You know what to do. . . 

Post questions, concerns, etc for the week. If you have a question, it's probably true that your classmates do too. 

Teaching poetry to young readers and writers can be challenging and also exciting. Prior to spring break, we spent two weeks looking a verse--poetry and a novel written in verse. We close out looking at verse and young adult readers with The Poet X, which mixes a bit of both. 

Your prompt this week asks you to think about how you would engage students with poetry. You can consider all of the texts we've explored over this time, but do be sure to include The Poet X. 

This Week’s Prompt: Let’s say that you managed to convince the faculty and parents at Brockton High School to let you teach The Poet X in a 12th grade English class that meets the outcomes for the International Baccalaureate Programme.  Th IB is sort of like an internationally recognized version of AP.  You can read about it here. Some quick facts about Brockton High (from Wikipedia, so, you know, grain of salt) and in general:

• The high school is 60.9% African American, 20.8% White, 2.5% Asian, 12.3% Hispanic, and 3.5% other. In 2016 it was made so everyone could get free lunch. Out of its 4,250 students, 2,161 are male and 2,089 are female.​
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• In 2008, Brockton students had a higher level of improvement on the English MCAS than 90% of the Massachusetts high schools. By 2010 it was one of the highest performing schools on the MCAS.[7]
  
  
• Keep in mind that 12th grade Lit is often a British Literature Survey. The IB syllabus is a little more adventurous. This might help or hurt.
  
  
• Try to be specific in both HOW you would teach this text and also HOW YOU MIGHT USE IT  to teach poetry in general. For the purposes of thinking about that second part, Here is a link to the IB curriculum at Brockton High. This takes you to the IB page for Brockton High. Click on the English HL link for the actual syllabus.
  
  

I’m really enjoying the back and forth in these discussion boards. Here’s to another good week. 

It's the week before Spring Break. It's midterms. Let's be kind to ourselves and the universe. Let's write poetry together. For, this week, please post an original poem. There are no other rules. 

There will be other weeks we can talk about how we could teach poetry (the week we come back from Break we are reading The Poet X) as readers, but one way we help our students to read poetry is to write poetry, is to give students the right to be poets. 

It's a brave act to write knowing people will read your work and so lessons where we ask our students to share their work in a safe setting is one way we help them to be brave thinkers, readers, and writers. One way we make safe spaces is to be brave and vulnerable with our students as well. When we write with our students we show them our process and we show them the all writers and readers have some sort of process. And, in that way, we help them to figure out reading writing processes of their own. 

USE THIS SPACE NOW UNTIL THE WEEK AFTER SPRING BREAK (so until 22 March 2020). . . 

If there was ever a time that I thought you might use this space, this is it. Here is a good space to use to crowd source tips and tricks, get answers to clear up confusion, ask questions about how to complete your Pecha Kucha. 

Trust me, if you have questions, other people do to. And it's in everyone's best interest to get that information out to everyone. If you ask me a question via email that is not specifically private, this will be the space that I answer it.