The persistence of failure

So your car breaks down and you can't tell what's wrong as you're sitting there at the side of the road. You don't know anything about cars, but you do know who to call for help. You call AAA or a towing service. What you don't do is pray. Oh, you might pray for patience or fortitude to cope with whatever challenges this breakdown brings. But a rational believer does not pray for God to fix his car. Why not? Because you hate religion or reject the power of God? No, because this is not an appropriate sphere to invoke the power of God. And, to invoke a reason which is not at all blasphemous, it won't work. I leave it to theologians to explain why this is so, but I expect that God doesn't want us to pray for magic tricks.

And let me repeat this. We don't pray for God to do magic mostly because it doesn't work. Yet we persist with magical thinking with regard to educational theory all the time, and consistently ignore evidence that conflicts with our faith-based convictions.

I don't want to make the mistake of being overly subtle about this: MERIT PAY FOR TEACHERS DOESN'T WORK. It never has. Let's ignore whether or not it should work, or the value of applying market lessons to the profession of teaching. THERE IS NOT ONE SCRAP OF PROOF THAT MERIT PAY HAS EVER WORKED. Educational professionals have known this for years, over a decade at least, but that does not discourage political figures from continuing to bring it up. You don't see politicians advocating the use of astrology or voodoo, but they persist with merit pay for teachers idea because "common sense" says it ought to work. But it never has.

And even if one is skeptical of an assertion because it comes from an interested party, such as a teacher's union, that doesn't make the assertion untrue.

The most recent documentation of failure comes from the Rand Corporation, hardly a bastion of left-wing, pro-union thought. In a carefully conducted, well-documented study, Rand concluded that New York City's merit pay system did not improve student achievement or teacher practices. The city figured this out a while back and dropped the program back in January. "Well," say the pro-merit pay types, "they didn't implement it correctly. If we install it in the correct fashion, it's bound to produce the results we expect."

Except that they've been saying that for 20 or 30 years. How long before you send the voodoo priest home and call a doctor? Because nobody can point to a system that was unquestionably effective and could be copied by other districts. How do I know this without an exhaustive search? Because if somebody had made it work, we would all know what the template was. It would be widely reported, celebrated on the morning news shows and the print newsweeklies and publicized far and near. The very fact that we are still trying to re-jigger this seems to me like an engineer who is still trying to build a flying machine using flapping wings. Surely -- if we just get the wing size right...

And what's so particularly idiotic about persisting with this failed idea is the insulting and unconsidered assumptions that underlie it. That notion is that teachers are basically failures and slackers who flock to teaching for the compensation -- not perhaps the salaries, as most people acknowledge that salaries are relatively low for the level of education and training involved, but because of the security and fringe benefits. Once ensconced in a firm position at the public trough, teachers begin coasting and loafing until someone walks up with a fistful of cash to wave at someone who decides to actually try and do a good job. "Hey," we sluggards say collectively, "There's an idea -- actually teach something. Let's try it!"

What a load. I know most people dislike their jobs, but that is simply not true for more than 90% of teachers. Yes, there are probably some burnouts who are marking the calendar until retirement, but you would be stunned to know how few of them there are. I've never met one. There are some more experienced teachers who employ non-progressive methods of teaching, but that's not because they're trying to get away with the minimum effort.

And even the minimum effort of teaching is pretty difficult. For a person like me, who started teaching in his mid-to-late 40s, it's physically exhausting, and that's not a matter of controlling unruly classrooms. It's the long hours involved in preparation, research, creation of materials and reviewing and assessing student work. For me most days require at least 10 hours of work, leaving aside any extra-curricular projects I have, such as Drama Club. 12 and 14 hour days are not uncommon, especially when you're working on writing projects which require careful reading and comment. It can be grueling, especially around February and March. It can't be done without passion and commitment, or at the very least, the memory of it.

The mythology behind what should have been a harmless piece of fluff like the film Bad Teacher is based on the idea that any drunken, burned-out stumblebum can do this teaching thing without even breaking a sweat. Teachers are chumps and losers. To be honest, I haven't seen the film -- I avoided it -- so I can't analyze it, and certainly not without the perspicacity of this piece. (I know that films today have a lot of silly unbelievable junk in them, but it is hard to believe that in a film released in 2011, a teacher who has gone bad is punished for being involved with drugs by being sent to "Malcolm X High School." Translation -- a school full of those people. Disgusting.)

To be clear, I'm not lacking a sense of humor about teaching. I love School of Rock, in which Jack Black's goofy slacker finds his calling in teaching. But he brings passion to his work, and his teaching is actually a model of authentic-based instruction, in which students collaborate to accomplish a real-world goal. In a way, we should all aspire to be like that character.

But the broader idea behind Bad Teacher is the pernicious concept that the problem with education is teachers. Structural, social and economic problems apparently don't exist. We teachers just need to "bear down" a little harder and success would follow.

Again, anybody got any evidence for that? Or is this just another religious question?

We can argue what the solutions to deeply entrenched problems of society, culture and economic conditions. But I sure do know that you can't "teach around" them. You can't teach around the problem of a student who can't get homework done because he has no idea where he is going to eat and sleep each night due to chaotic family conditions. (This is not as uncommon as you would think.) Or a family which does not or will not support education as an important value. I've known children of very well-to-do families who refuse to do work because they've been guaranteed a situation in the family business. How do you "bear down" on that?

Mostly what's infuriating is that businesspeople and politicians are defining the problems and offering the solutions and excluding educators from the process. I didn't see the politicians telling GM how to build their cars, even as they were sending them hundreds of millions to stay in business. We don't let politicians design the bridges they levy taxes to construct. But somehow they (and everybody else) know more about education than the people involved in the practice every working day of their lives.

I picked the example at the beginning of this post with some thought. Because I actually do know someone who fixed a car with prayer. Years ago, as a traveling entertainer, my wife found herself in a broken-down van desperately trying to get to an Easter morning church service. As she tells it, she said, "I just want to go to church!" and on the word "church" her hand came down on the car. At once it started, and the startled members of her group jumped in the van and agreed they had better darn well get to church.

So, miracles can happen, I suppose. But depending on miracles is no way to build an educational system.

What do you think?

Is this video just a cheesy marketing ploy for Microsoft Word, or is it a way to get students to think of history as a chain of possible alternative actions and outcomes, not to mention a lesson in the value (and ease) of rewriting?



Either way, I wish they'd credited the theme from Parks and Recreation.

Infusing Poetry in Language Arts instruction Part II

This began with my post urging English teachers NOT to celebrate National Poetry Month in April, because that shunts poetry into a calendar-bound ghetto, whereas poetry should be freely roaming around your curriculum, lurking behind every pedagogical corner.

One of your obstacles will be the general resistance to poetry, or, to be more precise, to the way poetry was taught to your students in the lower grades. Too much emphasis was put on rhyme and other technical matters, and the subject matter tended toward nature and other harmless warm and fuzzy topics. It would be surprising to find an elementary school teacher presenting students with poetry that talked to where they really live.

Slam poetry is all about where we really live here and now. It is not interested in posterity. It is literally of the moment, of the moment it is being performed. Even now, into its second decade, there are not a great number of printed anthologies of slam poetry, any more than there are books of rap lyrics. Slam is primarily an aural medium, meant to be experienced, which brings the focus back to the aspect of poetry most greatly neglected in the 20th century. Poetry had become reflexive, self-referential and driven by academia. (The exception in the United States, were the new Black and Latino writers creating a poetry of the streets, designed to be shouted and chanted from the pavement up toward the sealed windows of the people who run things.)

Slam, on the other hand, was born and bred in a barroom and the critics are not academics, but audience members selected at random and given no criterion. The pressure is on for the slam poet to reach the listener immediately and have them like what they hear. Frank Loesser described song lyrics as being written on the side of a train which the audience has once chance to read as it goes by. So it is with Slam. No chance to reflect on the reference to Baudelaire and the significance of post-modernism. Get it now and it goes.

Simply put it, you must understand it -- at least some if not most of it -- on first hearing. This will appeal to your students. Also, it must have a performance rhythm and audience appeal; typically, this is the long upward build to a climax with a denouement, perhaps witty, wry or touching. Performance requires poetry to take a narrative shape, even if the purpose is not storytelling but reflection on a subject -- that narrative shape asserts itself in nearly all oral presentation.

And in New Jersey, and probably your state as well, oral presentation is part of your core curriculum. So forget about making it optional. All students must get up and slam. I leave it to you as to whether you require memorization, they all must speak before the others, learn how to speak clearly and evenly, to emphasize what is important, to vary the speed and the pitch of their speech. I know a lot of them will fight you on it, but it is teaching abuse to leave your students unequipped and afraid of public speaking. I've backed off in this area before for fear of traumatizing children, but I believe that was a mistake. Like other times and places when you must move your students out of their comfort zone, you can't bully and threaten them on this. You must persuade and cajole and coax. But you must insist and be firm. (My thought about memorization is to announce that it will be required, then let them use the paper on the day itself. This provides the benefits of both thorough and complete preparation of the text with relaxation and security during delivery which allows them to focus on the quality of what they are doing rather than the brute effort of recitation from memory.)

And there is the competition factor. My first principal, who is a superb teacher, was always skittish around competition and its negative aspects, which I need hardly recite here. But I believe that many of those negatives are mitigated here, as there is no built-in advantage for the brainiacs or the jocks in this competition. Most years there is at least one or two surprises as to who will excel at slamming. But one of the great values of competition is that it is its own intrinsic motivation. I rarely, if ever, offer prizes in classroom competitions. Pride of success is sufficient. Most young people cannot avoid wanting to compete any more than my cat can avoid jumping on a shiny thing that is moving. Some kind of atavistic impulse kicks in and, provided that they each believe they can be basically competent, they will try to do well at slam.

Getting them to a confidence about basic competence will take some time. Months, probably. You need to start adding the writing of poetry onto other writing assignments right away at the beginning of the school year. Have them add a poetic reflection to their five-paragraph essays. Have them do their classroom warm-up as poetry. Most of all, break the doggerel habit. Too many children are swamped by the tyranny of rhyme and meter and their expressive instincts have been completely suppressed. Find organizing principles other than rhyme, such as repetition, anaphora, antistrophe, alternation of long and short phrases, controlling metaphor and the like. Most of all, get them to write and not worry about the process and the devices much.

A side benefit of writing poetry -- by having to break thoughts and stories into lines and stanzas, they will gradually fall away from turning in prose in one single unbroken paragraph. Personally, I find unparagraphed so literally physically difficult to read, that I will hand such papers back and demand they be resubmitted with some divisions. Again, teaching in the lower grades has damaged them a great deal, and they thrash around fearing they have no topic sentences and that not all the sentences will support that, and generally write as if the chief end of writing was to be able to be outlined easily. As you can see by my style in this blog, I think this is hooey. The chief end of writing is, obviously, communication of (1) emotion; and (2) ideas. (3) Information is OK, but it is a lower order of writing, valuable to know but not aspirational.

How you organize your competition, your teams, selecting judges, involving other classes or other faculty, you are a far better judge than I. I can no more engineer your methodology than you mine. I am just here to be a cheerleader. But make sure that it is fun, that it is competitive, that is emphatic, that is strong, that it is real and true.

And this is authentic learning, in that slam competitions are going on each and every weekend, if not each night of the week, all across this country. As far as introducing your students to the ethos of slam, there are a number of videos on YouTube you could cull. Here's one example:



I would also suggest the very selective use of HBO's Def Poetry Jam -- but you MUST preview this, because unobjectionable material alternates in rapid sequence with very adult themes. I like to use excerpts from a documentary feature SlamNation which although more than a decade old and with some technical lapses, shows a lot of the great early stars of the medium (Taylor Mali, Saul Williams, Beau Sia), and presents the heat of battle well. And the film has a bleeped school-appropriate edition which can be ordered here. Another resource is the Russell Simmons miniseries Brave New Voices, which is too long for classroom use, but excerpts from which can be used to show actual high school students preparing for competition.

All of this is to prove that poetry is not for the faint of heart. It's not just for flowers and clouds and unicorns and rainbows. Although maybe it is for rainbows, because it is a powerful medium for all the colors of your classroom to be heard.

Breaking News: Pride is a better motivator than shame

We've all had those lunch room conversations about the million-dollar grants we'd like to get in order to prove that peanut butter is yummy or that up is different from down. A recent editorial in my local paper describes a study that might fall in that category, at least for most successful teachers and parents. Yet civic leaders and opinion makers never seem to catch on to this basic idea. The idea? If you want to mold behavior, shame doesn't work. I'll repeat that. Shame doesn't work. Pride works better. It's not perfect or complete. There is no infallible tool for the formation of character and setting students on the path toward success, but pride has a way better track record than shame.

Here's how one of the researchers described her experiment:

In one of our studies, we put three groups of subjects alone in a room with a very large piece of chocolate cake, the utensils to devour it and water. We told them they could eat as much or as little cake as they wished. But first, the members of one group were instructed to focus on the pride they would feel if they resisted the cake. Those in the second group were told to imagine the shame they would feel if they ate it, and the final (control) group was simply let loose, with no instructions at all.

We discovered that the study subjects who anticipated pride at resisting the cake consumed far less than those who focused on the shame of succumbing. They also ate less than the control group. In other words, when it comes to self-regulation, anticipated pride outperformed anticipated shame as well as unconsidered, heedless consumption.

That is, if you define the goal as "not eating tempting cake," then picturing yourself succeeding at that goal is a better strategy than imagining feeling ashamed. Translated into classroom terms, picturing yourself getting "A's" and receiving praise is a better motivator than trying to impress upon students the possibility and fear of failure, shame and punishment.

Think how powerfully that could be put to work in your classroom. I know I will try it in mine. I have found simple, brief meditation to be a good tool to help students to calm down and focus on the tasks to follow. Now in addition to the visualization of being relaxed and happy and calm and peaceful, I will add picturing being successful, being praised, feeling good, feeling proud of one's success and accomplishment.

Very simply ask them, "What would it feel like to get an A+ in that course? How good would that feel? Is that worth a few simple sacrifices?"

Anyway, it's something I plan to explore, and I always like to have a little academic verification to back me up.

My imaginary commencement address

I have to be honest with myself. I am never going to deliver a commencement address. I am not now and have no desire to become an administrator or even a department head. I find it challenging enough to try and master teaching to take on responsibility for other teachers. I am not such a distinguished scholar or a successful entrepreneur as would be likely to be asked to speak at some other institution's commencement. It's just not in the cards.

This of course doesn't prevent me, as I sit in the front rows reserved for teachers, letting my eyes glass over as the real commencement speaker begins, from imagining myself in that situation and trying to project what I had to say. So here we go.

Mr. Superintendent, Graduates, Families, Friends and fellow staff. This will be brief, because I don't know much. But if this saves you a couple of bumps in the head in years to come, that'll be great.

1. "Nobody knows anything." This bit of wisdom was coined by novelist and screenwriter William Goldman in reaction to the idea that there are hard and fast rules about what will succeed and what will fail, specifically in the entertainment business. But if you extend it to predictions of human behavior, it's pretty universal. You can learn what has happened, and in the natural world we can make pretty good predictions. But when people tell you that your idea won't work or that the way they've been doing something is the only good way to do it, well, nobody knows anything. And the more sure they are about it, the more likely they are to be completely wrong. Which leads to an important corollary to Rule #1:

1a. Know what you don't know. You will work for and with a lot of people who will claim knowledge that not only they don't have, but nobody has. Know the boundary lines of the sovereign country of What-I-Know and be unafraid to call in people who live and work beyond those boundaries to tell you what's out there. Which relates to the next rule:

2. Learn to find the people who do know something. Perhaps the single greatest skill you can develop in your college and early years in the workplace is to find and identify mentors. Look for those people who are likely to be able to help and advise you and make it rewarding, in terms of your own respect and attention, to do so. And of course, many of those people are dead or otherwise unavailable, but luckily they have written these things called "books." More about that later.

3. Lockhart's Law of Slippage: Everything will take longer, cost more and be a bigger hassle than you thought. Don't be discouraged when things slip off the rails. They are supposed to. Here's a big secret. People older than you are not ipso facto smarter than you. They've just seen more stuff go wrong and therefore can more easily anticipate what will go wrong. They see those potholes coming sooner than you and steer around. See #2. In general, you will be judged more for the way you handle obstacles (anticipated or not) than the way you executed a flawless plan flawlessly (which has probably never happened in human history).

4. FORGET PLAN B!!! Parents and family cover your ears. I know your parents want you to have something to "fall back on." But to embark on a career with Plan B in your head is like entering a negotiation thinking about the lowest price you can accept or playing a game thinking about how much you are willing to lose by. One of your primary jobs at this point in your life is identifying your passion, then committing to it. And you must commit completely, put all your heart and will and resources and effort into it. And the truth is, even then it may not work out. You may not have the right set of talents or circumstances for it all to come true. (Walter Matthau said, "All you need to succeed in show business is forty good breaks.") But I promise you, you will never be happy thinking about the life you could have had if you had only put everything you had into it. Better to fail spectacularly then to drift into your second- or third-choice life, ever wondering if you could have had your first choice. So pick Plan A and be ready to go over Niagara Falls in a barrel for it.

5. Become a teacher and continue to be a student. I'm not saying you should all become licensed schoolteachers. But find appropriate opportunities to pass on what you know and what you've learned. Besides the general societal benefit and the warm fuzzies you'll feel inside, research shows that you most truly master and understand that which you teach. So teach in order to learn. And speaking of learning, you are not done. You have only just begun. You have not acquired a big bag of knowledge, which is what I thought education was. You have acquired a tool kit, to which you will add (hopefully), by which you will continue to acquire the knowledge and skills you need to work effectively, think clearly and live happily. That means you're going to have to keep reading, and not just on the internet, but real books. And think about them, talk about them, share them. And you're going to have to hang around with people who are different than you -- different backgrounds, different ages, entire different philosophies of life, many of which you will completely and violently disagree with. But they will all teach you. When you stop learning, you commence to die.

That's all I've got. Hope your families cooked up a great party for you tonight. It sure beats going out and drinking too much and feeling sick and stupid for a couple of days, which is what we used to do in my day. So you see, things do get better.

Congratulations, good luck, and come back and see us. Not next year because you're feeling homesick, but in five years, ten years, twenty years so you can share with those students then what you found in that big bad world out there after you Commenced.

Real progress

I am delighted that President Obama is no longer talking about "fixing" No Child Left Behind. That's like fixing the Spruce Goose. It might manage a brief flight, but it can't really do anything. Now we are talking about finding why the good teachers are good, mentoring the teachers whose results are lagging and changing the culture of failing schools. Here's the video:



So far Gov. Christie is still not talking about creating better schools or developing better teaching. All he talks about better and faster ways to fire teachers, presumably so they won't pay union dues which are used to make campaign contributions to the Democrats. Someday I hope he develops an interest in governing, rather than building his power base. Meantime, the president seems to be listening to better advice, and is climbing off the all-charter-schools-all-the-time bandwagon. Time will tell.

Integrating poetry into Language Arts Part I

At the outset, I need to be clear about two things. (1) I don't know much about poetry, and even less about the poetic literature. Of the great 18th and 19th century English poets I am almost completely ignorant; and (2) I don't care.

I have always approached teaching English as a discipline of skills (which is why I prefer the name "Language Arts.") I have no special brief for literature over all the other modes of writing. I want my students to build their toolkits as readers and writers, and I don't care much where and how they acquire their tools, so long as they work well. For instance, if you want to borrow from math and use a Venn diagram to teach metaphors, why not?

So from poetry, I'm not as interested in the sheer art of poetry as the craft elements which can contribute to the student's general literacy. To begin with, one of the greatest values poetry brings to writing in general is precision and economy. In a short piece of writing, such as ultra-short story, a song lyric or a poem, every word must be working hard to perform its task and contribute to the entire effect of the piece. Hence the challenge and fun of Hemingway's six word novels, for example:

For sale: Baby shoes, never worn
Playing pool was just an excuse.
I finally realized he loved guacamole.
Said I'd never marry again. Damn.
My secret discovered. Plane ticket purchased.
Two lives, one day. Never again.
He woke to an empty house.
Lost her sweater. Kept his jacket.
Heaven can't. Hell won't. Now what?
Wrong day for the scenic route.
Found true love, married someone else.
Hey Stranger, coffee's on, sit awhile.

So one approach might be to pack and unpack some especially pithy poems or portions thereof.

"So much depends/upon a red wheelbarrow"
"Do not go gentle into that good night"
"I took the one less traveled by/And that has made all the difference"
"I have measured my life out with coffee spoons"
"I held a Jewel in my fingers--/And went to sleep"
"yes is a pleasant country"

(Note - Shakespeare is not useful for this exercise, because he generally seems to unpack his own metaphors and images. As the experienced reader and playgoer will testify, Shakespeare always strives for utmost clarity, and eschews enigma.)

So for example, the "unpacked" version "I have measured my life out with coffee spoons" might be, "My life has become so dull and routine, that each day is like another as each mound of coffee in the spoon is like another." Or, "Another day, another pot of coffee, nothing happening but drinking cups of coffee, day after day." Or, "I keep spooning out my days like coffee until they will all be gone, like the coffee in the jar." Or some combination of all of these. None of these interpretations are all right or all wrong, but they are all contained, all "packed" into those few words, like a huge database packed into a Zip file.

The final exercise might be to take a short story or passage and condense it down into stages. First an abridged version of itself, then perhaps a list of salient points or events, then a poem, then a critical line or two of the poem. This task is best done collaboratively. What you end up with might be banal: Hamlet condensed might be: "Revenge is folly." But that's not important--what matters is what the student experiences or learns in the process of winnowing down the large to the small.

And that, ultimately, is the lesson of poetry -- that which is large contained, encompassed, suggested in that which is small.

DIY is authentic

Mark Frauenfelder in THE ATLANTIC :

Imagine a school where kids could do the following: clone jellyfish DNA; build gadgets to measure the electrical impulses of cockroach neurons; make robotic blackjack dealers; design machines that can distinguish between glass, plastic, and aluminum beverage containers and sort them into separate bins; and convert gasoline-burning cars to run on electric power.

No such school exists, but in August I went to Detroit and met the kids who did all these things, and more. They—along with 22,000 other people—had come from all over the United States and Canada to demo their creations at Maker Faire, a two-day festival of do-it-yourselfers, crafters, musicians, urban homesteaders, kit makers, scientists, engineers, and curious visitors who congregated to present projects, give performances, and swap ideas. Having attended eight Maker Faire events since 2006 (they’re put on by the same company that owns the magazine I edit), I’ve become convinced of two things about children and education: (1) making things is a terrific way to learn, and (2) schools are failing to teach kids to learn with their hands.

My son attended a technical high school and while he has a natural proclivity for physics, he struggled at first with chemistry. His chemistry teacher suggested that the problem may have been that he thinks with his hands. I don't know if that's true, but I know that the men in my family have an engineering-tinkering proclivity.

The challenge is to come up with some Language Arts DIY -- I mean beside the annual literary magazine and the increasingly irrelevant monthly newspaper, which are only semi-authentic as it is. They really only serve as a function of the school community without any direct outside use or application. But surely students can produce work of more general application. Perhaps they could develop a sustainability plan for the district, which would be a cross-disciplinary project with the Science Department. Or work with the police department and write a safety plan (although that may involve confidential matters which makes student participation impossible).

How about online wikis for the general community; job or recreation resources. Create study or discussion materials. Develop a One Book plan for the entire community. The municipal library may be able to steer students towards needs it or its patrons have.

But the point of these projects is not to look at them as something to earn Community Service points toward graduation. They each have literacy education value of their own. Remember, when our parents and teachers saw us acting out in frustration, they would tell us, "Use your words." Why not use our words to actually make stuff?

Don't celebrate National Poetry Month

Those "Special Months" - Black History Month, Poetry Month, National Widget Month - are a tempting trap for a teacher. Focus on this topic or area for this specified period of time and it will be "covered." It's a little frightening how many English teachers I talk to who freely admit not knowing much about poetry and/or not really liking it.

First of all, not knowing about something is NEVER an excuse not to teach it. It is an invitation to learn more. From my own experience, the most exciting things to teach are the things you are learning at the moment you are teaching. Much better than the stuff you've known for ages and ages. I didn't know much about poetry when I started teaching it, but I think I know something about good writing and bad writing and the difference. The trick is not to be sucked into the craft issues around verse which can smother an appreciation for poetry. If you're teaching English, you should have developed some personal taste, and that's all you really need. Teach what you respond to and/or what you believe your students will respond to.

The idea is NOT to teach "all about poetry." It's to teach poetry. I face this problem in general music courses all the time. Students come in at the beginning of the year with all sorts of facts about how many children Bach had and how old Mozart was when he died, but trivia about the lives of musicians is not music. Similarly, English teachers sink into a swamp of Robert Frost's New England roots, the use of anaphora and how a triolet is put together without ever developing a taste for poetry, either in themselves or in their students.

You know, like this:



In fact, these analytic habits are so ingrained that your students may assist you in killing poetry, like this:



And so poetry becomes a "unit," which is defined as "something we have to work on right now but soon you will be able to forget completely." To read and write poems for one month in an academic year is like only listening to music in the fall. If poetry is going to get under your skin and that of your students, you need to make it part of your routine, at least on a weekly or perhaps biweekly basis -- but no less frequent than that.

WHY should you care about poetry? Your students just need to be able to pass the HSPAs, write a resume and a college essay. They're never going to "need" this. If that's how you feel, stop, step back and remember that you are teaching literacy. Language and its uses. And poetry is language at its most assertive and vigorous, doing what only words can do. It's the same reasons you don't teach art by looking at book illustrations or teach music by studying Muzak. Most of the time we put language to work serving some other master -- typically, persuasion or narrative. (Both of those tasks can be performed by other means.) But poetry is lacuna pro lacuna, words on display, leaping and pirouetting as only they can do.

Step One: Find a whole bunch of poems YOU LIKE that you can explicate with energy and enthusiasm.

Where to look? Here's a few suggestions:

Poetry 180 A poem a day for high school students and teachers at this website created by former Poet Laureate Billy Collins. There are two versions of this collection in book form, if you're still attached to those old-fashioned things.

A note about anthologies - you can always look at the big ones, the Norton and the Oxford being the best. But they are rather anonymous and extremely over-inclusive, and you will have to slog through or pass over a lot of poems that mean nothing to you to find one that does. My advice is to find an editor you are comfortable with, or at least understand their point of view, and see what kind of poems they like.

She Walks in Beauty by Caroline Kennedy, an anthology organized around the stages of a woman's life.

Good Poems by Garrison Keillor. There's a no-frills title for you. It's based on a daily radio feature, so you can be sure these poems are good for reading aloud to people who don't go to poetry readings. Read Keillor's preface about poems that are clear, direct and communicative, rather than dense and literary.

An Invitation to Poetry The third volume of the "Favorite Poem Project," which are poems selected by actual humans (not college professors or literary critics) because they are significant to those people. I like this third volume for the classroom, because it comes with a DVD of 27 different people talking about their poems and their lives and reading or reciting the poems aloud. Many of these videos can be seen online at the link above, too.

Editor Robert Pinsky also has a fine collection, Essential pleasures: a new anthology of poems to read aloud, which is a great place to start looking for poems to commit to and recite from memory. I've written before about the virtues of memorizing of poetry, and I am making a resolution to learn a new poem by heart each month, as a challenge to my students.

(If you respond to poetry that's over 90 years old and out of copyright, you can check out this list of public domain anthologies on Bartleby.com. And of course there is a lot of poetry online, so you can simply follow your nose - but that can be very time-consuming.)

Step Two: Learn how to SAY the poem. Not read it, because if a poem is still a thing on a page to you, that's what it will be to your students. You don't have to memorize it, but you should know it well enough to spend most of your time speaking making eye contact with your students. Here's a poem I like to start the school year with, performed by its author, Taylor Mali:



I like this one because it not only notifies students what I expect of them (keep an open mind) but lets them know that I have aspirations and feelings as their teacher, that their progress means something to me.

Step Three: Repeat. Repeat regularly. You'll get better at this, if you only just start by presenting a poem you really like, opening up an issue or two or three that the students can talk about -- that is, be sure it's interactive and not just a performance by you. Don't worry about filling up a period. A few minutes at the start of one class each week would be awesome, as long as it's regular.

The advent of Taylor Mali raises the topic of Slam Poetry, which deserves its own post, especially in terms of incorporating slam into a regular middle school or high school English course, as contrasted with starting a club or a special group. But since I raised the subject, there are a couple of good anthologies and descriptions of the slam phenomenon, Poetry Slam by Gary Glezner and The Spoken Word Revolution by Mark Eleveld.

And I need to write yet another post on the use of writing poetry in a regular course. But I will tell you this from experience: Do not allow them to use rhyme at all for the first half-dozen assignments. Students will disappear down the hole of doggerel. They get obsessed with rhyming and, unless they are skilled and experienced, will not give you anything from the heart or the head, but just string together rhymes and syllables of padding in between. But I do recommend using poetry as a way of teaching ALL KINDS of writing. It teaches students to be economical, visual and precise. More of that another time.

And one MORE additional post I need to write. You need to assign students AND yourself to create an anthology over the school year. I highly recommend creating a class-wide wiki. But that's for another time. Soon, I promise.

So forget Poetry Month. My students know I celebrate Poetry Tuesday. If it's not regular and repeated, it's just "extra" and you will communicate the message that poetry *doesn't count.* And frankly folks, if you are an English teacher and you don't have anything to say or teach about poetry, you might be in the wrong line of work.

Fear eats the soul

I live and teach in New Jersey, where we are still living in the shadow of the suicide of Tyler Clementi, the Rutgers just-freshman for whom leaving this world was easier than dealing with the shame that had been put on his sexuality. Obviously, this is difficult for parents -- but it is even more difficult for students, especially those students who feel they may be homosexual, and particularly those from ethnic backgrounds which heap extra disgust and humiliation on anyone who even doubts.

R&B singer Marsha Ambrosius wades into this territory. What do you think -- can this video be an appropriate leaping-off place for discussion, or will it provoke too much anger, fear, ridicule or shame in the classroom and in the hallways afterwards?