The very first unit my host teacher gave me to teach as a student teacher was a poetry unit. Formidable, yes, but I was a young, idealistic student. I was Robin Williams in Dead Poets’ Society. I was ready!  To this day, I still remember the students’ underwhelmed expressions after I was done with my lesson. I just figured they were pretending not to be impressed. At the end of the day, my host teacher said, “That was great, but you never told them what a poem was.” Hmmm. That was enough for me to go make copies of the booklet I had been given in high school with all the different types of poems and examples from the poetic canon. I completely scrapped my “cool” unit, and taught out of the book because I figured I didn’t know what I was doing.

Over the years, I quietly snuck in some “cool” lessons: Reading and discussing Babette Deutsch’s “Ape” and Theodore Roethke’s “My Pappa’s Waltz” while reading To Kill a Mockingbird, comparing Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” with Romeo & Juliet (stop groaning, Ben!), stomping out the rhythm of iambic pentameter, assigning memorization for R&J and Juiius Caesar, writing  found poetry, and a lot of other really “cool” lessons. I knew other teachers had poetry units, but I did my own thing based off of what I’d read in journals and what I felt would be effective.

Turns out that my internal teaching compass had led me correctly. Stanley Fish’s position on poetry seems to be ‘a poem is a poem if you think it’s a poem’. I could’ve kept my “cool” unit during student teaching and just had a little discussion with the kids about poetic context. According to Elaine Showalter, what I was doing with poetry as an experienced teacher was fine too. I thought for sure that the teacher gods were going to strike me down with lightning every year for still assigning poetry memorization. (FYI: I did give students my rationale behind the assignment).

Showalter’s article was my favorite of the readings for this week. Obviously, I liked it because it gave me some confidence in how I handled poetry, but also because it gave me ideas in how to improve my teaching when I go back to work. (I hate reading pedagogical articles that give vague ideas of how to teach, but are quick to point out ineffective teaching methods). It was interesting to see that some of the professors seemed to disagree in methods. For example, Donald Howard doesn’t like having students read in his Chaucer class, but Diane Middlebrook has students read aloud. Both have sound reasons, and it seems to work for their courses.

I am going to use some of the teaching ideas, but more importantly, I want to emphasize to students that poetry demands to be re-read because every choice is deliberate– including punctuation. I also want to reiterate “the accessibility of poetry rather than its difficulty” (64). I’m not sure I did this before.