From: Monica Edinger <monicaedinger>
Date: Tue, 19 Apr 2005 05:32:55 -0400

On 4/18/05, Anne Oelke wrote: I keep wondering

I have been thinking about this too as poetry speaks to me more when I am able to see it on the page, see someone reading/performing/reciting it, or do so myself. The performance aspect strikes me as taping something different than the aural or visual, the kinesthetic perhaps?

And I do think having had memorable personal experiences wtih poetry helps those of us teaching it (or teaching anything for that matter). I had a very old?shioned 6th grade teacher in 1964 Missouri who required us to memorize and recite poems every Friday. I do not recall her providing any help finding the poems or even a book of poetry in the classroom. (In fact, the only books I can recall in the room were textbooks, dictionaries, and atlases --- perhaps next to that cool instrument, the autoharp!) I don't recall anyone outside of school helping me either. I just went looking and found my poems in books I loved --- I can still recite most of Kipling's "Laws of the Jungle" and many of the poems from the two ALICE books. And then in 7th grade I was part of a choral group that recited Longfellow's
"Midnight Ride of Paul Revere" (in a Defense Department school in Germany, by the way) most of which I STILL know! This leads me to believe that for some of us, hearing a poem doesn't work as well as reading it or performing it ourselves. (Poetry Alive is great for this.)

For many years, inspired by this experience, I invited students to read their favorite poems to us to close our school day. Now, being fortunate to receive many new books, I often start our day with a poem from one of them and the children read favorite poems at our Friday Literary Salon --- sometimes alone, sometimes in pairs and sometimes as a class. (Like Robin I have a large collection of poetry books for my students to peruse.) At next week's Alice Tea Party I hope a few of them will memorize and recite some of Carroll's verse just as Alice Liddell would have had to (which is what Carroll parodies so brilliantly).

To my mind, any sort of learning in classrooms is heightened when the teacher demonstrates passion and enthusiasm for the material be it poetry or something else. And it is really, really, really important that we teachers honor tastes that deviate from our own. To give a non-poetry example (so as not to distress anyone here:), I am a life-long fantasy lover. BHP (Before Harry Potter) we debated, on child_lit, why there was such fear of fantasy among teachers. AHP we have fantasy books coming out in droves, but teachers still frequently tell me (as did two wonderful ones yesterday) that they don't like fantasy. Nonetheless, they respect that their students love for it and have the books in their classrooms. I think the same kind of situation happens with poetry. We need to show passion for what we love and also respect the range of poetry out there. What may not be one person's passion may indeed be another's. And similarly we need to be open to a range of poetic forms and to a range of poetic experiences.

Monica


Monica Edinger The Dalton School New York NY edinger at dalton.org monicaedinger at gmail.com
Received on Tue 19 Apr 2005 04:32:55 AM CDT