Adapting and Adopting in Teaching Poetry

I am a huge advocate of using other people's ideas in my classroom. Why re-invent the wheel when others have already done it, and done it better than I could have, considering the time constraints of being a full time teacher, department head, mother, wife, and friend? So during this month's Poetry Reading unit, I have used ideas from different sources to enhance my lessons.

• Poetry Madness: The idea for a poetry recitation "tournament" came from NCTE's March Madness Poetry Tournament, which sets students up in brackets modeled from the NCAA Basketball tournament. Instead of holding to the original 64 poems, paired off with one winner per day, then a 32 poem next round, etc. until the final two are chosen, I hold the numbers down to the number of students in my class. The first round requires each student to pick a poem to perform, grouped in 3 or 4 poem competitions (this keeps middle schoolers from feeling like they are The Loser if there are 2-3 others who also didn't get picked as the winner). Students in the round perform their poem using effective pace, volume, and expression, and the class votes for the poem they think is the best. Each winner of these rounds goes to one of two semi-final rounds, also grouped in 3-4 poem competitions. Once each class gets down to the final 2, we hold an all-8th grade final competition, with 8 poems and 3 winners. The purpose of this non-graded activity is to expose students to a variety of poetry, practice poetry recitation before the graded Poetry Slam at the end of the Poetry Writing unit, and to inject a fun, positive spin on reading poetry.
• Teaching lyrics with Katy Perry's "Firework": Lyrics is one of the forms of poetry to teach in the 8th grade curriculum. Of course there are hundreds, even thousands of song lyrics to choose from for this, but why should I spend hours picking one and figuring out how to teach it when Tracee Olman already did it for me? Her lesson on teaching Figurative Language and Poetic Devices is complete with a student handout and teacher answer key at my fingertips. I used it first to look at the structure of song lyrics, teaching words such as verse, chorus, refrain, bridge, and coda. I also used it to teach different kinds of rhymes: true rhyme, slant rhyme, and internal rhyme. With the song laid out so neatly in numbered lines and clustered stanzas, it was easy to identify the different parts of the song and where the different kinds of rhymes were found.

During the Poetry Writing unit, coming up next week, I'll be borrowing lessons from Ralph Fletcher and Sara Holbrook. Thanks, great teachers out there in the world, for sharing your ideas for me to adopt  and adapt!

Too much homework?

We just finished our Social Justice Novel unit. During this four week unit, students read a novel with a small group in a Book Club, discussing it together two or three times per week. Their Reading Notebook work consisted of tracking vocabulary, author's craft, characters, and theme across the beginning, middle, and end of the book: 12 entries across about 3 1/2 weeks of reading workshop. Students had 20-30 minutes in class to work, and completed reading and entries at home. The final assessment was a 4-paragraph literary essay, for which they could use their Reading Notebook and the novel to help them.

For students who don't regularly read a book a month, this was a fast pace. For students who have difficulty organising thoughts on paper, 12 entries was a push. When I gave my mid-year student feedback survey the day after the unit ended, I read a lot of comments about "too much homework".

Homework has been an important issue for me. I value the time students have at home with their families, the time they have after school for athletics or drama or music or other interests, and the time they have to relax and de-stress. So when I assign homework, I want it to be 1) essential to furthering their progress as a learner in my courses, 2) authentic, and 3) a reasonable amount.

Reading at home is a non-negotiable. Lifelong reading habits are vital to establish in middle school, since high school often kills any nascent reading interest. Besides, study after study has shown how vital reading quantity is to academic success.

When I read "too much homework" in the comments, I need to re-evaluate. What were my goals for the 12 Reading Notebook entries? I wanted students to focus on vocabulary a little bit, since vocabulary development is so important and I spend too little time on it. I wanted students to practice noticing the literary elements that were review and those I was teaching: foreshadowing, allusion, irony, and dialect. I wanted students to track how characters changed over the course of a book, and how readers can form a theory about theme early in the book and then add to their theory or change it based on further evidence.

Could students achieve those goals with fewer entries? What if, instead of tracking beginning, middle, and end, they tracked first half and second half? Eight entries? Could I drop one of the categories and make it a task for the Book Club instead, a topic for discussion? Six entries? How much can I minimize before I lose the rigor and high expectations for critical thinking?

Or maybe it was just bad timing. There was a big research project going on in Science at the same time, involving research into five different energy sources, a formal bibliography, graded notes, and a slideshow to go with a speech. Maybe 12 entries isn't too much for mid-year 8th grade. Maybe I can blame it all on Science!

"Too much homework"? If students are stressed out, feel like they are doing nothing but going to school and doing homework, and not enjoying their learning, there is a problem (however much I want to blame it all on Science). So I can back off a bit. But I still wonder, how much is too little?