At the beginning of this year, I took on the task of writing a Haiku every morning before starting my day. My goal is to have one for every day of the year. I am nearly halfway through the year and so far so good. My initial reason for doing this was that I noticed that the first thing I did every morning was to shut off my alarm and open my iPad. I would check facebook, twitter, Reddit, email, Pinterest, facebook again, etc. I wanted to find a way to fight this trend, and I thought reaching out for good old paper and pen would help. And it has. To an extent, yet I still find myself shutting my Haiku journal, then opening up my iPad. Alas, I am a slave it seems.

I am not alone. My students cannot go without their phones for more than a few seconds at a time. Across the globe, teachers and admin struggle with what to do about the phone distraction. And many debates have raged about whether to fight to the bitter end and ban them in schools or face the fact that resistance is futile, ahem, and embrace the technology. I waver between the two depending on how productive my class has been, and how many times I had to address students about using their phones at inappropriate times. Phones can actually be quite handy in a classroom without computers. Students can look up words and facts when directed, and it is even useful for tapping into a fairly decent rhyming dictionary when, you know, writing poetry in class.

The attention span of any teenager rivals that of a gnat on any given day, and I don’t think that that has changed much over the years. I can remember being distracted by just about anything to avoid certain lessons including, but not limited to, watching gnats. And yes, perhaps I spent more time inside my head than looking outward at a screen, but I, as well as many other generations, have fully embraced the electronic age. Teenagers are not the only one’s glued to their screens. I know this because I get notifications on my phone every time one of my colleagues likes a post on Facebook throughout the day, or tweets something on Twitter. And they are not always school related items. Not throwing stones, believe me. And yet, I will sometimes throw them at my students. [Metaphorically speaking, of course]

I don’t have the answers, but I am willing to question and to try new things. And so, when I wake, I grab my journal and write. One simple haiku for the day. This should be the selling point of Haikus to my students. They are short. One sentence really, divided into three parts. A capture of a single image or a thought. 5/7/5 is the syllable count. I remember distinctly when I was a teenager not liking Haikus. I thought they were a trap. It was too simple and I hated counting syllables. So, I try and keep that in mind when introducing them to my Sophomores. The first one we do is on the white board together.
“Right! Someone give me a sentence.”
“What on?”
“Doesn’t matter, first thing that pops into your head.”
“There is a girl?”
“Okay, There. Is. A. Girl.” Writing on board, “that’s four syllables, one more syllable!”
“There is a shy girl?”
“Yes! Great, so there’s your first line! Next line 7 syllables, what do we want to say about this girl?”
Thinking, counting sounds, mumbles….
”Who sits by herself at lunch!” Shouts out one student who counts out on their fingers as they speak.
“Great! What next?”
“I LIKE HER STYLE!” yells a different student, others laugh. I smile.
“Fantastic!” I say as I write it all on the board. “Now it’s your turn to go solo. I want at least 3 Haikus by the end of class. Try to visualize first, then put it into words. If you need help, I’m at my desk.”

And they all tend to get right on it. Sometimes they work in pairs or groups, and, usually, there are giggles and gasps as they try the boundaries of language out. I don’t mind the odd outlandish or “racy” image. These are things they need to express too. I think one of my favorite lines from a student’s Haiku this year was “Dank memes and sad dreams.” It painted a picture for me of loneliness and ridicule, and I confess I liked the rhyme.

In the morning, when I am writing, I sometimes pull from my dreams or what is going on inside the house. I thought that for this post I would share some from the last few months.

January

Empty bird feeder
Swings so gently back and forth
Neighbor’s cat looks up.

February

Notes begin gently
Rise mournfully up then drop
They speak of heartbreak.

March

The electrics hum
Water gurgles in the sink,
Calm morning silence.

April

A loud shout cried out,
It woke me from my slumber,
Was it you or me?

May

The deer are pregnant
It looks like any day now
the fawns will arrive.

Your Turn!

Haiku

Lines: Three
Rhythm: 5 – 7- 5 Syllable count

It is the last week of the Six week period. It’s do or die time. Students have to get all their make-up work into their teachers by the end of this week. Grades are in on Sunday. Report cards mail out Monday. There are six six weeks in a school year. Three a semester. And every 6th week is the same. What are they missing? Which ones are the major grades? Didn’t they already hand that in? I am sure that is in the back of my journal, could you check again, please?

This week, I decided to combine a makeup class with the potential for extra credit. I picked out four forms of poetry and two short story prompts and assigned each a certain number of points. I thought this will be fun, they will get a choice, they will have something to do while other students work on getting their previous work finished. I thought we can workshop this together. What fun!
Out of 42 students, 20 odd who didn’t have any makeup work, 6 attempted the prompts. The rest sat for an entire 90 minutes on their devices, staring into space, and sleeping.

I should have felt hesitation at the very shadow of that phrase – “What Fun.”
Fun to a teenager and fun to a teacher vary wildly. I sometimes fall into the trap of thinking, “man, I wish I had paid more attention in high school when we did x. I would have really loved that if only I had given it a try.” I then go on to think, “My students will love this if they are willing to give it a go too!” Only, I might as well have been trying to get teenage me to participate. It wouldn’t have worked then either.

I once organized a day where all we would be doing in class was playing board games. Now, these were cooperative board games, and the lesson in Interpersonal Studies was to illustrate how working together to tackle an issue is a good thing. I was so excited. I laid out the games and split the class in four groups – each with a game to unbox, then read the instructions and play. For the next 90 minutes, the majority of my class complained about how difficult it was, and how stupid it was, and why couldn’t they just read from a textbook instead! I spent the passing period in tears in my partner’s closed classroom.

In fairness to my students, when next we met, we had an open and honest discussion about what had happened the class before. I had felt hurt and frustrated, and they felt unsure and confused about trying new things. They feared looking foolish if they got it wrong. We spent the rest of the class actually playing the games, and it ended up a success on a couple of levels. But, it reminded me of a day I had forgotten.

I was a junior in high school. And my English Teacher, Mrs. Edwards, was going to be teaching us Edgar Allen Poe’s poem The Raven. I walked into the classroom and she had transformed her desk into an old writer’s desk. There was a feather and ink well, large Iron candle holders with wide circular candles, and long white scroll, unfurled on the desk. And Mrs. Edwards? Well, she was dressed in all black, including a short black wig, and perched on her shoulder was a spraypainted, black, fake parrot.

I vividly remember thinking, “Oh my God, what is she thinking? This is so embarrassing.”

I vividly remember now thinking, “Oh my God, she was so desperate to get us engaged and I had mocked her internally.” For the first time, I felt shame for what I had put my teachers through. It all made so much sense to me now.

There are so many other things that a student wants to be doing with their time than sitting and listening to a teacher day in, day out. The odd time sure, it can be interesting, but what they really want is to be hanging out with each other and gossiping and listening to music, and experimenting with other adult things. I did not want to be experimenting with acrostics and villanelles. Even if my strangely-hyper-today teacher is telling me they are “fun.”

But honestly, they are fun. The Villanelle is a six-stanza poem with five stanzas of three and one of four. Like the triolet, the villanelles have repeating whole lines and a simple rhyme scheme. It looks like this: A1bA2 abA1 abA2 abA1 abA2 abA1A2. So just to be clear capital letters indicate a repeat of the entire line, and matching letters rhyme regardless of the capitalization. “A” always rhymes with “a.” So it goes with all the letters.

When teaching them to my students, I begin, of course, with the Dylan Thomas example, “Do Not Go Gentle into that Goodnight.” There is a wonderful video of Thomas himself reading. It is an old recording that sparks and pops, so I am not sure how they feel about it. But they like the line about “Raging.” It is, to me, quite heartbreaking as it is about Thomas’ dying father, and it’s meaning, for me, now has changed. It’s no longer simply about dying old men, but about one in particular. I am sure that there a quite a few students who understand more once we have dissected and discussed. And then it is their turn.

I can usually sway them by saying they only have to come up with 13 lines instead of 19, due to the repeating nature of the lines. As they have already tackled sonnets, this should be a doddle. And though, many grumble that they would rather just free write, they soon settle down and explore the form. It is a real privilege to read their work. It is wonderful.

Now, for my own attempt. I actually really like Villanelles and have practiced them before. At least twice, so that’s a pretty good run for me. I was given the prompt to write about a combination of water, flow, and evolution. I kind of like this one, which may be a bad sign.

There is a spinning force which moves and lingers
I form into being slower than you might imagine
Splitting cells – separating yolks with your fingers

I curl inwards like an old man having fought many winters
The drum of my heart still visible through my skin
There is a spinning force which moves and lingers

This warm liquid hosts all the new thinkers
Yet few thoughts of mine appear through the din
Splitting cells – separating yolks with your fingers

Muffled and muted come sounds of the singers
From outside to inside I feel them push in
There is a spinning force which moves and lingers

I share these two, and, now, mostly I am hers
Yet opening eyes reveal parts that are him
Splitting cells – separating yolks with your fingers

With every divide the ancestry whispers
As I stretch out and strengthen each new limb
There is a spinning force which moves and lingers
Splitting cells – separating yolks with your fingers

Your Turn!

Lines: 5 triplets 1 Quatrain
Stanzas: 6
Rhyme: A1bA2 abA1 abA2 abA1 abA2 abA1A2

The page represents you. This is what I tell my High School Sophomore English students. I tell them this when they ask me why we have to bother with grammar and writing and reading and school in general.  I tell them – the page represents you. And you will be judged by what scratches you leave upon it. In person, you may be an awesome, dynamic, witty, clever, quick-thinking being, but You will not accompany the email/tweet/resume/collection of poems/STAAR essay answer that you send out into the world.  Those who read your unaccompanied words may have never met you in person.  But, they will read these words and feel as though they know you or your “type” at least.  Some of these people will only be doing their jobs; others will just be doing what comes natural to all human beings: categorizing.

Humans categorize; they sort, they filter, they color code.  It’s how they function in the day to day without getting lost in information.  For example, let’s take a look at the job vacancy that just received 300 applications.  The job needs to be filled in a month – not a lot of time to filter.  No cover letter? – bin it! Not qualified yet? – bin it! No experience? – bin it!  Too much experience? – bin it! and on it goes. So, let’s say you make it to the pile of twenty on the table, just bear with me here. Your application sits on the table with 19 others for one position.  This is when they read the cover letters.  Tell me – do you think grammar matters now?

Okay, breathe. Let’s back it up a bit. William Shakespeare. Right so, not that far, but how about a look at his sonnets. He is perhaps the most well known of English writers, as to whether or not he is the greatest I will leave that up to countless other treatise. This is not that discussion.  Nonetheless, Shakespeare is considered canon material and we are introduced to him from pretty early on in our development.  Every year I have taught him, my students groan and moan and sigh very heavily.  The thought of not only having to write poetry, but also to have to write the way some guy who lived an ancient time ago dictated is absolutely abhorrent to them.  I say “yes, yes, it’s all very terrible and ghastly, but none the less, I expect 14 lines with ‘abab cdcd efef gg’ rhyme scheme written in iambic pentameter by the end of class.”

We don’t start with writing sonnets though; we start with reading them.  At first glance, all the students hear is the archaic sounding “shall I compare thee’s” and summer’s leases “hathing” etc.; and they, perhaps rightly, believe it “hath” nothing to do with them.  Of course, this is not true. For Shakespeare’s greatest gift is that his meaning to every generation is found in translation.  It is a wonderful moment when my students go from the lovely-dovey “Shall I compare thee to a Summer’s day/Thou art more lovely and more temperate” of his 18th Sonnet to his not so flattering 130 Sonnet – “And in some perfumes is there more delight/than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.”  They look at me kind of funny and say, “Wait. Is he saying her breath stinks?” Yes, yes this is exactly what he is saying.  As I watch them giggle and nudge each other, I am reminded of my first years of college when I discovered that Chaucer was dirty old man who liked to write “filth.”

I do not keep things from my students.  I tell them all the gossip, I mean, theories relating to Shakespeare.  Most of my students have experienced some form of trauma in their lives, I think they can handle the idea that Shakespeare might have been writing his love poems to a man.  There are great theories surrounding Shakespeare: he never existed, he was gay, he was a collection of writers at that time who chose to write under a single name, he was actually Queen Elizabeth writing incognito. Okay, the last one I made up.  However, there are always multiple theories in life, there is very little solid information out there, very few things we can know with certainty, and we’re not just talking about Shakespeare any more.  

I remember how I felt about writing when I was the same age as my students.  I found form poetry so restricting.  I felt it stifled the process and creativity.  My poetry was free, it flowed through me, it was inspiration, I was only the vessel, et cetera, et cetera. And this conviction was so righteous, that I don’t think I have tried my hand at sonnet writing again until my appalled Sophomore class, said “Well, aren’t you going to write one, if you think they are so great?”  I blustered and guffawed and then I relented.  Okay then, alright, I could do this.  I often give the same two options for theme, one is the traditional love sonnet – good love, unrequited love, love soars, love sucks, no matter – and then the alternative is to write a sonnet about how much it blows to have to write a sonnet. I choose an altered form of the second – how much my students hate writing sonnets.  Right so, first line – My students are always complaining – darn 4 and ½ iambs.  My young students are always complaining. ha! easy peasy… now what rhymes with complaining….  I wrote this piece a few years ago, and, alas, it is nowhere to be found.  I’d written it on the back of a piece of looseleaf paper, and it took me the rest of the class period.  My students and I worked together – mostly in silence, but every once in a while one of us would say what rhymes with this word? and would someone count my syllables?  I no longer have the poem, but it’s a great memory.  

Accept in its stead, this piece I wrote as a response to a prompt at my writer’s group.  We had just read the poem, “Men as Friends” by Robin Becker.  We were tasked with writing a piece that explored the idea of “something as friends.”  I thought this might be a good opportunity to practice the sonnet form again and wrote this response about my dad.  He died nearly six years ago.  I thought that perhaps the restraint of the form might help distance from the grief.  It did, and it didn’t.

“Ghosts as friends”

Nothing remains of what you used to be.
Your clothes recycled ashes cast away.
The house is sold with no estate for me.
Not that I mind, I’m never one to stay;
You taught me that habit from early on
Packing and moving from home to abode
Seas we crossed, lands traversed and forgotten
all part of the fun you promised and told
a great adventure awaits us beyond
you cannot spend your life looking back dear
you will thank me once you have reached the end
You cannot focus on the things you fear.
I now can thank you for my wander lust.
Travel with me still, only as a ghost

Your Turn! 

Lines: 14
Rhyme: abab cdcd efef gg
Rhythm: Iambic Pentameter [“ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum”]