Disclaimer: I’ve been incredibly sleep-deprived the past few days with trying to get all my grades and homework done. So if there are parts of this (or all of it) that don’t seem coherent and don’t make sense, I apologize in advance. It’s just one of those weeks :-)

After reading TEAPOD, I found myself thinking about what I have taught so far this year. The first two things I thought of, and my two major units thus far, were short stories and poetry. I really wish that I had read this book before I started teaching, because it gave me so many great ideas. I know that in undergrad I took a class about teaching reading. However, I seem to be suffering some of Schulman’s amnesia, because I can’t really remember it. I have vague memories of thinking it was geared more toward elementary teachers and making posters with a group, and I can see the text book still sitting on my book shelf, but that’s all I can come up with. If I was taught, the information didn’t stick with me. So with all of this in mind, there are a few things regarding our readings that I would like to address.

I really like the idea that difficulty doesn’t always equal impossibility. In fact, since I read that, I’ve been already trying to incorporate that thought into my classes. I know it hasn’t really sunk in with them, but I hope that it will. I really wish that I had been able to read this before I taught these units. I think I would have been more effective, particularly during the poetry unit. I can’t say for sure that I was ever really taught how to read poetry. It was just something that I found that if I sat and thought about it long enough and read and re-read, I could eventually figure out something intelligent to say. No one ever said, “I want you to think about these things.” Because of that, I really don’t know how to teach my students how to read poetry. In fact, I’d actually forgotten that I was able to do that until I saw “One Art” in the book. As a senior in high school, “One Art” was given to me as my mid-term for AP English. The assignment was to break the poem down and analyze it, then write it in an essay. I ended up with the highest grade in the class because I could take all the pieces apart. I stopped using that skill, and I forgot that I had it. (Amnesia? Yes.) In the past few days, I have been grading their poetry book projects, and when I read their analyses of poems by other authors, I find that it’s a really small percentage who are actually able to pull a poem apart. When asked “what sorts of poetic devices do you see in this poem?” many responded by saying that they used it because they just happened to like that particular poem. That’s it. No rhyme or reason. I have a really hard time trying to convey that aspect of my knowledge to my students.

This brings me to my next point, which may be more like an interjection. TEAPOD said that often times, teachers will have a tendency to teach in the way that we, ourselves, learned. And in the article that we read, there was an example of two English teachers, one of which teaches his ninth graders in the same way that he learned when he was in college. At some point, all of this has applied to me. I have been tempted to try to mime my teachers from high school and college. When I first started teaching, I was still so much in the college frame of mind that I had to almost let the 9th graders break me down before I could get on their level. Once I did, I found that I didn’t need to try to emulate my college professors and their course material. I could relate to my students on my own. Now that I’ve been teaching for a few years, I can’t necessarily say that how I was taught best was and IS the only way.

What I would like to do next year (and I plan to try to somehow incorporate this on a smaller scale into my curriculum for the rest of this year, too), is to have more poems that I go through WITH my students. I want them to really understand that difficulty is a GOOD thing, and not something that should make one ashamed. I want having difficulty to be the cool thing to do (on a good level, of course). I think the difficulty paper is a good idea, and I think giving students the opportunity to interact with the things that are hanging them up is a good way to help them understand what they’re reading on a deeper level.

With that in mind, I’m wondering, what do you do with a student who just absolutely insists that he or she has NO trouble whatsoever with a poem? (And maybe they really don’t, or maybe they’re just suffering from fantasia!)