2021 Post #19 Written to Inspire Your Younger Self

 by Brett Vogelsinger

How many times in life do adults wish to go back and ask for a redo in their younger years?  How often do we wish we could time-travel and offer that younger version of ourselves some sage advice?  

This poem, "Seventeen" by Rudy Francisco imagines this possibility.  While the poem is about building up the courage to talk to someone you like and maybe even love, it is also about so much more.  It is about the social hierarchy of high school, male body image, introversion, and confidence, and Francisco's acrobatic skill with simile.  

After listening to this poem, ask your students to write a note, a letter, a poem, a list that they would give to a younger self.  In my school, grades 7-9, it is creatively fruitful to ask my ninth-graders to write to their seventh-grade selves.  Can you use a simile or two like Rudy Francisco does to bring to life what you felt back then or to add dimension to the wisdom you are able to pass on now as an older-but-wiser version of yourself?

I find that sometimes in workshops like this it is better to ask (or cajole) a few volunteers to share their work in class rather than insist everyone turn to a partner and read their writing out loud.  I let my students know this before they write so that they can feel comfortable expressing even thoughts and ideas they feel are deeply private.  The writer's notebook can be a space to write with such candor, but only if our students know how, when, and why they are expected to share, and what to do when they feel they cannot share. 

Depending on the number of volunteers to share with an audience, I might have a little time left for a deeper question raised by this poem:  How does our life experience shape our identity?  

Further Reading:

If you like this poem, check out another post featuring Francisco's "My Honest Poem" from earlier this year on Go Poems.  

Brett Vogelsinger is a ninth-grade English teacher at Holicong Middle School in Bucks County, PA.  He has been starting class with a poem each day for the past ten years. He is the creator of the Go Poems blog and the author of Poetry Pauses: Teaching With Poems to Elevate Writing in All Genres.   Find him on Twitter @theVogelman.

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.