Elizabeth Joy Levinson

This afternoon I was asked to cover a class for thirty minutes for a teacher who was taking most of her students on a field trip.  There were a handful that couldn’t go and this made them the perfect group of guinea pigs for an experimental lesson.  I borrowed from a teacher I had in undergrad, who would have students swap meaningful objects and then try to write about them, not knowing the history behind them.

Because so many of our students struggle with imagery, after they swapped objects, I asked them to come up with a list of descriptors.  I then instructed them to write stories (in prose form) about the objects.  Once they had both components, I explained that they should weave their list into their stories and then try to break the lines to find a rhythm they liked.  Even I was surprised with how well this worked out & I had a ton of fun doing it (imagine me making giant hand motions to illustrate the weaving process).  The strongest poem came from what I thought would be the most boring — the student was working with another student’s school id.  The resulting poem was political in nature; the students need their id’s to get free lunch at the school and this is what the writer chose to focus on, the hunger in the boy’s face on the id.  This from a fifteen year old.

It is such a cliché but true what they say, you always end up learning more from your students than they learn from you.