Cocoa Café

Language arts teachers share their love for spoken word

By: LISA TARRIFF

"Poetry"

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Two roads diverged in a yellow

   wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I

   could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better

   claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted

   wear;

Though as for that the passing

   there

Had worn them really about the

   same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden

   black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to

   way,

I doubted if I should ever come

   back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood,

   and I —

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the

   difference.

— Robert


Frost

   LANGUAGE arts teacher Sue Aurin led a conga line of seventh graders through the halls of Readington Middle School.

   "On-o-mato-poe-ia," students and teacher sang, cruising through the halls, "if you want to be a Crash! boom! bang!"

   A traditional poetry lesson? Maybe not. But it got the students’ attention.

   "At least," Ms. Aurin said, "they knew what onomatopoeia meant." (For those who need a refresher course in poetic devices, onomatopoeia is the naming of a thing or action by a vocal imitation of the sound associated with it.)

   Ms. Aurin and other language arts teachers say they must use whatever it takes to get sometimes reluctant students interested in poetry. But usually, they agree, their efforts are well worth it.

   "The first thing I have students do is share their thoughts on poetry," said Craig Stephenson, an English teacher at Kingsway High School in Swedesboro. "Of course, many of the kids, especially the boys, will indicate that they do not like poetry. Some comments include ‘I hate poetry, why don’t they just get to the point?’ and ‘they write dumb things.’ "

   So what is a teacher to do? Pam Benkin, who will teach basic skills classes in grades one through four at Perry L. Drew School in East Windsor this year, points out, "Songs are really poems that are put to music." Ms. Benkin, who has taught several elementary grades, said she often uses nursery rhymes with her young students. "It is important for students to realize that nursery rhymes they heard as small children are poems," she said.

   In introducing her poetry lessons, Ms. Aurin asks her seventh grade students, "How do poets help us hear the music in our heads?"

   "Poetry is words on a page," she explained. "It’s images we visualize. But it’s also music. It’s the music and imagery we hear in our minds." Most poetry, she pointed out, has a rhythm to it. Ms. Aurin teaches her students to understand the link between the rhythms of poetry and the rhythms of jazz. She has her students listen to Western hymns and African drum music and points out the poetry and rhythm in each.

   Mr. Stephenson uses a similar approach when introducing his poetry lessons. "Whenever the kids complain about the language in Shakespeare, I bring up rap music," he said. "In Shakespeare, they always want to read a translation. I try to explain that it loses meaning. What if I were to take DMX lyrics and correct the grammar? It would lose its power. Most kids seem to understand my point."

   As a culminating activity to her poetry unit, Ms. Aurin and her co-teachers organize a Cocoa Café, a re-creation of coffee houses of the 1950s. Each student is required to select a poem from the many they had written during the course of the unit and "bring it to publishable form," Ms. Aurin said. While an audience of other students and parents sip cocoa and eat cookies, the amateur poets, dressed in Beatnik outfits, perform their piece. Another student provides accompaniment. Accompaniment runs the gamut from bongos, maracas, flutes and keyboards. "Every student had to perform, and every student had to accompany," Ms. Aurin said.

"Dogs

   Teachers do not only teach students to hear the music in poems, they teach them to see the imagery. Ms. Aurin reads Robert Frost’s "Stopping By the Woods on A Snowy Evening" to her students and then has them draw a picture of what they perceive the images to be. Then she asks, "How did the poet make you see this in your mind?" This leads naturally into a lesson about using strong words appropriate word choice.

   "One of the problems young writers have is that their vocabulary is sparse," Ms. Aurin said. When teaching poetry, Ms. Aurin talks about "rich sensory appeal."

   Ms. Aurin’s poetry lessons often focus on word choice, selection of significant details, and elaboration of a point, essential elements in any type of writing. Poetry, however, "just brings it out where it’s clear and easily identifiable," she said.

   Which is what Katy Bischoff strives for in her poetry lessons to students at Christa McCauliffe School in Jackson. Ms. Bischoff pops popcorn for her fifth grade students and has them describe what they see, taste, touch, smell and feel before they write haikus. Haikus are Japanese poems that are three lines, the first line five syllables, the second line seven syllables and the third line five syllables. Students write the final draft of their poems on yellow sheets of paper cut into the shape of popcorn.

   "I thought (the haikus) went nicely with sensory writing," Ms. Bischoff said.

   Other teachers use poetry as a springboard to other lessons. "We used a lot of adjectives and practiced them in our poetry," Ms. Benkin said. "We studied similes in our reading and talked about comparisons when writing and to give the audience a clear picture of what they were talking about." When working with the youngest readers, Ms. Benkin uses poems to teach recognition of word families. Ms. Aurin points out that poetry can also be used to teach the writing process of brainstorming, writing, editing and revising and publishing.

   Ms. Benkin points out that many poems follow patterns, a concept often taught in math classes. Students can be asked to determine the patterns of a limerick or another poem that follows a specific pattern. A social studies lesson on Japanese culture or a science lesson about nature could extend easily into the teaching of Haikus.

   Teachers say the lessons learned from poems go beyond anything students can learn in a textbook. "Poetry helps kids become critical thinkers and better readers," Mr. Stephenson said. "But most of all I love the discussions that arise from the ideas, feelings, emotions expressed in a poem. That’s where the real value lies. The kids begin to see that poetry expresses things that everyday speech can’t."

   "Poetry is a form of writing that can really express what someone is thinking or how they are feeling," Ms. Benkin said. "It can be serious or humorous, or a bit of both."

   Kathy Fogle, a special education teacher at Hillsborough Middle School, said that was especially true after Sept. 11. "Even though no one had it in their hearts to go back to school the next day, it was the right thing," she said. "But we couldn’t open the book to page 23 and pick up where we left off. So we wrote poems. And we got that first day back at school under our belt."

   Writing without hard-fast rules allows children to express ideas they otherwise have difficulty articulating. Ms. Fogle said a student’s poem last year helped her understand the student’s feelings. "I never knew she was so lonely," Ms. Fogle said. "No 10 essays could have told me what that poem told me."

   Poetry, Ms. Fogle pointed out, frees students from the constraints of proper sentence structure and grammar. "You’ve got a kid who can’t spell, for whom sentence structure is difficult, it gives them a way of expressing themselves that allows success. The standard rules of written English don’t apply."

   "Some kids say they hated writing poetry because of all the rules they have to follow," Mr. Stephenson said. "I try to make them see that the beauty of poetry is that there really aren’t rules."