Cleveland Elementary School Day 9, teaching notes: Laux Heart, journal

Weirdly, last week I got all geared up and ready to teach—only to discover that it was Easter vacation. Oops. During this these Covid times, school holidays like Easter vacation are relatively meaningless. I meant to introduce the idea of the Ofrenda, or offering lesson (Jimmy Santiago Baca) as a follow-up to the hand lesson, but for some reason we got bogged down and I wound up introducing Dorianne Laux’s Heart poem instead. 

What I discovered was that the two-week gap was more than enough to derail my students to the point where they did not really remember what we had accomplished. So I wound up re-introducing the hand lesson and many of the kids did not do the homework which is to draw their hand filled with symbols, drawings which we will be using for the poetry book as illustration, so it’s a problem.

As it turns out I don’t think Ms. Loeser had a chance to give the kids the handout, a dictionary of symbols so we went over that. There is definitely a time lapse problem with this class that makes it a little more challenging to get through things with some sense of equilibrium.

Next week I want to introduce the Ofrenda lesson as a possible link between the two recipes. Today we looked at Dorianne Laux’s Heart poem and I had each student read one sentence aloud versus one line aloud, which was interesting because we all had to think a little differently that way. Students are used to being asked to read only one line each. But I wanted to work enjambment in. They had to pay attention to the lines in a different way.

It was great to do a a class generic catch-up after the Easter break. We talked about the upcoming poetry book at the end of the residency at the end of April. And I was able to share with them the two published California Poets in the Schools broadside posters. All three posters were of my students’ work, and two of the posters had to do with hands so it was a good segue into today’s lesson—not only a segue, but it picking up on the themes that I had introduced two weeks ago.

I am always striving for continuity when I teach—trying different languages and patterns to bring forth the poetry recipe from the previous session, and making a bridge to time present. I am not always successful. But I do strive for that contiguous quality.

We talked a little bit more about using Zoom, making our drawings and just sort of a chatty catch-up, unscripted as it were. But that’s good too.

During freewrite, I talked about the role of imagination, how our minds wander, and how you can start writing one thing, then your mind goes someplace else completely. I said, it’s OK to follow those leads—even if they don’t make sense—because they will trick you into writing about something you never dreamed you were going to ever talk about. And that’s probably the real secret to good writing—is to write so that you have a self-discovery happening, versus something you expect to write or expect an answer from.

I realize that kind of information is abstract, if not downright esoteric. I also know that some of the students won’t get it, at least not yet, but closure happens at the oddest of times. It’s just too far outside of their current reality. But because we are so increasingly isolated by Covid, I think it’s important to have these unscripted conversations. It gives the kids a chance to process on a different level, in a way that would not normally happen in a classroom setting. 

So I had the kids instruct me in the various ways on how to use Zoom. I learned a lot more about Minecraft, and a few other things too that were completely boring, but that was OK too. One kid noted that I was probably not understanding what they were talking about, and I had to laugh, because I really wasn’t listening. I was just kind of done with the concept.

During my freewrite, I wrote:

My mind wanders to the clouds
where I find lost dreams of those
who wept for other lives
having found theirs wanting.
Sometimes my heart is so heavy
it wants to lie down
right in the middle of the road
and give up. But then it sees something shiny
and is distracted by the beauty of the day. 

It frolics in distant meadows, 

wanders off to far horizons,
where it loses contact with the mothership,
and returns the prodigal child.

We read Dorianne Laux’s Heart poem and students wrote from it, but what I’m noting is the quality of their writing is falling off, and even though I am giving them more time to write, they are not producing. Is it because of Easter vacation? I’m thinking that my time with them is done if they can’t get it together. 

I hate to say that but it’s pointless when a third of the class does not do the writing assignment, and the other third barely writes down a sentence. I have lots of great starter lines, questions, and prompts and they’re just zoning out, so I’m a little disappointed in the class right now.  in a traditional classroom setting I would be able to reach the students who are not producing. But it is difficult via Zoom teaching to reach out to everyone if their cameras are turned off.

So today, after class was the first time I was able to actually see their work on the page other than using the chat box. One of the good things that has come out of the chat box process, is that they can paste in lines they like from Dorianne’s poem, or they pasted in lines or entire poems that they have written.

I like this concept of sharing, but what happens is that half of the class is fully engaged, while the rest are not. And a quarter of the class is missing in action. God knows where they are, their lights are literally off, there’s nobody home—meaning they don’t even have their cameras on. This is the downside of Zoom teaching. It isn’t my job to make sure that they’re all on the same page, my job is to get them to write, to get them to respond but if they don’t even have their cameras on, how am I supposed to make it so?

So, needless to say, when I finally was able to access their Google.docs to make comments on their poems, and start the editing process for the poetry book, it was no surprise that the kids whose cameras were always dark, also had little, or no work. So, a few individuals have been using this time for the past nine sessions to basically sign off, sleep in, and not be participants. 

This makes for a sad, if interesting dilemma for the poetry book. I guess it means we won’t have as many students participating in the final process as I had thought. Luckily, we discovered that some students had misplaced, or misfiled their documents, so maybe it’s not as dire a problem as it seems.