Christensen's teaching strategies surprised me with many cool tools that I never thought of. I am excited about using these ideas for my lesson plans. I really hope I could get my students to enjoy sharing and learning from each other. The school where I teach at has an average of 4 to 5 students per period. It is a very small school and everybody knows everything about everybody. However, I trust that there are details from sharing poems that might surprise them about who they are on the inside.
I admire how Linda thought thoroughly about how to work with students. She emphasized on when teaching, learn "how to gain sights in students' knowledge about literature and history" and encourage them by "sharing laughters and tears, sharing their lives give other students hope, courage, strategies, and allies as they wrestle with a hard time."
I snickered at the way Linda played with the language. Who would have thought of the words, language weightlifting? I weightlift two to three times a week at the gym. Language weightlifting gives me an idea that it takes time to build up writing good poems like it takes time to build a mass of lean, dense muscles.
When spotting the keywords Linda used, workhorse, to represent verb as a workhorse of the sentence, all sudden, my flashback of my mechanic Deaf dad popped up. The words made me think of how much he loved to fix hot-rod engines. As he only has three daughters, it didn't stop him from teaching us about cars. He would go as far as explaining about the key of having a powerful workhorse to make the best hot-rod engine. Clearly, I was clueless, so he stood up at 6'0 feet tall and weigh at 200 lbs in front of me. As a little, wee kid looking up at him with my head bent backward against the back of my neck, he lifted his thick arms at 90 degrees revealing big muscular biceps and then he shouted at a high-pitch. It was so loud that the forceful vibration startled me. What a perfect example of how to describe a powerful and loud the hot-rod workhorse was like.
The flashback of Dad's hot rod gave me a vivid idea of how important verbs are when writing poems. Like the hot rod, the verbs will deliver the reader to picture an image of a forceful vibration when reading the poem.
Christensen mentioned how important it is to milk for more information out of the students once they start sharing their ideas. I often feel at a loss at how to encourage them to share more ideas. Inspired by Linda's idea, I will use her tricks of milking the ideas out of the students by keep asking for more specific information out of general ideas they share at first.
Another fabulous idea by Kati Macaluso made me want to preserve it for my lesson plan. She shared her learning experience from her teacher suggesting to go places to capture a poem. Kati's metaphor of orange juice strikes me about the fact that poetry has been forgotten by our new generation. I notice that poetry is not as popular as it used to be. I will ensure that I do not forget how important poetry is to our writing experience. To create a great poem, I agree with her that one must works in the space between experience and language. Both Kati and Linda shared many great tools for me to use when teaching poems.
Writing a poem is not easy because often it involves sound such as rhymes, alliteration, homonyms, and so on. Poems have so many rules that students may be overwhelmed to learn, but thanks to Linda, I will teach what she suggested. The basic idea of a poem includes the power of verbs, power of specificities, and power of repeating lines. This conception of a powerful poem is so basic that I will definitely feel very comfortable to teach my students what to focus on more than ever.
Great figurative language use in this post. I really loved when you compared practicing poetry to weightlifting and you talked about lean and dense muscles. Also bringing it back to orange juice and milk. You're already thinking like a poet by using language in unusual combinations. Deba, you've got a unique outlook on poetry because you are deaf. Interestingly, a spoken poem and a written poem are basically different species. Poets have their ear trained to the sounds of words, but poems can also be very visual. Layout is very important in a written poem and in most cases when a poem is set up into a specific number of stanzas or a certain shape, it's intentional and it's meant to add to the layers of the work. There are all kinds of opportunities in poetry outside of the usual rhyme and meter that inevitably comes up in a classroom. (I hate this because it's so boring to me. I'm not a musician, so I don't feel like breaking words up into beats. I know when words sound good together that's good enough for me. I'm not really interested in the why.) Like you had brought up in the Christensen reading, verbs are the star players of a poem. That's where your movement comes from. Verbs are how you just do it. Adverbs however are the worst thing that's ever happened to poetry. With adverbs there's no sense of degree. It's just oh, "He walked quickly." What does that even mean? He was walking fast, but not really fast? Was he walking into a ally to hide or avoid detection? Was he running late for a meeting? Did he get barked at by a dog and try to dart out of biting range? You'll never know if you're not specific enough. Great reflection.
ReplyDeleteTo address a practical concern, in class tomorrow I'm going to be doing a writing lesson with everyone and I'd like you to follow along. I'm going to add my example poem that I'm putting together to show the others and I figured you could work on it at home at your own time and see how you like it. I'll leave more instructions in your dialog Google Doc. You can either choose one of the articles I've picked out for the class or you can find a newspaper of your own and do the activity on there. Make sure to have a dark marker on hand as well.
Katie, thank you so much for wonderful, useful pointers. They helped me understand more about poems and specific details related to sound vs visual. Thank you for pointing out that adverb is worse way to use in poems. Your examples are champ. I look forward to your assignment tomorrow.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with you that Christensen does a fantastic job laying out very concrete examples of how to teach poetry in your classroom. Poetry is not always accessible for everyone therefore having this book to help you find ways to implement it in a very accessible way is valuable! I will definitely be holding onto this book. I also enjoyed her vocabulary too! She uses the word delicious quite often!
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