2020 Post #3 -- Sarah Kay and the Power of Lists

by Candace Brobst

Sarah Kay has the power to convince even the most jaded students among us that poetry isn’t so bad. She is both poet and hypnotist, and April is a time when teachers are perhaps more in need of the latter. To be honest, there are days in April where T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” doesn’t seem so bad.

I teach Seniors, by choice I might add, not because my school’s administration is trying to punish me. And by April, student engagement is waning. Seniors have grabbed the nearest scissors, and they are cutting their own umbilical cords to anything school related. Younger students are no doubt also feeling the restlessness of spring, the home stretch, whatever. I like to capture that I-have-something-to-say-before-I-go energy with Sarah Kay’s “If I Should Have a Daughter…” TED Talk.

The entire TED Talk (18 minutes) is a you-can-do-this tutorial and inspiration for writing performance poetry so if you have a whole period, keep going. Have students become the virtual participants in Kay’s master class. There’s even another great poem at the end.

But if time is short, and you are trying to follow Brett’s lead with this poem-a-day challenge, just play the poem (the first three and a half minutes of the TED Talk). Kay assumes the role of an imaginary mother giving advice to her imaginary daughter. In the spirit of the poem, direct students to become the sages (a.k.a. mothers 😉). Have them create a quick list, as in: “Things I Know to be True” or “I Wish I had Known…” From there, Pair-Share, throw ideas on the whiteboard, or make a Nearpod Collaborate! Board.

Seniors in particular can do this as a culminating reflection on high school. Start with a list they can ultimately use to write letters to younger versions of themselves, armed with what they now know… things like: “Don’t wait until Senior year to take that first art elective” or “Audition for the musical; you are going to meet your best friends.” One year, my school (graduating class around 1000 students) had Seniors write letters of advice to incoming Freshmen. Distributing them was a logistical nightmare (one we never repeated), but it may work better in smaller districts.  

Further Reading:

Candace Brobst (brobstc@parklandsd.org) teaches English and Creative Writing at Parkland High School in Allentown, PA. She very much enjoys receiving assignments from former students.

Postscript: OK, OK, this is Brett writing now and I need to explain the last line of that bio . . . Candace Brobst is my high school creative writing teacher and one of the MAJOR early influences. My love of reading and writing poetry owes so much to this wonderful teacher, and I feel so honored that she agreed to write a post to my blog project.

2019 Post #19 -- Letters To and From the Past

by Rama Janamanchi

When I read the poem "Dear NaiNai" by Jennifer Tseng with my class, I remembered my own grandmother, now long gone, and the ways in which I lean back into her as I have come from her. I think too of the many silences that prevent me from knowing her. This is a great way for students to see their own lines going back and leading back to where they stand.

We begin by reading the poem chorally (I project the poem and give my students copies to hold). Then I divide the class in half and have one group read the poem from the beginning until “#1 writes me a letter.”

Group 2 then reads the letter. Group 1 picks up to read the rest of the poem but group 2 joins in just for the italicized words. I tell the students that NaiNai means "grandma" in Chinese and point out that the poet’s father is dead so in effect, she is listening to ghosts. In one group, a student noticed this before I said anything!

We read the poem again but this time switch roles -- Group 1 reads the letter and joins in for the italicized words. This time, group 2 reads the main voice. At the end of the reading, I ask them what they noticed about the poem and its voices.

I then ask them to turn over their copies of the poem and draw a single vertical line. At the bottom of the line, they write their name. Then they write the name of one parent and one grandparent. Then next to each name, write a word or phrase they associate most with that parent and grandparent. For each word, they write what other words they associate with that word. After 3 rounds of word association, we talk about how we could use these words to build our own “Dear NaiNai” letters.

Further Reading:

Bio: I teach 11th-grade English at a private high school for students with language-based learning differences. Twitter: @MsJanamanchi410

2018 Poem #12 -- Letter to the Future

by Tyler Kline

In this exercise, students write a letter to a person living fifty years in the future.  First, read Matthew Olzmann's poem “Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years From Now” as a mentor text.

Students may write the letter to a specific person or to an anonymous "someone" like Olzmann does.  Encourage students to consider what they want to tell this person living in the future with some of the following prompts:  Do you want to share information about what is going on in the world right now?   Current events?  Celebrity gossip?  Do you want to share a fear, dream, wish or thought that you currently have?  Remind students that their letter do not have to be about anything monumental (example: Olzmann writes about animals becoming extinct) but what students write about should be significant to THEM.

As they write, encourage students to include a question to the future reader, something they would like to know from this person.  For example: "Do you still have the McDonald's Dollar Menu?" or "Who is on the one-hundred-dollar bill?" or "Are robots friendly?"

Olzmann ends his poem with the powerful line, "And then all the bees were dead."  Students can choose to end on any type of note they want -- inspiring, hopeful, forlorn, confused, etc.  Whatever their choice, encourage students to craft a last line that is as impactful as possible and to write this line in a separate stanza.

If time permits for discussion, students can share their poems with a partner.  The conference partner can pretend to be the reader fifty years from now and predict how this future reader would respond to the poem. 

Further Reading:

Tyler Kline is a teacher and writer from Pennsylvania.  In 2015, he was named the Poet Laureate of Bucks County, PA.