Poetry


Poetry has never really been my favorite part of studying English and taking ELA classes. None of my teachers even remotely seemed like they were interested in poetry in the slightest, making most of the lessons seem like it was more obligation to the curriculum more than anyone actually enjoying poetry with their students. The only time I ever had a teacher actually care about poetry was when I knew that they had actually participated in poetry slams and wrote spoken word poems to share with their class. Granted, it was for a creative writing class, but we spent an entire month just on poetry and during that month, I tried really hard to think of poetry as more than just a bunch of choppy little sentences, but it was hard when my entire history had painted them as such. In the past few years, programs like Button Poetry have really made me appreciate poetry as an art and really made me see it as more than just Shakespeare’s sonnets or e.e. cummings lowercase spellings.
After reading the piece on poetry by Christensen, I have really had to take a critical look at myself as an educator and as a poet. I have decided to take on teaching English Language Arts as a career and one part of that has been to teach poetry. And to start off, I’ll be teaching our class this week with poetry, something that I have never done before, so my nerves are tense and I’m definitely nervous about sharing my knowledge with the class. But to hear that Christensen makes sure to use poetry in each and every one of her units and do things like read-arounds makes me that much more nervous as well, but also kind of excited? 
The golden nugget I’ve taken out of this chapter is definitely “part of my job as a teacher is to awaken students to the joy and love that they may take for granted, so I use poetry and narrative prompts that help them ‘see’ daily gifts, to celebrate their homes and heritages” (Christensen 17). I think this definitely summarizes the entirety of what she’s trying to reiterate throughout the entirety of the chapter and what she wants educators to take out of reading her book. I’ve heard a lot of talk from people like me that have had issues with poetry in the past and are now being asked to teach it. I think that understanding the beauty of poetry and realizing that students have the ability to have so much of their personal feelings and ideas within those stanzas would actually really help those who are hesitant to use poetry in their units. Reading about how poetry really awakens this beauty definitely helps me in taking a step back and realizing that it isn’t what I’m wanting to read, it’s about my students being able to express themselves in whatever way they can and want to.
Thought I would add one of my favorite spoken word poems to the end of this!


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