2/9 Well, this is a first, I came late to my own class, thinking it began on Thursdays, not Tuesdays. Oops! This pandemic messes with my sense of time. It took me quite some time to get into the Zoom meeting as well, which made me even later yet. Egg on my face. What a funny saying. First you have to be eating eggs for breakfast, second you have to be eating them so fast that they’re all over your face. Then you need to be in such a hurry that you don’t even have the time to wipe your mouth. That about sums it up. I never quite caught my breath the entire class. Wipe your mouth!
I am a great one for over-preparing, but this time I had to teach ad hoc, off the top of my head. Luckily the poem I chose was a phrase by William Butler Yeats, Love is like a lion’s tooth as a starter place. Mary did not receive my PDF handouts, so I had to teach, and simultaneously send her the lesson plan via email, talk about multitasking. But we did it.
I did a brief intro—who I am, my relationship with poetry, why I write. How dyslexia, feeling mute, and the urge to share all these feelings shaped my poetic persona. How I arrived late to this class, and also to poetry, I was turning 30 before I wrote a poem, I was late, all out of breath.
During independent study, or while they were waiting for me to show up for class, students wrote a short bio on Google Docs. A great use of time.
We opened our class with comparisons. I read Yeats’ fragment, Love is like a lion’s tooth. I asked students what they thought it meant. There were some interesting comments, I asked them to write their own version. And there were some great examples. We expanded our ideas into longer poems. Kids are eager to share their poems in this crazy cyber world.
During recess, we had a breakout room. A first. Paloma shared her screen, so we worked on line breaks, a rarity. One thing that came up several times was how to deepen our images. How do we make something generic versus specific? I told her I can’t see the word “bad,” can you give me an example so I can see it? How do we deepen? How do we create a picture that the audience too can see? I tell them, Poetry is a picture made with words.
Kids wrote in their journals but will transfer their poems to Google Docs which Mary will share with me later. I did not get a chance to record some of the examples that we spontaneously made up, and they were good. Next time.
I designed a quickie heart card and shared it, saying that since Sunday was Valentine’s Day, they should consider taking one of their love comparisons and putting it inside a valentine card to give to someone. I also mentioned the presidential inauguration youth poet Amanda Gorman was a CPITS student. Kids were sufficiently shocked. They liked the idea that poetry can travel well beyond the boundaries of this classroom.
2/16 We did a quick review of love is like, talking about our feelings. We expanded that idea because of something YuHao wrote, America is like an eagle learning how to fly. I was so stunned by his observation that I changed what I was going to teach to include Laura Walker‘s 5th grade sudent examples of My America poem, Something which I had originally vetoed thinking it was too politically loaded. I emailed the my America poems to Mary and she was able to reproduce them on the screen. Pure magic from my computer to their eyes. I wrote My America is a hummingbird hovering at an empty feeder covered with ants.
Today’s lesson was based upon If and Then. If... then I’d give you.. a new line, a new starter idea I’ll give you, the idea of a gift. I quickly changed my handout to reflect the additional starter line. My poetry lessons are always morphing. Marginalia and glosses. Interesting in that to send in my formatted lesson plans in advance is to codify them, and also the order in which I teach. But the need for flexibility is important. I am glad it is possible to do so in this crazy cyber realm.
Special Resources teacher Heather Henry met with several kids including Jim-pen, Monica, Laxmi, and Ky’moni in a breakout room. Was a pleasure meeting them this way one on one and I think we did some good work together. It turns out her son was one of my students four years ago. He is still writing.
Having parent Sheehan Grant as a cohost is brilliant because he types out my instructions on the chat box so that’s another way of reiterating the lesson prompts. From my lips to your chat box. We met until about 10:15 this morning and I was utterly exhausted after teaching. So I didn’t write very much about today’s teaching process. Need to include the necessary down time for reflection and observation after each class and not go onto the next thing, as Zoom is such an exhausting ephemeral process.
2/23 Today we began with a review of last week’s work. We worked on the idea of MY. Last week, we wrote my America poems that came about because one student, YuHao wrote a My America line that was so stunning that we were able to go back in and develop those ideas further. He said, America is like an eagle learning how to fly. It still takes my breath away.
We used Laura Walker‘s student poems from a Berkeley school as our model poems. Kids are beginning to make the connection that we can talk about bigger things than just this cyber classroom. Some really strong work is emerging. I’m frustrated in that I can only hear the poems, and not see them on the page.
When we did the If/then poems last week, kids only wrote short haiku-like poems. I was somewhat disappointed in that the good stuff always comes after you think you’re done. Poetry should surprise and delight the writer too. But India read a great one-liner. So for freewrite, I asked them to do at least five sentences based on the idea of if and then. I also said that during freewrite they don’t have to go back and revisit last week’s poem recipe. They can write about something else as long as they use comparisons.
Heather’s special learner students met in a breakout room. I am grateful for her presence. YuHao again did a fantastic freewrite. The freewrite poems were so good that I again changed my lesson plan for the day. I was planning to do I Am poems, but suddenly, because of India’s poem, or was it Emily‘s poem, I did Emily Dickinson poems today, Hope is the thing with feathers. I read the poem aloud, then I had each kid read the line out loud with me again and I asked them what the poem meant. Hope is indeed a bird on the wing. A Zoom cacophony of words.
The problem with the Zoom format is that everyone wants to speak at once and chaos arrives quickly on feathers. We read the sample poems after I read off the list of possible conceptual nouns, or feeling words to use. I mentioned incorporating the five senses. The example poem had enough lines to where we just went around the room—as it were—we read down the screen with each kid reading one of the lines. Everything is euphemism. The idea of talking about two things simultaneously all at once. The kids get the connection.
If the students don’t have the opportunity to respond verbally in this way, what happens is that they’re not taking the poems in, and they’re not expanding their ideas or repertoire. But some kids are writing well above grade level during our freewrite time. I have hope for this group.
I met with Paloma in a breakout room. We talked about how we write poems. Paloma has discovered dictation. I talk about how handwriting gives me one kind of poem, typing gives me another kind of poem, and dictating while I’m driving down the road gives me something else completely different. All are poems. All are valid. Just different voices, different formats. I said Poetry is a secret shared in a breakout room, the room is silent, small and dark, it is also as big as the world.
Recess begins at 9:45 and I keep forgetting that it does, so we need to break from to 950 to 10 AM. I need to coordinate that better. I need to plan ahead, and it took so long to get through the sample poems that we literally ran out of time. Kids need to begin writing at 9:30 AM. I am still having trouble allocating my time. But the structure is such that the entire morning is ours. I am teaching 31 kids at once, and it takes much longer to teach this way. Still I worry that I’m not reaching everyone.
TG Mary gives the students independent writing time after recess so I met with some kids individually, or in small groups, both during recess, and after recess in breakout rooms. Atziri, with her tiny voice, and her extraordinary poetic presence, is making serious inroads. This is one thing that I do love about teaching via Zoom. Kids can also work on their poems during homework time and the poems themselves are not due until Wednesday afternoon. so kids have three separate chances to complete their poems, a real luxury. It diminishes the pressure to write. One boy finds himself writing down poem ideas throughout the week. He compared America’s economy to sharks.
Awesome class today. I think we are making breakthroughs. Also, the ability for the students to share their screens with me makes such a difference because now I can see the poems on the page. And more importantly I can suggest edits. We covered spelling, better word choices, and line breaks. Small nuggets of wisdom, why we use the word an with a noun that begins with a vowel vs. “a” because it’s easier to read aloud. Easier on the tongue.
Class went on longer than I expected today but that’s all right, as the kids were still with me. We broke out of our second breakout room at 10:20 and then I went over class expectations once again, reiterating how many poems what we’ve studied, and what I’m looking for. We were done by 10:45.
So to reiterate, students should have no less than five typed poems. I will need to work out logistics because I won’t be able to leave comments on their poems in the same way I would have in the past. No journals. Logistics. We learn as we go.
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