcame them, you can overcome them, too." - Morehouse College, 2013
"Nothing is as important as passion. No matter what you want to do with your life, be passionate. The world doesn't need any more gray. On the other hand, we can't get enough color. Mediocrity is nobody's goal and perfection shouldn't be either. We'll never be perfect. But remember these three P's: Passion +Persistence = Possibility." - Monmouth University, 2001
Jim Carrey 金凱瑞
「我們之中許多人在選擇我們自己的人生道路時，常常依循的是被包裝成實用性的恐懼。我們真正渴望的看起來似乎遙不可及、沒有一點成功的可能性，而且去期待這件事情也顯得很可笑，因此我們從來不敢伸手向全世界索討。」──2014年於Maharishi University of Management
"So many of us choose our path out of fear disguised as practicality. What we really want seems impossibly out of reach and ridiculous to expect, so we never dare to ask the universe for it.” - Maharishi University of Management, 2014
Bob Knight 鮑伯‧奈特 (籃球教練)
「我從不相信運氣，我只相信準備周全。」──2010年於Trine University
"I don’t believe in luck, I believe in preparation." - Trine University, 2010
Arnold Schwarzenegger 阿諾‧史瓦辛格
「只要記住一點，如果你把手插在口袋裡，你絕對沒辦法爬上成功的梯子。」──2009年於南加州大學
"Just remember, you can’t climb the ladder of success with your hands in your pockets." - University of Southern California, 2009
"When you are chided for your naivete—and you will be—remind your critics that an amateur built the ark and experts built the Titanic." - University of Virginia, 2014
"What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy--they're given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you're not careful, and if you do, it'll probably be to the detriment of your choices." - Princeton University, 2010
"You should also know that there are external forces out there that are holding you back from really owning your success. ... I've experienced this firsthand. When I first joined Facebook, there was a well-read blog out in the Valley that devoted some incredibly serious pixels to trashing me. ... [I]n the end, my best and only response was just to do my job and do it well. When Facebook's performance improved, the trash talk went away." - Barnard College, 2011
"Follow your passion, stay true to yourself, never follow someone else's path unless you're in the woods and you're lost and you see a path then by all means you should follow that." - Tulane University, 2009
“The world is more malleable than you think and it's waiting for you to hammer it into shape. Now if I were a folksinger I'd immediately launch into "If I Had a Hammer" right now get you all singing and swaying. But as I say I come from punk rock, so I'd rather have the bloody hammer right here in my fist.” - University of Pennsylvania, 2004
"Nobody remembers the naysayers. In the end, all that endures are the builders, and in the end even the builders are forgotten and all that endures are the ripples of what they built, and that’s good — that’s a good thing.” - Yale University, 2010
"Don’t let complexity stop you. Be activists. Take on the big inequities. It will be one of the great experiences of your lives." - Harvard University, 2007
Chuck Norris 查克‧羅禮士
「聖靈告訴我：『只有當你沒有從中習得教訓時，你才會真的失去什麼。』」──2008年於自由大學
"The Holy Spirit said to me, ‘The only time you lose at something is when you don’t learn from that experience." - Liberty University, 2008
Aaron Sorkin 艾倫‧索金 (美國編劇)
「這個世界不會在乎你摔倒多少次，只要比你站起來的次數少一次就可以了。」──2012年於雪城大學
"The world doesn’t care how many times you fall down, as long as it’s one fewer than the number of times you get back up." - Syracuse University, 2012
7.Blippi
