What's The Point Of Studying Poetry And Then Writing Essays?

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We spent a month reading poetry from the Harlem Renaissance in our English class. Then Mr. Ward—that’s our teacher—asked us to write an essay about it. Make sense to you? Me neither. I mean, what’s the point of studying poetry and then writing essays?

When I was at the NCTE Convention this past November, I attended this one session where a woman talked about an after school literacy club she began for fourth and fifth grade girls.  All the books have female authors and protagonists.  I wrote down her entire reading list and bought every single book for Elsa for her eighth birthday in January.  The book I was most eager to read myself was Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming, which was a National Book Award Finalist in 2014.  I finished it yesterday.  It was awesome.

Brown Girl Dreaming, in short, is an autobiography told in a series of poetic vignettes, divided into five sections, covering Woodson’s birth in Ohio, her childhood in South Carolina, and her adolescence in New York.  I especially enjoyed the middle sections that take place in South Carolina where Woodson and her siblings were raised by their maternal grandparents as their mother strove to re-make her life in New York.

The book made me think of Nikki Grimes’ Bronx Masquerade (2002).  Although Grimes’ book is fiction, it tells the biography of a school in the Bronx, and is told in a series of vignettes that are both in prose and poetry.  Both works also use Langston Hughes poems as framing devices for their narratives.  Brown Girl Dreaming uses “Dreams” while Bronx Masquerade uses “Harlem,” which is often referred to as “A Dream Deferred.”

The epigraph I used for this column comes from Tyrone, the protagonist—or at least the focalizing character—of Bronx Masquerade.  I thought of this statement Tyrone makes early in the novel because I wondered the same thing.  When I read Bronx Masquerade, I wondered how often teachers allow students to attempt to write poetry, or more provocative yet, to write something in a mixed genre like the novel itself.

For two decades I have said that one of the oddest things we do in the field of English is ask students to read, venerate, and study fiction, poetry, and drama, but then we rarely allow them to write in these genres, but only to write essays about them.

And yet there is such a rich tradition, not just of the principal genres, of course, but of mixed genre books.  Staying just within the realm of African-American writers, I immediately think of Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize, in 1950, after the publication of Annie Allen in 1949.  Annie Allen, like Grimes’ or Woodson’s books, tells a biography but in a series of poetic vignettes.  In 1953, Brooks published a similar work, titled Maud Martha, which again tells the biography of an African-American woman in a series of vignettes, but this time the vignettes are in lyrical prose rather than in verse.  I discovered them about a decade ago and couldn’t believe I had never heard of them before.

Then there’s Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), which tells the story of a community in poems, prose, and drama, and sometimes a mix of two or all three in a single section.

Of course these sorts of literary experiments aren’t the sole provenance of African-American writers.  I’ve always loved Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology (1915), which tells the story of a community in a series of poems, each authored by a deceased member of the community.  Masters’ work influenced both Sherwood Anderson’s experimental novel Winesburg, Ohio (1919), which is a series of vignettes that tells the story of a town through the focalizing lens of a single protagonist, as well as Thornton Wilder’s experimental play Our Town (1938), which also tells the story of a town and uses the dead as narrating characters—as well as a somewhat supernatural narrator.

So, at the risk of belaboring my point, I wonder why we don’t allow our students to experiment likewise.  I know many will say that the students need to learn the rules before they can break the rules.  I kind of get that.  But I don’t think we need be quite so tight on the reins.  It’s a topic for a different day, but in Write Beside Them, Penny Kittle shares some great ideas about multigenre projects that her students compose as end of semester assessments.  I think it’s a worthy idea.

Student Motivation And The Inconvenience Of Snow

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I’ve been reading Amanda Ripley’s The Smartest Kids in the World, in which she follows three US students who spend a year studying abroad in countries that have routinely scored high on recent PISA tests.  One student studies in Finland, a second in South Korea, and a third in Poland.  I’ll write more once I am finished, but one of Ripley’s chapters struck a chord with me the other day. 

Among the many issues Ripley explores is student drive.  One set of measurements on the PISA exams was a series of post-test questions.  The questions were a set-up because the researchers were not actually interested in the answers to the questions but in the question of whether or not students completed the post-exam questions.  This was their way of assessing drive.  Students from high performing countries like Finland and South Korea completed the post-exam questions in large numbers, and thoroughly.  Students from the PISA-ascendant Poland had the highest completion rate in the world.  US students had one of the lowest completion rates.  Large numbers just blew it off or answered in perfunctory ways.

As part of Ripley’s research, she interviewed many additional students, both US students studying abroad and foreign students studying in the US.  She found that all students reported high levels of praise in the US and low levels of freedom, risk, and failure.  US students were given every opportunity to avoid failure and were praised for even minor successes.  They also lived very controlled lives, especially in the suburbs.  There is a lot of structure and adult supervision in all aspects of our students’ lives, with many safety nets and myriad second (and third and fourth) chances.  According to Ripley, US students don’t try that hard or take that many risks (intellectual or otherwise) because they don’t have to.

Now we all know this isn’t true for vast segments of US students, more than half of whom are living in poverty, but for the kids wealthy and stable enough to be studying abroad, apparently it is.  This reminds me of the time I went to a screening of the documentary Race To Nowhere at ACT Magnet School in Willimantic.  The documentary argues that we should ease up on our best and brightest students, that we demand too much of them.  We had a Q&A after the screening, and the first hand to shoot up was that of a mother of a Windham student, who said, “I wish my kid had those problems!”

But why I thought of this was because on Monday UConn only cancelled classes before 10 AM.  Students otherwise had to trudge through the snow to get to the rest of their classes, and many complained about unplowed sidewalks and the general inconvenience of the day.  I was discussing this with colleagues from EO Smith who had brought their seniors to UConn for the day.

We all said it was ridiculous that undergrads were complaining that the sidewalks weren’t plowed.  I remember being an undergrad and there were no sidewalks!  That nice paved and well-lighted pathway across the green space of east campus was a dirt track that became a slough of despond by March, and you just had to put on your boots and muck through to get to class.  Part of the irony was that we were having this discussion in the food court over lunch.  We didn’t have the luxury of sitting in the food court and complaining about snow over decaf mochas back in the day.  Not only did we not have a food court with a coffee bar, we didn’t even have a weekend meal plan!  We walked to the supermarket that was where the Storrs Center is now—with its many restaurants and Insomnia Cookies, which delivers hot cookies right to your dorm room till 3 AM—and we bought groceries and walked back with the bags and then made dinner on hot plates or on the stove top of the communal panggangan that was in the basement common room, next to the communal washer and drier.

We all laughed at this because we knew we sounded a thousand years old, but I reminded everyone that my first class in the fall of 1987 was in Storrs Hall in a room with a fireplace.  I said, just imagine classes in winter back in 1908 when Storrs Hall was built.  Forget snow on the sidewalks.  Back then whoever got to class first must have had to split wood and start the fire!  They would have killed for a hot plate and a local supermarket.  Heck, they would have killed to have electricity!

Getting Students To Read

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I was in my friend Rochelle’s eighth grade literature class today.  She and the student teacher, my advisee Emma, had the students working in literature circles.  For the most part they were going really well, but one group of boys had not done much reading.  They were supposed to be reading Kekla Magoon’s The Rock and the River, which is about the Black Panthers, but they weren’t.  One boy, however, defended himself to me by holding a different book aloft and saying, “But look, I am reading!”  His book of choice was Frank Beddor’s The Looking Glass Wars, a sort of sci-fi retelling of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.

This reminded me of an incident a couple years ago in one of Tiffany Smith’s classes of sophomore American literature students at E.O. Smith.  Her students were supposed to be reading Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild with my undergrads, but there again was this one group of boys just not doing the reading.  And yet when I went to talk with them one day in the computer lab, they were talking excitedly about the new release in Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians series.

The common thread here, of course, is that these boys who were seemingly non-readers are in fact readers, but the trick is to find books that are the best fit for their interests and reading levels.

Not that Tiffany and Rochelle (and Emma) weren’t already doing these things, but I think some of the best ideas I have found for getting students to read canonical (or curricular) books is to follow Kelly Gallagher’s advice in Readicide to allow students to read self-selected material fifty percent of the time and assigned books the other fifty percent of the time, and to pair classic texts with contemporary texts based on shared elements, such as theme.

I read pretty voraciously, and I like to jump around from young adult titles to popular contemporary titles to classics that I have overlooked to academic work on teaching and education.  And whereas we may find ourselves telling our students to read like writers, I found that I read like a teacher.  I am always thinking about ways I might teach this text, and one thing I often notice is the tendency of writers to use earlier, well known works as frames for their novels.  Now of course novelists have been doing this since Fielding wrote Tom Jones and filled it with allusions to everything from Homer and Hamlet to Oedipus and Quijote, but I am finding many contemporary writers deliberately using much more recently canonized work as their literary frames.

I am thinking of how Stephen Chbosky in The Perks of Being a Wallflower makes deliberate use of The Catcher in the Rye or John Greene in The Fault in our Stars makes deliberate use of The Diary of Anne Frank.  These works practically beg a teacher to instructionally pair the contemporary YA novels with the recently canonized works to which they refer.

A sort of reverse version of this can be found in some contemporary adult works that make significant references to classic works that most of us would have read as children.  I’m thinking of Neil Gaiman’s The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which makes so many references to C. S. Lewis’ Narnia books, especially to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which relies so heavily upon allusions to Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

I got excited reading Díaz’s and Gaiman’s novels recently because I had read the Narnia books to Cormac when he was a little boy, and currently we are reading The Lord of the Rings together, so these were cool discoveries.

Tonight, Elsa finished R. J. Palacio’s Wonder (she still has to read the Julian chapters), and Palacio does something similar, not just with her extensive use of song lyrics but also with films.  In particular, Auggie frequently sees himself through the lens of the Star Wars films, especially Episode IV:  A New Hope (the one we all grew up thinking of as the first film, not the fourth).  When in the concluding chapters Auggie is awarded the Henry Ward Beecher medal for good character, he compares himself to Luke and Han when Princess Leia bestows medals upon them.

I know that such pairings can’t magically make all our students read or read the books we want them to, but they are a wise way to start.

Literacy And Gender, Privilege And Opportunity

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I may have inadvertently begun a gender war in my Advanced Composition class.  This week we began reading Wilhelm and Smith’s award-winning “Reading Don’t Fix No Chevys”:  Literacy in the Lives of Young Men.  Let’s just say there was not universal agreement among the students about the causes of or solutions to the issues addressed by Wilhelm and Smith.

I began the class by sharing a few facts.  Boys drop out of school at a rate about one percentage point higher than girls.  About 7% of all boys age 15 to 24 lack a high school diploma.  The number is closer to 4% for girls. Boys who drop out of school are more likely to wind up in prison.

In high school and college, girls have higher GPAs and take more honors classes.  And there are more girls in college.  About 58% of the entire undergraduate population is female.  And women are making significant gains in graduate school.  Only in the hard sciences, engineering, business, medicine, and law do males still outnumber females at the graduate level, and in the latter three categories not by much.

I half-joked that maybe the young women in class did not see this as a problem, or had reason to resent that their success was being cast as a masalah for male literacy.  Nonetheless, the academic decline of boys is troubling, and it’s worth asking if there are things we can and should be doing differently in the classroom to address this.

Several of the women in the class thought it was problematic to address the problems as gender-based problems or as ones that were pedagogical in nature.  If boys and girls have the same educational opportunities, then there is something boys and/or society need to do to fix this.  Some of the boys seemed to feel this was an unfair response, and while I can see why some might take it that way, I don’t think the response is without merit.  After all, why shouldn’t a boy and a girl from the same background in the same school experience similar success, unless we think there is something essentially different about boys and girls?

The discussion made me think of a very different study I just finished (which I wrote about briefly two weeks ago) called The Smartest Kids in the World.  In that book, Amanda Ripley follows three US students who study abroad in Finland, South Korea, and Poland.  These three countries are among the highest achieving countries in international tests of student learning (namely PISA), and through her study of these students and extensive interviews with many other students, Ripley attempts to draw some conclusions about why US students perform so unimpressively on international tests while students in these countries perform so well.

Now, we know that when we discuss gender or international education there can be no single causal factor.  However, among Ripley’s conclusions is the notion that, since the second world war, Finland, South Korea, and Poland have developed cultures of imperative national ascendancy.  In short, as each of these countries emerged from the crises of World War II (and in Poland’s case the more recent crises of the Cold War and the Solidarity Movement), they developed a cultural attitude “born out of crisis” that “focused the national mind” on success.  And much of this focus has been on education.

I have been wondering if this rationale could also be applied to the rapid ascendency of girls and women in the US in the area of education.  The passage of Title IX in 1972 did not so much launch a new cultural attitude as catalyze a long-emerging one.   

Ripley writes that after World War II “wealth had made [academic] rigor optional in America.”  We were so prosperous for so long, so dominant on the world scene for so long, that we had grown to assume things would always be so.  By contrast, the Finlands, South Koreas, and Polands of the world possess a hunger we have long lacked.

Could something similar be said about boys in the US?  Has male privilege existed for so long, been entrenched in our culture for so long, that we (not just adolescent boys but all of us) have come to assume success for boys regardless of effort or participation?  By contrast, are our girls, so recently given equal educational opportunities, in possession of a hunger or a focus that has likewise been born of the crisis of long-denied educational opportunities?

I know this would be at best only one factor, but the question is worth asking.

Sometimes The Students School The Teachers

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Twenty-seven seconds.  That’s how long I waited before the girl answered my question.  I know because the technology director sent me a link to the videos he created of the demo lessons, and I timed it myself.

I have been observing two sixth grade teachers as part of some PD I am doing in their school.  It’s been a great experience, though I don’t think they realize how much I have learned from them.  Anyway, after several observations, the time came for me to teach or co-teach their classes, lessons we had co-planned that built upon established units, the teachers’ strengths, and the existing cultures of the classrooms.

We asked the students to read some essays written by slightly older students (one from Teen Ink and one from Time for Kids), and then asked them to analyze the essays’ organization.  The kids were familiar with a five-paragraph stack  from Empowering Writers, and we adapted that, asking students to draw boxes around paragraphs or groups of paragraphs in authentic essays and to then describe what those paragraphs were doing, and how they were doing it.

Twenty-seven seconds does not strike me as very long, and in fact at the time I didn’t feel that I was waiting an especially long time for the girl to answer, but in the break-out session, many of the teachers remarked on how long I had waited.  One direktur even said, “Yeah, it was starting to get uncomfortable.” 

One teacher asked why I was so confident that the girl was going to say something worthwhile—which she did.  I answered that I hadn’t thought about it, but I suppose that since she had volunteered, I was confident that she would have something insightful to say, at least something that I could work with.

There was another student I called on that surprised us, a boy I had conferred with during independent work time.  He was one of several boys seated in the back who looked to me to be doing everything possible to avoid the assignment, so I made a bee line for them.  When I asked them questions, they were stonily silent.  When I didn’t give them the answers or walk away but instead kept asking questions, they gave tepid answers that weren’t half bad.  Once we got to the sharing part of the lesson, I asked those boys if any of them would share, and one did, and he did fine.

Someone asked why I called on such a reluctant student to demonstrate something to his classmates.  I said, “Well, when I asked if any of those boys would volunteer, three buried their chins in their chests but that one made eye contact with me and even smirked, so I went with it.”

Later, we learned that those boys are not normally in that class but were from a mostly self-contained special ed class and had only been placed there because my demo lessons had caused some coverage issues.  They were, supposedly, non-readers. 

In the other class, which I co-taught, a couple of our volunteers were boys who apparently are usually some of the more disruptive kids.  Perhaps they were just having fun with a guest or maybe they were responding to a male instructor (me), but I suspect they also may have liked being given the opportunity to play expert, to go to the front of the class and “teach” their classmates.  Regardless of the reason, those boys did a nice job and their teacher was pleasantly surprised and impressed.

My goals for that day’s lessons were to use authentic writing as mentor texts, to engage the students in an activity that was more descriptive of what writers do than prescriptive of what writers should do, and to be student-centered.  I think I accomplished all of those goals, but I also think we learned a couple other unintended lessons.

One would be about faith and patience.  Why did I call on the kid in back whose teeth I practically had to pull to get an answer during a conference?  Because he made eye contact when I asked.  Why did I wait twenty-seven seconds for a girl to re-read three paragraphs to herself before answering?  Because her volunteering signaled to me that she had confidence in her ideas.

Another related lesson would be about the preconceived notions we hold about kids.  I had few because I had only observed those classes once or twice before and so I knew little to nothing about the students.  The result was that I ended up with unexpected volunteers.  Special ed?  Non-reader?  Rowdy?  Disruptive?  I had no idea, which turned out to be a good thing.