A Pennsylvania Teacher Makes Poetry a Daily Routine

In this Edutopia article, Pennsylvania teacher Brett Vogelsinger says that one of his most successful routines over the last year has been starting each of his ninth-grade classes with a new poem. Many of his students have previously experienced poetry classes as “dissection labs;” his goal is to make the genre something students love. Here are his suggestions for choosing poems that will make these lesson segments “brisk and bright”:

• Choose poems that students can understand on the first reading – and reveal greater depth when re-read.
• Choose poems short enough to understand and analyze in a few minutes.
• Choose poems with humor, nostalgia, sarcasm, despair.
• Choose poems you find engaging and fascinating.

Here are some of the activities Vogelsinger uses in his daily poetry start-up routine:

• Sketch this poem. Students spend three minutes making a sketch of what they see in a poem and then five minutes discussing the differences in what they saw. His students tried this with “Little Citizen, Little Survivor” by Hayden Carruth, a poem about a rat in a wood pile.

• Wave this poem. Students sit in a circle and read the poem one word per student, moving around the circle like a wave, repeating it till the language becomes smooth and fluid.

• Shout out this poem. Students find their favorite word or phrase, and when he reads the poem a second time, they join in on their chosen parts. This leads to a good discussion about why certain lines stand out.

• Build this poem. He cuts a poem into lines (or, with a short poem, into words), puts the pieces into envelopes, and has students assemble the poem before they’ve read it. When they hear the real poem, they’re ready to discuss its logical coherence and share some different

ideas on how to express the ideas.

• Wordle this poem. Vogelsinger feeds the poem into Wordle http://www.wordle.net to create a word-splash of all its nouns, has students predict what it’s about, and discusses whether the nouns are used literally or figuratively.

• Update this poem. Students rewrite a poem in contemporary language or substitute local place-names and people. Vogelsinger had his students read “Clay County” by John Hodgen and turn it into “Bucks County.” 

• Overdramatize this poem. After a first reading in a normal tone of voice, he challenges students to read it in an overzealous, dramatic style and discuss different interpretations. 

• Wreck this poem. Students suggest altering five words in a poem that will destroy the quality or completely change the subject.

• Gift this poem. Students write in their journals for three minutes about a person they’d like to give the poem to and why, and then share their ideas with a partner.

• Connect this poem. Students are challenged to make non-obvious connections between a poem and something else they’re studying – for example, Vogelsinger asked students whether there are connections between a haiku about a falcon by An’Ya and To Kill a Mockingbird. 

• Hear this poem. He searches the Internet for clips of poets reading their own work or performing it in a poetry slam. 

• E-mail or tweet this poem. A class composes a collective interpretation of a poem and sends it to the poet for his or her reactions. Vogelsinger says his classes have had lively exchanges with Jason Tandon, Sean Hewitt, Robert Pinsky, and others. 

“Brisk and Bright Approaches for National Poetry Month” by Brett Vogelsinger in Edutopia, March 9, 2015, http://bit.ly/1x7UcZm 

From the Marshall memo #578