Teaching Through The Arts

If you've never gone to the Rethinking Schools website , now might be a great time. Their online magazine topic for summer 2010 is the "Power of Poetry" and contains some powerful ideas. COVER STORIES • POWER OF POETRY The U.S. poet Robert Frost said, “A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a love sickness. It finds the thought and the thought finds the words.” Our cover section focuses on three teachers who guide students to find their voice through poetry, to take the lump in their throat and transform it into poetry that gives them a sense of their own power. At the same time, Tom McKenna, Renée Watson, and Elizabeth Schlessman show us how to use poetry to help students think critically about their personal experience and connect it to a larger social reality.

Here are some student reflections after taking our Northeastern University Integrating Drama and Poetry Across the Curriculum course. An immense success for me as a third grade teacher--endless ideas--realistic, valuable for real classrooms and real students. It helped me to remember how and why I went into teaching. The materials, the experiential pieces, and the collaboration empowered me. I realized that poetry is so much more than I knew. I learned how to enhance my ability to empathize with my students. For the first time I felt like someone was really teaching me how to "feel" poetry. I am so excited about building the sense of community with my class using the openers, closers and energizers. This course offered the process I need to get to the creative--the gradual, trust-building process. It provided the validation I needed to continue the great "stuff"! This course has helped me to break out of my shell! This has been the best grad course I have ever taken...

This group is in the early stages of creating a group poem . The next steps are to lay it out as a journey for the rest of the class to experience and decide how they want to present it.

What is poem? Don’t give me some long, convoluted definition. Just answer the question. Could you? Don’t worry, I can’t either. I can’t say definitively what poetry is and I can’t say with certainty what poetry isn’t. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that you and I don’t understand the general concept of poetry. I know we do. All I am saying is that neither you nor I, not even the Poet Laureate, has the ability to say that something is or isn’t a poem unless we have written it ourselves. (If you happen to meet him, please don’t tell him I said he couldn’t!) One of the first things that I try to drive home with my students is that if they say that something they have written is a poem, then it’s a poem, and no one has the right to tell them otherwise! Around Christmas time, I was invited by the parent council to perform a poetry/storytelling evening at my school. About 200 students and parents (Grades 5-8) came back to school on a Thursday night to take in the show, have some hot coco...

You know what I’m talking about! Everything is perfectly normal in your classroom (well… I mean as normal as it can be). Suddenly the atmosphere is sucked out of your room leaving a soundless, scentless (OK, maybe not scentless if your kids had gym that day) vacuum. The cause? It wasn’t a star burning out and leaving a dense black hole in its wake. It wasn’t the hole in our ozone layer expanding to the point where all oxygen, nitrogen, CO2, and whatever else you science teachers know is up there, is violently ripped from our world’s grasp. (If that’s even possible, I don’t know. I don’t teach science.) This catastrophic shift has not been caused by anything even remotely close to that magnitude. No. It has been caused by the utterance of one seemingly harmless, yet somehow daunting, four-letter word. You know the one. P-O-E-M! AAAAaaaahhhhh! (Insert the “Kill” theme music from PSYCHO here.) You know you just found yourself going, “Ree Ree Ree Ree...” all alone in front of your computer...