Comments on: Making Room for Poetry

By: sassjemleon

sassjemleon — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 19:04:22 +0000

within the last few years, my children have taken standardized tests in new jersey. there have been sections on these njask tests which require reading and responding to poetry in an intelligent and thoughtful manner (see link below for poem by jill essbaum).

generally speaking, my kids, who performed well in just about every other section of the njask test, always performed poorly on these poetry questions, and said, dad, “poetry’s hard.” no other subject, to my elementary school children, was ever “hard.”

i had to wonder how much time the teachers actually spent preparing my children for the poetry questions, or did the teachers just blow off teaching poetry because nobody really cares how kids perform on the poetry section of the test? you could do pretty crappy in the poetry section and still score very well on the overall test.

http://www.state.nj.us/education/assessment/es/sample/NJ-LAL_sample.pdf

By: Ian

Ian — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 18:26:19 +0000

Oops, sorry, I clicked the wrong reply button. My above post was in response to the article (not Terreson).

By: Ian

Ian — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 18:17:21 +0000

One bad teacher can wreck many people. I’ve seen it.

By: Terreson

Terreson — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 17:23:29 +0000

My hat is off to all teachers, high school teachers maybe the most, who manage to do that increasingly subversive thing of inciting in their students a passionate appreciation of poetry.

Terreson

By: Riva Nathans

Riva Nathans — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 04:41:52 +0000

@Glen: Yes! Let be be finale of seem / The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

By: Ian

Ian — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 21:41:20 +0000

I think school ruins poetry for many people. What my teachers knew about poetry could be written on the back of a postage stamp.

By: Glen

Glen — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 19:04:46 +0000

The solution to the Poetry Problem at my high school was to use poems with esoteric vocabulary to help with SAT prep. So there was very little enjoyment there, though I did learn what concupiscence means (thanks, Wallace Stevens!).

By: John Oliver Simon

John Oliver Simon — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 16:46:22 +0000

And those of us who have made a precarious career out of teaching poetry in the schools (in my case since 1971), now find, as the schools don’t even know how much money they don’t have with draconian cuts imposed by recession funding, that writers in elementary, middle and high school classes are the first to go. Seventh-grader Uriel Bravo writes:

An undiscovered world,
a locked chest full of rage,
empty thoughts,
an animal in a cage,
time rushing,
black, impenetrable fog,
a raft on a river,
paying no attention to my steps,
a silent mask,
all these in a melting pot —
my life.

By: Jim Murdoch

Jim Murdoch — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 15:21:44 +0000

I think a part of the problem too is that many teachers were not taught poetry well themselves and so they struggle to impart what they have only a tenuous grasp on themselves. I was educated in Scotland in the sixties and seventies but I always felt that my teachers had a very by-the-numbers approach to poetry. What I learned proved a bedrock and I’m grateful for it but then I was receptive and desperate to learn no matter how lacklustre the teacher’s performance. That was not true for the majority of my classmates who derided the subject. And I wonder if any of them went on to teach English?

By: Marty Elwell

Marty Elwell — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 15:18:38 +0000

I was looking through books on the shelf for English 101 through 600 Level English classes at Purdue this week. I was surprised to see how little poetry was required. There were plenty of texts, that I know from my own college experience, that could have been skipped in favor of good poetry. It’s not just high school.