"My Sorrowful Heart"

             I had a pretty incredible experience during the final few days of this past week and have brought in some student work to share. Because we finished up our district testing early and had a few extra days to “kill,” I was able to plan out a two-day poetry workshop (which would lead us into our poetry unit that begins on Tuesday of this week). The overall goal for my mini-unit was to free up enough space in the classroom so students could create their own poetry. Basically, I figured that having students create poetry would be the best way for them to learn poetry. My ultimate goal was to have students write their own poems... but since I knew this would be difficult to jump right into (especially because they have not done much creative writing this year), I decided to scaffold the writing experience towards this final goal. With this in mind, the students worked the first day on creating “Found” poems, where they used words and phrases from other sources to create their poems. I thought this would be a unique and fun experience for the students, while also allowing them to essentially pull their poems from a physical “word bank”–thus removing some of the anxiety that comes with creating a poem from scratch. After students completed their poem, the next step was to choose their favorite line from their Found poem and use it as the first sentence of a “Response” poem, in which they used their “Found” poem as an inspiration for their own written poem.

            The results were wonderful, but as you will see when I show examples of student work, it would be very easy for a teacher (or administrator, or parent...) to simply “miss” the incredible achievements and "write off" many students' work, because activities like this do not always look like traditional learning. And by traditional learning, I mean quantified literacy instruction broken down into skills based writing. In this sense, I hope my class never looks like traditional learning.

            Anyway, I know this post is not very thorough or well developed, but this whole story is just going to be much easier to tell in person as I show you some student work to emphasize my point. The most powerful example comes from one student in particular, who essentially "failed" at creating a successful Found Poem (it made little to no sense and was basically just a collage of random words), but then used one line from his Found Poem to create a masterful Response poem. I was so proud of his work that I walked down and shared it with two other teachers in the hall to show how important this kind of work is. And unfortunately, I am sure that a lot of teachers would have viewed his work as a failure because his Found Poem could be perceived as such. But his final work was amazing, as he took the line "Celebrating Summer" from his Found Poem and wrote a beautiful and reflective piece. His poem reads (note, he used a more unique format structure for the poem that I will show you in person because it is hard to duplicate on the computer...):

"Celebrating Summer
Flashed me back
To a time when mom and dad
were still together
with pretty pink butterflies
on one windowed walls
and a big old bed
worthy of my dreams
offered to rest my weak body
and soothe my
sorrowful heart."