Teaching project: week 5

Last week, when I was teaching in New Hampshire, I found myself in the position of having to invent a class assignment off the top of my head. To my delight, that activity went swimmingly in the workshop; but when I tried it during today's freshman/junior session, it felt less exciting. The big difference was that today's students were mostly unwilling to share their work. They may have been tired, and they certainly were distracted: it was one of those mornings when the office secretary gets on the horn every five minutes to drag kids downstairs for their flu shots, so students were coming and going, and their sharing and concentration were constantly interrupted. As every teacher knows, certain days conspire against anyone's ability to get anything done. Still, despite today's lackluster ambience, I definitely plan to try the lesson again. It worked remarkably well with the young New Hampshire poets, who immediately latched onto the idea of stanza placement as both an organizational concept and a revision strategy; and even in this large and disparate amalgam of skills and enthusiams, the kids definitely comprehended what Rilke was doing organizationally.

While I was on the road last week, the teachers had divided the double class into small groups, which shared and discussed their poem drafts; and each person had chosen a piece to revise more thoroughly. So with revision as my guiding focus, I started the lesson by dictating Rilke's "The Panther," using Stephen Mitchell's translation, which I adore. After a brief conversation about ways in which Rilke had used his stanzas both to organize information and create a visual frame around images of the imprisoned panther, I gave the students the following exercise, tossing out the numbered instructions at about five-minute intervals.

Think back to an event that happened yesterday. It can be momentous or trivial; it can even be a lie. 

1. Write four lines describing the event. 

2. Skip a line to start a new stanza, and write four lines that tell what you saw during the event. 

3. Skip a line to start a new stanza, and write four lines that tell what you remembered during the event.

After a few students had shared their drafts, I then gave them the following revision exercise:

Go back to the three-stanza poem you just wrote. Change the order of your stanzas, rewriting as necessary. Then, in the middle stanza, add at least two questions.

The point of this revision, I told them, was to shake up their thoughts about the way in which one detail links to another. And adding a couple of unanswered questions is a way to open oneself to a bit of uncertainty, which is a very important element of art. They seemed to find this idea unnerving.

We heard a few versions of first and second drafts; and in every case, in both today's and last week's New Hampshire session, the second draft was richer and deeper, the poet's questing awareness far more palpable. So even though today's classroom atmosphere was blah, I'm convinced that the activity is a valuable tool in teaching students how to create more complex poetic connections.

For homework, I had them turn back to the workshop poems they'd chosen last week:

1. Break your poem into a series of three-line stanzas, rewriting as necessary. 

2. Swap the order of at least two of those stanzas, rewriting as necessary.

For links to the previous weeks' activities, go here.