Week Nine of Student Teaching

This week we worked on a found poem. I meant to use my webquest, which I got a good grade on but for some reason now it won't open. It's like it changed formats on me somehow. Anyway a found poem is a poem that is comprised of stolen lines from other works. So I combined reading and writing poetry. They had to get onto Poets.org and read a few works from sixteen different authors. All the while stealing lines that they liked from the poetry. Then after they had completed their reading assignment they had to organize poems out of the lines which they had stolen. (giving credit to the original authors of course) I led the first day off with a discussion about how to be good at something most people study people who are good at that. I.E. a basketball wannabe studies Michael Jordan etc. That is one reason to read poetry, so that you can get better at writing it. The second day I discussed finding themes in poetry. We did a short exercise which consisted of infering meaning from "The World is Too Much With Us". First only knowing the title and trying to get meaning from it, and predicting what the poem would be about, then interpreting the poem using key lines and phrases.

It seemed like the students groaned about the assignment as I discussed it with them, but as I walked around the computer lab suggesting different authors or poems to different students, and offering help where needed, I heard alot of students talking about the poems. They would even say things to me like, "I really liked this one." or "Mr. Strong these are weird." Which I took as a good sign since they were paying enough attention to them to understand that they were written differently, and lets face it, Sylvia Plath and Ezra Pound were weird. I would maybe like to read more of the poems as a class and evoke some class discussion in the future.

This is something I plan on using in the future. I read a few of the poems and the students really seemed to do a good job. They also groaned about the assignment but when it was time to actually write the poem many of them got really excited and enjoyed the way their poem turned out. I also think that many of them found a poem or two that spoke to them and hopefully helped them realize that all poetry is not stupid.