Your Pappa’s Waltz, My Humble Pie Poem

So here I was all proud of myself for doing something different when I ‘taught’ poetry and, come to find out, I was doing it all wrong. If I were the type to be embarrassed, I’d be really embarrassed about that blog entry. To add insult to injury, I was teaching the wrong interpretation of “My Pappa’s Waltz”! Dagger. I am one of the 85% that thought the poem was sad and that the father was an alcoholic. I gave the students the poem after we read the trial scene in To Kill a Mockingbird and read Mayella testify against Tom Robinson. Of course none of my students interpreted the poem as a happy poem because when read directly after reading about Mayella’s relationship with her father, the poem is tainted! I got the idea that “My Pappa’s Waltz” was a poem about an abusive father because that’s how it was presented to me when I first read it.

I can’t help but wonder then, how do you present poems to students in such a way that they aren’t tainted? Do we bring back the dreaded Poetry Unit? If you weave poems into classroom units like I did, do you run the risk of giving students context that can alter the interpretation they might have had if read independent from another text? I used to open class with a warm-up– grammar or quickwrite. Would a poem be a good addition? Maybe even one that a student has brought in that I’ve never seen before?

One thing I noticed about Blau that I will definitely have to work on when I go back to teaching is how masterful he is at conducting workshops. He’s like a traffic cop, coordinating the discussion in efficient and effective directions. He also reels back his own opinions. If a student had told me that “Pappa’s Waltz” was a happy poem, I don’t know that I would have shot him down, but I may have said something like, “Oh! Well, isn’t that a *neat* interpretation?”

I am guilty of feeding the English teacher machine in that I teach texts the way was taught them and have assumed that there are many ways to interpret a poem, but really there is only one right version. I have to confess that it is going to be really hard for me to let go of the idea that several ‘correct’ reading possible, but I think his workshop discussing Pat Mora’s “Sonrisas” is a strong argument for accepting different interpretations.