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These haiku not only reflect the strong relationship my students have with their natural world but also show their ability to poetically translate that experience, adhering both to the form and intention of traditional haiku. Writing poetry is just one of many ways that I have found to connect my Inupiaq Eskimo students of northwestern Alaska to the language arts curriculum in my classroom. Thirteen years ago, when I first stepped off the plane in Shishmaref, I had no idea what living or teaching in a rural Alaskan village would be like. Arriving from a rural town in southwestern Iowa, I doubt if anything could have adequately prepared me for my first sight of Shishmaref. From the air, the village appeared to be sitting on the edge of the world on a huge sandbar. It seemed as if someone had flown over it and ran

F or years, my ninth-grade students had held the same opinion: They could read, they explained, because they understood the plot of a story. They insisted that noticing the subtleties of a text was not their job. That is what teachers did. Teachers explained the themes and motifs; teachers clarified the effects of diction and figurative language on the text. When I asked ninth graders to do such things, they became frustrated and indignant, as if I was not doing my job properly. While I was trying to convince these students that there was more to reading than understanding plot, a new mandate trickled down through the Fairfax County Public Schools bureaucracy. English teachers were asked to teach Advanced Placement (AP) concepts at all levels and all grades of the high school English curriculum. The idea was to boost minority achievement by preparing all students for the AP curriculum should they decide to take AP English their senior year. I was faced with a dilemma: How would I teach AP-level concepts to students who believed reading consists only of following plot elements? I found the answer in a unit on lyric poetry. After all, lyric poetry contains no plot, making it exceptionally frustrating to readers who skim the surface of a text. And since 60 percent of the AP test focuses on poetry (Jacobs), I could comply with the county's directive while encouraging students to look beyond the literal topic of a text. I knew that, if the students were going to master reading a poem, I could not schedule the poetry unit for the middle or end of the school year; it must be taught first. We would explore how imagery reifies theme, how musical devices create mood, and how diction affects theme and mood. I would then revisit these concepts with the prose and drama we read thereafter. The plan worked, and I have changed the way I teach. The students now learn that they need not depend on the teacher to notice subtleties and clarify language in the text. They know how to do that themselves.

I wish I could say that I knew exactly what I was doing when I put the following words on the board in my Advanced Placement, senior English classroom: "Bring tomorrow: found object for art activity." I wish I could say that I had planned this activity long in advance and that I had lesson plans to match that filled five pages, outlining state objectives, theoretical underpinnings, and definitive rules for how we would pursue the sometimes difficult epic poem Beowulf I wish I could say that I had matched this teaching experience with current brain research that clearly demonstrates how humans learn. However, I had done none of these things. What I had done was follow my intuition in searching for a teachable moment. Only later did I discover that at that moment I had become, according to Caine and Caine in Unleashing the Power of Perceptual Change, a "brain-based teacher" who was

and nervous about teaching for the first time. To calm my nerves I had prepared and planned, but nothing could have prepared me for what I would encounter student teaching in the fall of 2001. I began the semester with community-building activities. On the fourth school day, we instantly became a community, a community dealing with tragedy and coping with loss and a pervasive fear. On September 11, my students, along with the other 3,000 students of Stuyvesant High School, ran for their lives up the West Side Highway as they saw the twin towers come down. Our school was only a few blocks away; some had parents who would be in those towers. Everyone was scared and shocked, unable to understand how and why this could be taking place. Everything that they were sure of was to be questioned; everything that they took for granted-their freedom, their safety-now seemed all too fragile. We were away from Stuyvesant and each other for a week and a half. I found myself feeling very isolated and longing for people to talk to, to share my feelings and fears with. I was sure that my students had the same need. I emailed all of them on the night of September 11, hoping and praying that they had all arrived home safely. Because Stuyvesant High School is a specialized school, students come from all five boroughs of New York City. Many of my ninth graders were still getting acquainted with Manhattan and now they had to find their way back to Queens and Brooklyn without public transportation. Some had to walk for miles over bridges; most took hours to get home. Luckily, all of my students and their families were fine.

Ueaching English is about sharing stories and discovering more about ourselves in the process. During the difficult teenage years, literature offers a way to talk about life's problems and relationships in a safe format. Students can look objectively at issues they are completely subjective about when it comes to their own lives. A multigenre approach offers a rich opportunity for students of all learning styles to explore the issues they care about. U For young women, the mother-daughter relationship is critical and sometimes very difficult. At the end of my Women's Literature class, a semester-long elective for juniors and seniors, we complete a mother-daughter unit that includes nonfiction, fiction, poetry, oral history, and film. The culminating project is an extensive interview each student completes with her mother. Each semester that I have taught the class, I am struck by the depth of thinking, the willingness to share, and the deep desire my students have to understand a relationship that is so central to their lives. Though we begin class with a historical perspective on why we study women's literature, I try to encourage thinking about the important contemporary women in students' lives from the very first day. Tahereh remembers our opening day activity when she writes up her interview with her mother

assignments one or more of us had used before in teaching poetry, this unit was substantially different from anything any of us had done previously and was the most successful approach to teaching poetry that any of us had ever taken. The central elements of our unit were collaboratively planning curriculum, creating the collection of poems we used as a text, varying the approaches and types of assignments we built in for students, utilizing recorded music and poetry we collected, bringing in local poets who read and performed for our students, facilitating online sharing and critiquing of our students' poetry, and staging a poetry slam as a culminating activity.

whose driving rhythm provides pleasure and places the reader right inside that car as it speeds along. The lines the students later wrote, in which they played with words in their own writing, were quite acceptable. Still, the student's question, which I merely smiled at that day, remained with me through the spring and summer. More questions swirled in my teaching brain: Do students even think about the "play impulse" as they write lines of poetry? Are there other elements of poetry that they think of when they compose their own poems? What would students teach about poetry if given the chance? Many students write poems on their own all the time. They say that what they like about writing poetry is that there are no rules or guidelines to follow. In other words, they like to play with words. Their frame of reference for writing poetry is to the poems they write at home, not the poems they write in school, which are seen as assigned. How often do students ask us if they can use poems they have already written for our assignments? And how often does our teacher-editor voice rise up and say, "Why don't you write a new one for this assignment?" Students make a distinction between writing poetry at home and writing it at school. Away from school, students feel safe to write as much poetry as they want to without a teacher's red pen, or editing voice, all over it. At school, they know that eventually their poems will receive a grade, a notion that quite a few students find repugnant. They realize that teachers sometimes take a lower view of their poetic experiments written outside of class than of those pieces that are produced under their informed tutelage. Here, our attitude is like the attitudes of the editors of The Oxford English Dictionary, who view wordplay as a mere "playing or trifling with words ... mainly for the purpose of producing a rhetorical or fantastic effect" (Cook 173). In order to honor our students' own impulse to play with language, we must turn to poets who extol the value of wordplay. Robert Frost urged, "And then to play. The play's the thing. Play's the thing." He added, "Poetry transcends itself in the playfulness of the toast" (Barry 124). Lewis Carroll, one of the great wordplayers of all time, wrote riddles, limericks, acrostics, puzzles, doublets, and the well-liked nonsense poem, "Jabberwocky." Elizabeth Bishop, in "Brazil, January 1, 1502," has taken wordplay to a level of etymological punning (Cook 186). Coleman Barks, who gave Bill Moyers the idea for the latter's title, Fooling with Words, says about form in poetry, "I love a deep playfulness" (Moyers

existence, something having unique value to the fully realized life, something which he is better off for having and which he is spiritually impoverished without" (3). With the unswerving ideology of any first year teacher, I watched my students' faces in anticipation of the awe and understanding that I would find unfolding in their blank gazes. It never came. Teaching poetry to high school students is an arduous, thankless task. I remember my own nightmarish experiences with the odes of John Keats and the sonnets of William Shakespeare. To a fourteenyear-old, nothing could seem as impossibly boring and irrelevant as Dylan Thomas's

because a careful study of the cultural values and poetics of early Native American songs can help our students better understand these speakers and writers as people and as artists. Such a study would also invite students into the conversation about bias in the construction of a literary canon and would contribute to the development of their writing skills. Early Native American songs and poetry are easily among the most difficult literature to teach across cultures. So much of a song in the original language is symbolic, relying upon local knowledge and local landscapes. For example, Natalie Curtis points out that a line from a Winnebago song, "Mother, let me go to my uncle," makes little sense out of context. However, tribal members would understand that on warm summer evenings young men sit outside the tepees of young women, enticing them by playing their flutes. These young women, wanting to visit with the men, would often create excuses to go outside, such as going to see a relative. A tribal member hearing, "Mother, let me go to my uncle," would immediately recognize the courting ritual that the song addressed (261). Thus the translator of the song is faced with a dilemma: translate literally and nearly guarantee that most contemporary readers will fail to understand, or translate the spirit of the song, thus altering its original form and syntax. This is made all the more complicated by the fact that many songwriters clearly enjoyed creating songs that were ambiguous, full of puns and double meanings. When exploring early Native American songs, teachers and students might want to cultivate a kind of double hearing, listening for the original singer, while continually being aware of the presence of the translator. In practical terms, this means looking for cultural bias and looking past dated or colloquial language that may be traced to choices made by the translator rather than the singer. In The Sky Clears: Poetry ofthe American Indians, A. Grove Day suggests that readers be particularly suspect of any "Christian-sounding lines which were probably inserted later by the person who wrote them down, 'to remove the flavor of heathenism'" (15). Student interpretations will also benefit from understanding that most early Native American songs fit roughly into the following categories

what I am talking about. My choice of Archibald MacLeish's "Ars Poetica" is my English major way of affirming that I have a philosophical approach to poetry, that I understand its mysteries, and that I am eager to share what I know on this fine October afternoon. "Globed fruit"? my students' expressions seem to ask. "Really?" What I learned in the years that followed this scene was that neither my English major nor my methods course had trained me very well to teach poetry to high school students. Gradually I learned how to help my students see that poetry is a celebration of sound and sense, that its music can capture our hearts and minds. So, what did I do in my second year? I began by asking students to recite their favorite poems. Another mistake. Most of them could not recite a poem, and, to my surprise, many of them could not complete the lines of familiar nursery rhymes. Another year I began by asking them to write for a few minutes on "What is poetry?" I got some surprisingly good answers to that one, the poets in the classroom rhapsodizing on their favorite (and often secret) pastime. Then one year I discovered a gold mine. I opened with Carl Sandburg's "Jazz Fantasia"; I put students in small groups and sent them off to practice a performance. As I visited the groups in rehearsal, voices buzzed with energy. I heard laughter, spirited suggestions about how to rush this line or slow down that one; I sensed real excitement, even joy. Their subsequent performances were miracles of delight for me as my students launched us into the world of poetry, drumming on our drums, battering on our banjoes, sobbing on our "long, cool winding saxophones." We answered Sandburg's invitation to "Go to it, O jazzmen" (193). Another year I began with David Bottoms's "Shooting Rats at the Bibb County Dump" as a way of working against my students' misconceptions of appropriate poetic subjects. I've also used the excruciatingly painful and suspenseful experience described in Bottoms's "Under the Boathouse" for the

As a result of this kind of teaching, students often enter a poetry lesson resistant because of previous negative encounters. Inevitably, in trying to get them to analyze and understand a poem, the poem becomes the enemy-a force to struggle with and ultimately conquer. Unfortunately, what is left in the end, for even the most successful students, is an experience and a poem that are both limp and lifeless. Instead, over the years I have redirected my teaching. I try to move students away from the concept of poetry as an object that is taken apart, examined, and reexamined and toward the use of poetry as a critical or interpretive lens through which other literature may be experienced and understood. I use this approach with my seventh graders in our reading class, where I teach the students a variety of reading strategies-making predictions, connecting and supporting ideas, understanding character, figuring out difficult vocabulary-to guide them through the novel. I thought poetry could be another means to aid their understanding. Recently we read Gary Soto's Taking Sides, a novel that explores what happens to a Mexican American teenager, Lincoln Mendoza, when he moves from the city to the suburbs. Throughout the book Lincoln struggles with internal and external conflicts. For example, he changes from the ethnic majority to the minority; he initially opposes his mother's white boyfriend; he grapples with the changing perceptions of his best friend, who accuses him of becoming "white"; he confronts a prejudiced basketball coach; and he struggles to develop a relationship with Monica, a Mexican American girl. In our study of this book students responded in a journal to each chapter. I encouraged them to make observations, substantiating them with examples from the text. I also asked them to jot down open-ended questions to which the rest of the class could respond that would bring us further into the novel. Using this framework, we discussed many themes and kept an ongoing list of "big ideas." Among the ideas students found in Taking Sides were "torn between different environments," "the loss of something valued," "friendship," "racism," "being different," "starting new," "love interests," "growing apart," and "finding a place in the world." When we finished the novel, I gave the students a packet of poems taken primarily from the book, Latino Poetry, but which also included several thematically related selections from our edition of Taking Sides. I wanted their work with poetry to be an extension of the work we were doing with the

would take to poetry writing like it was free pizza day in the cafeteria, and others who would rather study algebra in a foreign language, so I had adopted what Cicero referred to as the indirect approach until I saw which way the wind was blowing. Usually the wind blew from all over the place, so I had developed a mixed bag of strategies. There was the song gambit in which I worked my way through popular song lyrics to poems. There was the exercise gambit in which we worked with simple forms such as concrete poetry and haiku, moving eventually to ballads, or even sonnets. There was the free verse gambit, where we started with poetically inspired scenarios like childhood memories or lost relationships. All of these approaches worked to a certain degree, but I always felt uneasy when I used them. Sometimes I even felt I was doing something almost underhanded. Not that I was above pulling a fast one or two in order to get my students to move in a useful direction, but this feeling was different, nagging. I couldn't quite put my finger on it until I remembered something the playwright Christopher Fry wrote about poetry being the language in which man explores his own amazement. I wasn't dealing with exploration. I was moving through territory that had been well mapped out, settled, and developed. I knew when I wrote a poem that I didn't start with a form, or even a memory in some cases. Sometimes I didn't even know what I was writing about until I was pretty far into it. Fry was right. Poetry was a language by which I explored, and the poem became a representation of the journey. Was I selling my students a bill of goods about poetry, inadvertently leading them to think it was something I knew it really wasn't? I didn't know how to answer that question. At first this niggling doubt didn't stop me from opening the unit in the way I always had, and it didn't stop the students from writing poems that ran the gamut. Every year I would have students whose poems could make the class stop breathing until the last syllable had flown up and out of the room like the barn swallows one student wrote

human being is the objectification of that human being into an "other," then it also follows that any curriculum of peace must have at its core the teaching of empathy, "the power to enter into the feeling and spirit of others." 1I But the question still remains: How can we teach, not preach, empathy? How can we empower our students to "enter into" the feeling and spirit of others? One answer lies in a remarkable teaching tool-ecphrastic poetry-and one particular ecphrastic poem of address written by Peter L. Fischl, "To the Little Polish Boy Standing With His Arms Up" (see facing page).

perplexed by the woeful public rhetoric that heaps a good portion of blame for violence on teachers and public schools. Nevertheless, we choose to agree with Mary Rose O'Reilley that we can teach English so people stop hurting and killing each other. In this article we explain our thinking and share our experiences in attempting to develop a Hip-hop-influenced slam poetry curriculum that teaches for peace. Dislodging Violence in the English Classroom

sure to use evidence from the text to support your claims. 50 pts. ROUGH DRAFT due WED. FINAL due FRI." Many of the students just stared at me with a glazed look; others complained, sighed, or whined. When in my literature-teacher mode, I had the authority, the agenda, and the "right" answers. Through writing and answering my recitation questions, students strove to guess as many of these right answers as they could. On Friday, however, I was in my writingcoach mode. Beginning with a poem of mine on the board, I requested, "Help me revise my poem. In your writing folders, write down three suggestions for improvement and something that you liked." Flattered that I had asked for their help, my students wrote and then offered suggestions as I began crossing out, changing, and reordering the text on the board. After thanking them, I reminded them to bring a draft to peer conferences Wednesday. For the next twenty minutes of class, students worked on writing or revising a piece on a topic and in a form of their choice. They submitted their best pieces for grading and publication at the end of the marking period. I sat down at a student desk and wrote with them. As a writing coach, I wanted students to discover their own subjects, experiment with form, publish their work, and care about their writing. Students did not spend the period fishing for right answers; there were no right or wrong writing topics. Do you find these two teaching approaches inconsistent? I did. It was almost as if I were two

prerequisites and gave me background information for seeing historical and critical analysis of the novels. I was sure that I could pass on my love of literature to my students so that they, too, would want to become English majors in college. We started the year with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I remember one student telling me that the best part of the book was the poetry that Emmeline Grangerford wrote. I tried to explain to her that we weren't supposed to like it. Twain included it as a parody of bad poetry. Another student told me that he thought the Cliffs Notes made more sense than the book. Someone else pointed out that it was a waste of time reading any of it because I told them everything they needed to know each day in class. These comments came from "good" students, who accepted what I said about the book, completed assignments, and accurately fed back the information on quizzes and tests. Close to Halloween, after spending about seven weeks on Huck Finn, we started Edgar Allan Poe and Washington Irving. I lectured to students on the characteristics of the romantic period and gothic style, how Irving was making a political statement in "Rip Van Winkle," and I even played them a record of Basil Rathbone reading "The Tell Tale Heart" and "The Raven." I turned the lights off for effect and sat down to listen. In spite of Basil Rathbone's dramatic interpretations, I felt myself nodding off. Walking around the classroom to wake myself up, I refused to admit that I, like my students, was bored and blamed my drowsiness on my late nights of writing lecture notes and grading papers. For six years I assigned students classic literature to read, wrote study questions, gave reading comprehension quizzes, assigned essay topics, and led class discussions to help my students love literature as I did. Rarely did students tell me they liked what we read, nor did they become engaged in discussions beyond answering the questions I asked. I was frustrated with their lack of interest and my growing sense of irrelevance. After all, what was the point of studying literature unless students had an interest in what they were reading beyond getting a good grade? During the eight years I spent at home with my two children, three events changed my views of teaching: My Thursday afternoon book club helped me experience quality contemporary literature and the joys of sharing with and learning from other readers; my involvement at my children's preschool helped me discover student-centered, active learn

y favorite English teacher could draw humor out of the driest material. It wasn't imposed either. He took Samuel Johnson's dictionary, Addison's essays, and many other literary wonders from the eighteenth century and made them hilarious, even at eight o'clock in the morning. The thing that amazed me most was that the first time I read these works on my own some of them seemed dead, but the second time, after his explanation, I couldn't believe that I hadn't seen the humor. The stories and poems and plays were suddenly filled with irony and allusions and hilarious moments. I learned more from him than from any other teacher. My least favorite English teacher also made