Day 26 of 30: #verselove with Sarah J. Donovan

Inspiration

Our students have a lot to say about what’s going in their lives. We don’t always give them a forum to voice their views, in part because we don’t know what they’ll say. We may not want to hear the raw truth (and sometimes we may think it is not “school appropriate”). I have found that spoken word offers a meaningful framework for organizing ideas around a strong point of view welcoming students who may feel more comfortable using their voices than their fingers to express their views.

Today’s inspiration is called “Reasons Why and Responses To.” And I invite you to try a different modality in your expression, if you are game.

To begin, let’s take a look at a common text structure in spoken word: the list or countdown. Listen to a few of these spoken word performances. Just a heads up, a few have strong language.

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Using the count-down or count-up structure, I taught junior high students to blend poetry, research, and argument in order to share their passion and expertise about a subject or issue of interest to them.

Take a look at this short collection of what junior high students wrote and performed for our class last year. Notice the jargon to signal expertise, notice embedded facts, notice the argument for moving people to understand more deeply the importance of the topics students chose, and notice the craft.

• Eight Responses to People Who Say Girls Can’t Code
• Six Response to Those Who Can’t “Feel” the Beat
• Eight Responses to People Who Say Renewable Energy is Not Sustainable
• Eight Responses to People Who Say They Want to Play Football
• Eight Responses to People Who Say Animals Are Dumb
• Eight Responses to People Who Say Photo Prints Are Useless
• Eight Responses to People Who Ask “What’s Human Behavioral Sciences?”
• Eight Responses to People Who Say Making a Movie is Easy
• Eight Responses to People Who Say They Want to Learn Karate

Today, let’s play with this spoken word text structure. How can we access our expertise, passions, and even commentary about the world using the rhythm of spoken word? Today’s poems will likely look different– more text heavy and less dependent on white space or line breaks — we’ll see.

Process

Select a topic based on a hobby, expertise, passion, or issue about which you already know a lot or want to learn more about.

• Everyday: flossing, the perfect cup of coffee, eye brow grooming, loading the dishwasher, toast, snoozing the alarm clock
• Expertise: an instrument, perfect running shoe/yoga mat, the beauty of BBQ, planting a garden, birdwatching, a recipe/cooking technique, art technique/period, lesser known, undervalued author/activist/historical figure
• Activism: a cause you know well or volunteer for that most people don’t know about, an experience you’ve had that others need to understand better

Select a framework: Responses to people who ask…Reasons to try…What I’d say to people who…What everyone needs to understand about…

• Count up or count down. Some of the examples start at 8 and work down to 1 while others start at 1 and go from there.
• Address the person or group of people directly and use the language they’d understand, i.e., if your audience is new or ignorant/novice to the topic.
• Any number is fine — you do not need 8 responses, 3, or maybe you want to make a single statement.

Try a technique: You will see in the student examples hyperlinked above that some have color coding and bolding. I teach grammar and craft in context — no worksheets or quizzes. So I ask students to highlight their moves in their final drafts, perhaps you want to try this too with anaphora or polysyndeton:

1. Anaphora is the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive lines or a refrain, make this bold.
2. Polysyndeton is a literary technique in which conjunctions (e.g. and, but, or) are used repeatedly in quick succession, often with no commas, even when the conjunctions could be remove. Try this with italics.

Sarah’s Poem

Note: I did a voice recording of my spoken word piece using a free app on my phone. If you’d like to include a voice recording of your spoken word piece, email it to me, and I will do my best to upload it to your comment: sarah.j.donovan@okstate.edu.

Reasons Why I Hate Grades

Five. Because they suck.

Four. As a kid, I never like competition, comparison as though your A identity made you more worthy of love, attention, a hug than my B identity. Sure, I skipped a few blanks, failed to match terms, only partially shaded a bubble or two, but my story was beautiful. It’s not my fault creativity is only worth 10%.

Three. When it comes time to grade an essay, I read. I am transported into the heart and mind of a writer. I notice doubt in parentheticals, certainty in periods, excitement in fragments, and trust-distrust of their words in my hands. I cannot slash prepositions, scribe “awk,” count typos — the being on the page defies such measurement. It feels wrong to conflate it all to a letter, number, score.

Two. What they don’t advertise in teacher job descriptions is that the reason you came teaching– to be the change, to make a difference — will be reduced to the humanity of our students by measuring, ranking, and sorting bodies into tracks of classes, access to opportunities, beliefs of possibilities because of

One test or grade that cannot possibly define worth, should not factor into identity. So the A can do school, comply with rules, lacks wi-fi excuses, doesn’t need to be after school child care. So the C is subversive, resists meaningless homework, won’t tolerate packets, doodles in the margin of the Cornell notes. So what? Who are they? What do they know? Who do they want to become? See, our students are not letters. We know that. And yet grades drive assignments, phone calls home, eligibility lists, high fives, and disappointed glares. So the next time your student asks, “Miss, what grade did I get?” Change the topic and say, “I’d rather talk about your poem.”

Write