College does NOT begin in Kindergarten

Thank you Ken Robinson.

He also says, "a three year old is not half a six-year-old. "Do we want our education system to be "fast food" or "customized dining?"

I came across this talk late. It's from May, but definitely worth watching if you haven't yet seen it.



He closes with this poem by William Butler Yeats:

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Rethinking Schools Poetry issue is FREE!

Yay! I love poetry. My students wrote some amazing poems this year that we are publishing into a little book. I'll share some of them on here soon- they are beautiful.

Check out Rethinking Schools current issue for free online - it's devoted to 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.

In my favorite piece, an elementary school teachers explores what it means to leave one country and move to another: Aquí y Allá • Exploring Our Lives Through Poetry — Here and There. One of the poems she used is very accessible to students:

Wonders of the City
Here in the city there are
wonders everywhere

Here mangoes
come in cans

In El Salvador
they grew on trees

Here chickens come
in plastic bags

Over there
they slept beside me

—Jorge Argueta

beautiful to love the world with eyes that have not yet been born

Before the Scales, Tomorrow

And when the enthusiastic
story of our time
is told,
who are yet to be born
but announce themselves
with more generous face,
we will come out ahead
--those who have suffered most from it.

And that
being ahead of your time
means much suffering from it.
But it's beautiful to love the world
with eyes
that have not yet
been born.

And splendid
to know yourself victorious
when all around you
it's all still so cold,
so dark.

Otto Rene Castillo

Hello Poetry!

April is Poetry Month. I love poems.

• Teachers and Writers Collaborative always has awesome articles on teaching poetry. I'm hoping to put something together with poetry and comics for my second graders.
• Wishes, Lies, and Dreams is an awesome, fabulous, and beautiful book about writing poetry with children. It has simple but awesome ideas!
• Poets.org has curricula and lesson plans that are cool.

By Heart: This book sounds good...

By Heart

Poetry, Prison, and Two Lives

Judith Tannenbaum, Spoon Jackson

"A boy with no one to listen becomes a man in prison for life and discovers his mind can be free. A woman enters prison to teach and becomes his first listener. And so begins a twenty-five year friendship between two gifted writers and poets. The result is By Heart — a book that will anger you, give you hope, and break your heart."
— Gloria Steinem

Judith Tannenbaum and Spoon Jackson met at San Quentin State Prison in 1985. For over two decades they have conferred, corresponded and sometimes collaborated, producing very different bodies of work resting on the same understanding: that human beings have one foot in darkness, the other in light.

In this beautifully crafted exploration – part memoir, part essay – Tannenbaum and Jackson consider art, education, prison, possibility, and which children our world nurtures and which it shuns. At the book's core are two stories that speak for human imagination, spirit, and expression.

Imprints

Saw this as I was walking today in Brooklyn.

Contribute a Verse

O Me! O Life!

by Walt Whitman

O Me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring;
Of the endless trains of the faithless—of cities fill’d with the foolish;
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light—of the objects mean—of the struggle ever renew’d;
Of the poor results of all—of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me;
Of the empty and useless years of the rest—with the rest me intertwined;
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

Answer.

That you are here—that life exists, and identity;
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.

Writers Corp Resources

From WritersCorps in San Francisco

Anthologies, Lesson Plans, and Resources

Jump Write In!
Days I Moved Through Ordinary Sounds

Jump Write In! is a collection of lesson plans created by WritersCorps
Teaching Artists. It was published by Josey-Bass. Summary about the
book (on the sidebar to the right), including the TOC: http://www.sfartscommission.org/WC/for-teachers/

There are also some of the exercises on the site for people to use.
It's in the Teaching Tools section of our site http://www.sfartscommission.org/WC/
The lessons are sortable by topic. There are a just few up right
now, but a lot more will be added.
http://www.sfartscommission.org/WC/for-teachers/teaching-tools/

Days I Moved is an anthology of fiction, poetry and memoir by Teaching
Artists who have served in WritersCorps. Each writer shares a brief
memoir about their time as teaching artists, as well as their own
creative work.

Summary about the book: http://www.sfartscommission.org/WC/events/days-i-moved/

Authors who are in the book: http://www.sfartscommission.org/WC/events/the-authors-of-days-i-moved/

The student work section of the site features poems and photos by
students, also sortable by category, or the cloud tag on the right: http://www.sfartscommission.org/WC/student-work/

Small, but Powerful! Spoken Word Poetry Unit for 4th Grade

I've been looking for resources to use for a fourth grade study on poetry that will culminate with a poetry slam. Here's what I've found so far:

News Hour with Jim Lehrer did a cool segment on poetry. Here, for teachers, they have the Poetry Box Rules that highlight poetry as the art of words, and describe the tools and forms of poetry. They also have one lesson plan on using the poetry slam to teach the mechanics of poetry.

Schooltube has a video of a second grade classroom's poetry slam. (Adorable.)

Hey You! C'mere! A Poetry Slam seems like an interesting book to check out.

From Publishers Weekly
Everyone's a poet, according to this exhortative poetry-reading and street-theater combo: "You've got a poem in your pocket, A poem on your tongue, did you know that? You can be the poet and you can be the poem too. Yesssss!" To prove it, seven young poets roam their city block on a summer day, using ordinary situations as material for syncopated storytelling. The players' portraits and names appear in the table of contents, so that each one is identifiable during their improv. Ratchit, a bold prankster, repeats a tough kid's threat ("Hey you, c'mere, Whatsa matter witcha"), while his friend Jacob describes a timid reaction to bullying in "A Good Cry." Mattie mimics her mother's phone voice "Yeah, uh huh, uh huh" in a song. While Doria creates a nonsense riff on "Silly Names" ("Mr. Grub T. Mudstuck, Diane Doobey Doo, Fineas Figmuff and Tina Tutoo..."), Ratchit sneaks off to play a joke on the group; after his ghostly noises inspire his friends' frightened poem, "Monsters," Ratchit laughs, then composes a reiterative "Sorry." Swados, author of the musical play Runaways, crafts an upbeat series of poems and dramatic asides. Using a crackling-hot palette of orange, summer green and blue-violet, Cepeda (What a Truly Cool World) limns a vibrant cityscape and brings out the strong personalities of the multiracial group. The slangy words and upbeat visuals suggest that poetry happens in casual conversation and friendship; readers might want to try this "slam" as a real play or spin some verse of their own. Ages 6-12.

Education World has a few lesson plans as well.

There Are Still Kids: Amazing Poem

There Are Still Kids
by Crystal Tettey

In a world of adult policies
There are still kids
Where milk is left to curd, then sold
There are still kids
Where wombs are shattered
There are still kids

Where an arm is the price of a meal
Where a meal is the price of an arm
There are still kids

Where power outages deny us TV
There are still kids
Where solitude is safe, fun is sorry
There are still kids
On a playground of mines
There are still kids
At peace conferences that echo war
There are still kids

In a world where adults vote
There are still kids
In schools silenced by artillery
There are still kids
In homes emptied by bombs
There are still kids
Our land cracks at her sides
There are still kids

Attention is the beginning of devotion

Teach the children. We don’t matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin-flowers. And the frisky ones–inkberry, lamb’s-quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones–rosemary, oregano. Give the peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.

Attention is the beginning of devotion.

-Mary Oliver

Plays for Young People

When I was younger, I acted in I Never Saw Another Butterfly - a play by Celeste Rapsanti based on the poetry of Jewish children from Terezin. I can still remember the words of the title poem:

I never saw another butterfly . . .
The last, the very last,
so richly, brightly, dazzling yellow.
Perhaps if the sun's tears sing
against a white stone . . .
Such, such a yellow
Is carried lightly `way up high.
It went away I'm sure because it
wished to kiss the world goodbye.
For seven weeks I've lived in here,
Penned up inside this ghetto,
but I have found my people here.
The dandelions call to me,
And the white chestnut candles in the court.
Only I never saw another butterfly.
That butterfly was the last one.
Butterflies don't live here in the ghetto.

I often think of the play and how it was simultaneously beautiful and horrific--wishing that I could see it again as an adult. The book, I Never Saw Another Butterfly, highlights the art work and poetry of children in Terezin.

Voicing Pain: Students at a Queens School Talk About Immigration

Students at the International High School work with Judith Sloan, creator of “Yo Miss! Teaching Inside the Cultural Divide” and EarSay to create a performance piece based on the immigration experiences of their families. (See the full NY Times article.)

Sandup, 14, said speaking his lines made him proud. “It feels like I’m telling the public how I’ve been struggling,” he said.

He pointed to a favorite line: “My homeland screams, ‘Don’t forget me!’ My new life says, ‘Come and get me!’ ”

He said he and other Nepali teenagers spend a lot of time speaking English and having fun, not thinking much about what their parents went through to bring them here.

“I don’t want to forget,” he said.

Teens Re-Writing America Through Poetry

Brave New Voices documentary series on HBO follows teenagers creating and performing their original poetry in this teen poetry slam championship. On the HBO website you can watch the first episode and see performances of the teens' amazing works. B. Yung of Team New York City writes:

I can't stomach being whipped or stripped because of the color of my skin so every time I write a slave poem my paper bleeds.

More and more, I think poetry is such an amazing and liberating tool for expression and a great entry point to creating theatre--particularly physical theatre and movement pieces.

April: Happy Poetry Month

I've been reading Jonathan Kozol's Letters to a Young Teacher (which I highly recommend). He references a Yevgeny Yevtushenko poem that I find to be quite beautiful and profound. In today's schools, we often "choose" not to approach particular subjects or even affirm or believe that the troubles our students and their communities face a real and legitimate. Perhaps these are lies of omission. Something to think about...

Lies

Telling lies to the young is wrong.
Proving to them that lies are true is wrong.
Telling that god’s in his heaven
And all’s well with the world is wrong.
The young know what you mean. The young are people.
Tell them the difficulties can’t be counted,
And let them see not only what will be
But see with clarity these present times.
Say obstacles exist they must encounter
Sorrow happens, hardship happens.
To hell with it. Who never knew
The price of happiness will not be happy.
Forgive no error you recognize,
It will repeat itself, increase,
And afterwards our pupils
Will not forgive in us what we forgave.

Looking for meaningful children's books?

The Jane Addams Childrens Book Awards are given annually by the Jane Addams Peace Association to children's books that promote peace and social justice. It's an excellent list of books. I know I often have trouble finding children's literature with a social justice foundation.

One book that caught my eye:

Poems to Dream Together=Poemas Para Soñar Juntos, written by Francisco X. Alarcón, illustrated by Paula Barragán, and published by Lee and Low Books, Inc., has been named an honor book in the Books for Younger Children category. In nineteen short and heartfelt poems in Spanish and English, Alarcón encourages and inspires us to dream alone and to work and dream together, as families and communities, in order to make our hopes for a better world come true. The stylized paintings of Paula Barragán colorfully extend and interpret the theme.

The World Becomes What You Teach

On Leaving the Theatre

Do not leave the theatre satisfied
Do not be reconciled
Have you been entertained?
Laughter that’s not also an idea
Is cruel

Have you been touched?
Sympathy that’s not also an action
Corrodes
To make the play the writer used god’s scissors
Whose was the pattern?
The actors rehearsed with care

Have they moulded you to their shape?
Has the lighting man blinded you?
The designer dressed your ego?

You cannot live on our wax fruit
Leave the theatre hungry
For change

Making Room for Hope... The New York State Literary Center

Check out the website. The founder and leader of this organization, Dale Davis, is truly a force in the teaching artist field. The work of the youth and young men in correctional facilities with which NYSLC works is moving, strong, and breathtaking....

I Want To Write
By Miguel

I want to write to turn insanity into clarity,
write to a convict on death row
and have tears roll off his cheeks.
I want my words to reach the inner
chambers of a frozen heart and let it thaw.
I want to write to a woman who has seen it all
and had enough hardships and turn them into soft voyages.
If I could, I would write to life and
let it know
it's playing a novice while it's a pro
in a game only itself knows.
I wish I could write to who I was four
years ago
to say: take it slowly, cuz if not...well you already know.
I want to write words to express
all of the stress you gain from such a test
of having your freedom taken away
by no other than yourself.
I want to write for help but I'm scared of
the one who will send it.
I want to write to a young mother
to let her see how much harder I made her
stay here,
but still she WILL reap the benefits
you can only gain from having kids.
I just want to write until carpal tunnel takes
over my wrist...and hard,
and I'll either become left handed or the
loudest man
to say what I have to say
because the world is my stand.
I want to write...

What I Have to Say
By Rodney

I apologize,
I apologize
for leaving my loved ones behind.

I am a young Black man who has been in the system too long.

I was searching.
I was searching.
I was searching for freedom,
but I never found where it was at.
It was lost.
Will I find it?

Somebody has to hear my story.

"Remember": A Sixth Grade Poem

Today, I stumbled across this poem, by a student in Astoria, Queens, on the NYC Department of Ed's website.

"Remember," Katherine Huynh, Sixth Grade, PS 122Q

Remember when we were small,
when we haven't met at all?
When we didn't worry about other things,
That you'd think of as too much?
When we didn't worry about homework?
When we didn't worry about tests?
When we had no troubles?
When we thought none of pain
No worries here to taint us,
I wished it was that way we stayed.