Inspiring quote and afterthoughts of Memo 5.

"A poem can change a child, and a child can change the world."

-Kalli Dakos

There is a trend that I noticed when some poets like Kalli Dakos and Taylor Mali.  Why were these poets former teachers?

I looked into them a bit, got a kick at Mali's website: "(NOTE: IF YOU ARE GOING TO BE INTRODUCING TAYLOR AT AN EVENT, DON’T READ THIS ALOUD VERBATIM. IT’S TOO LONG! YOU CAN TAKE A FEW FACTS FROM HERE, OR GO TO HIS INTRODUCTION CUE CARD, WHICH YOU CAN ACCESS HERE. ALSO NOTE: “I, TAYLOR MALI, WAS BORN ON MARCH 28, 1965″)." ...oh. He knows he is good and has everything all set and ready to go. 

This made me think about Nikki Giovanni again, how famous these poets are. It brought me back to my original question, why are some teachers not including poetry in the classroom? In fact, I never heard of ANY of these people until I entered college. The only poets I knew were Poe and Shakespeare, who I still love greatly.

I figured I had to do a bit more digging. Taylor Mali has lesson plans on his site, he wants teachers to use his work. Some of these include:

Answer to an Unasked Question
All poems can be seen as answers to questions never asked. Each student artfully answers an imaginative question, leaving others to guess what the question is.
Build a Better Metaphor
Using three different colors of index cards, each student gets to create a metaphor using a concrete noun, and adjective, and an abstract noun, often with hilarious results.
Poem from a List of Prompts
A list of two-minute prompts to be given one after the other so that students can build a poem line by line.

And there they are. Just sitting there waiting for us to use and abuse in our classrooms. I want to use all these assignments in the classroom and I do see students enjoying them.  The "Build a better Metaphor" speaks for itself too in relation to teaching English in a classroom: turn the metaphors that students generate into a class-made poem and stick the cards on the wall or door. Possibilities are endless!

Dakos' site made me a little sad, "Helping children cope with grief and loss; THE GOODBYE POEMS" 
Yikes. However, maybe even some teenagers could use this kind of therapy. And it is a good way to help know students better and make the classroom more inviting.

So, while the rest of this entry may feel a bit scattered. I do want to point something out. All these poets that I encounter, they all seem geared and ready to teach a class: materials ready, plans set before you, people who are still alive and were teachers once themselves. WHY ARE WE NOT USING THIS?
I think we, as English majors, and as Teachers, need to see this. I would not have either myself if I did not have people showing me sources, and really devoting my time into really looking into these sources.
As a write myself, though slightly out of practice, I really want to have my students enjoy writing, and get used to writing. Right now, I only write for grades. Before students are faced with this reality, they need to see the more fun side to writing. The expressionism they can generate through poetry. How much they can learn through poetry. What others have to say through poetry. And how much we learn from it. I learned more about Malcolm X through Nikki Giovanni than any Social Studies or history class. How easy is it that we can connect all these tidbits of history and other literature and make it so much more meaningful to our students just through a few little poems.

And that is what this I-Search helped me see. I want to be that teacher that makes learning and writing meaningful, maybe not fun per se, but meaningful. Shakespeare is something I will always love, but what will my students learn? That Elizabethan is difficult to translate?
I am so grateful that I got a chance to explore all these different poets, and write poetry again myself.


Bonus: Dis Poem