Teaching project: week 7

Today was workshop day; but even though the ninth-grade teacher was out sick, and the ninth graders straggled into the eleventh-grade room looking homeless and unsettled, and the late-arriving substitute was a shop teacher, the day went beautifully.

I began with Anne Sexton's "Hog," which I haven't found online but can send you if you are interested. "Hog," to me, is an example of a poem that starts off tremendously but then peters out into distraction; and I wanted the students to see that Pulitzer Prize winners are no better than the rest of us when it comes to making questionable decisions about revision. (Also, I wanted them to see that, every once in while, you find a poet who's just as sexy as Marilyn Monroe.)

I explained the revision principle of two stars and a wish, which we use at the Frost Place as a way to help students and teachers constructively discuss other people's poems. A star is a particular element the reader likes about the poem; a wish is a "what if" question about possible changes--as in "What if this poem were written in rhyming quatrains?" "What if you changed the tense from past to present?" While every poet enjoys hearing, "I love this poem!" that's not a particularly helpful revision aid. Nor is "If this were my poem, I'd add the word 'monster' after every third line and make it be about my ex-boyfriend." Nor is "Stanza 2 sucks, but stanza 3 is kind of okay." It's important for the poet to hear what readers believe works well in a poem, but it's equally important for readers to give the poet concrete suggestions that don't meddle with the writer's imaginative jurisdiction or cast him into a tar pit of gloom and loathing.

Now the class broke into four groups of about ten students each (the same groups they'd worked in during the week I was in New Hampshire). In each group one person was assigned to be the note taker who kept track of comments on all of the poems. Two groups stayed in the eleventh-grade room, two went to the ninth-grade room with the shop teacher, and the eleventh-grade teacher and I circulated from room to room.

My strategy, at first, was to say nothing. That worked well for three of the groups, in which the students quickly worked out their own patterns of sharing. A student would read; the listeners would clap or snap their fingers in appreciation. Then I heard "I like this," "I like that." As one might expect, they had a more difficult time saying "I wish" or "What if?" Some of that reluctance was good manners, but some was inexperience in recognizing what confused them or distracted them in a poem. But as the hour went on, they got better at identifying their wishes. They began to hear meter and caesura, although we had not discussed those terms in class. They began to understand that when their attention began to wander, that might indicate that the poem, too, was wandering.

(Bemused in his corner, the shop teacher said, "Is this kind of like a coffeehouse?")

The fourth group lagged behind the other three in conversational progress. But after I tossed out a a couple of my own stars and wishes, two or three students took charge and began prodding the rest of the group to move forward. By the end of the class, they were functioning much better as a group, though it would probably do everyone a service to reorganize them into new formations for next week's second-stage workshop.

It was interesting for me to wander more or less silently through these talking students. What I overheard several of them say was how much they had enjoyed the Whitman exercise in week 1: how well it had pressed them into writing down fairly complex ideas that they could expand on in revision. As you might expect, this made me very happy. These students had been my lab rats with this prompt, which I've since taken into other classrooms with equivalent success yet highly disparate results--which tells me that the prompt works without being gimmicky or controlling . . . two things I hate, hate, hate about the vast majority of textbook prompts aimed at K-12 students.

Before class ended, we all reformed as a large group. I told them how happy I was about the Whitman prompt, and then I offered a couple of "what if" questions that they could use for revision if they weren't quite sure what to do with the advice offered in their groups.

What if the poem were shorter?

What if the poem started in a different place?

For homework they need to make at least two major changes in their workshop poem, based on the group conversations and/or my "what if" questions.

Next week I'll be teaching out of state again, so the teachers will run a second-stage revision workshop, in which students listen to the revised poems and consider how those changes have affected the first draft. Then we'll move on to performance practice and finally a videotaped reading for the school's news feed.

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