“You have to practice what you teach,” says Teresa Collins, a teacher at Boston College High School. At the poetry retreat and professional development training program held at the Boston Athenaeum, she had a chance to meet with others who share her belief. Collins was one of twenty teachers who signed up immediately for the August 12th and 13th program, which filled up less than 24 hours after it was announced.
The workshops, taught by Jill McDonough and Maggie Dietz, were sponsored by MassPOP and hosted by the Boston Athenaeum. The program, which is part of MassPOP’s long term effort to build audiences for poetry. MassPOP has been testing programs to see which seem most valuable. The teacher training program appears to have worked and will be a regular program for the next couple of years
David Lane, a teacher from Leominster High School, also believes teaching is enhanced by experience in the craft of poetry and found the program workshops exciting because they emphasized the process of writing. “We learned what the teacher as writer can bring to the student.” Saying the program “fed my soul,” Lane particularly liked the fact that the program focused on the process of experiencing poetry.
Avoiding the we’re-doing-poetry groan
Given that experiencing rather than interpreting poetry is key to success, teaching it may not follow the New Criticism guidelines for close reading of text. “If I say we are going to read poetry, my students usually groan,” says Lane, who believes that line by line interpretation can be deadly to classroom involvement. “But if I’m more subtle about announcing a poem, they love it.” Connor Ryan, a teacher from Marblehead High School, agrees. “My students get involved through the sounds of a poem, by listening to the rhythm of a line, or by looking at how an interesting enjambment can suggest first one meaning and then another on the following line. They also get enjoyment out of interesting and appealing images.”
Given students’ natural affinity for sound, Collins found Jill McDonough’s session on meter helpful. “She spent of lot of time on exercises that encourage play in learning about rhythm.”
Both Ryan and Lane agreed with Collins that students prefer contemporary poetry. “They struggle with Milton and John Donne, but they love poets like Billy Collins,” she says. Other poets mentioned as favorites of students are Alice Walker, Sharon Olds, Langston Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Theodore Roethke.
Every Monday Ryan spends some time on contemporary poetry in his AP classes. “I introduce a poem by reading it. I use poems from Ted Kooser’s American Life In Poetry or Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. Usually the weekly poem feature has caught on so well by January that students start bringing in poems they want to share with the rest of the class.”
Lane liked hearing the favorite poems of the workshop leaders. He also found extremely helpful the resources offered in the workshops—from both the leaders as well as fellow teachers.
Teachers’ Perk – a Yearlong Membership to the Athenaeum
In addition to the value of the workshops, another perk the teachers received is a yearlong membership in the Athenaeum, the Boston library all three described in superlatives. Lane adds, “It’s a temple to literature and art.” Collins has already been back. And she expects to visit often.
When asked whether they would recommend the program to other teachers, each of the three was enthusiastic. “I already have,” says Lane.
How the Program Came About
Chloe Garcia Roberts of MassPOP says that idea for the program came from a meeting between her and Jill McDonough. “Jill has a longstanding relationship with the Athenaeum, and she brought MassPOP together with the Athenaeum’s Mary Warnement, William D. Hacker Head of Reader Services, and Monica Higgins, Director of Events in planning this program.” Both organizations are pleased with the results. “The Anthenaeum was a wonderful host for us and for the teachers and MassPOP is grateful for the resources they provided,” says Garcia Roberts.
Garcia Roberts is putting together a handbook of resources for the teachers who attended. The funding for the handbook along with a copy for each of the teachers of Muriel Rukeyser’s The Life of Poetry, published by Paris Press, was generously provided by Mass Humanities.
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