Photo by Aja Riggs
This time of year in traditional schools, teachers receive presents from their students, or more likely from their students’ parents. Not in my school. For one thing, we don’t give grades, so there is no need for the students to try to soften up their teachers. For another thing, our students are [...]
It is always tricky choosing poems for my students. I want to challenge them, but I don’t want to lose them. Too many words that they don’t know, and … goodbye. They’ve checked out. The red flashing sign that spells S-T-U-P-I-D goes off in their minds and nothing I do or say will bring them [...]
My students are starting a poetry blog. They chose as the blog’s title: Poetry Is a Mirror (we’re not quite ready to take the wraps off yet, but stay tuned). The title, they told me, means that poetry is a mirror in which we can see ourselves more clearly.
Maybe I should change my blog’s [...]
I recently received this email from a friend, whose son is in grade school:
Hi,
I’ve been looking for short things to read to H. at night (a tradition we still carry out) and tried out some poetry on him. I read some selected poems from Garrison Keillor’s book Good Poetry. He seems to like the accessible [...]
