Adios

Day One of the Poetry Unit and I am that gooey teachery pie filling that I turn into when my students spend a chunk of time bent over their desks writing intently.  I mean, suffice it to tell you that I am writing this in eighth period, which is usually completely impossible because I have to keep shooting students death stares and getting out of my seat to stand intimidatingly close to the baddies.  There are days where I have "written" in my notebook only for the show of it, scribbling incoherent nonsense about getting. myself. together.

But today is not one of those days.  I read "Adios" by Naomi Shihab Nye to the students, and modeled an approach to poetry designed to help them understand and appreciate poems that can at first seem impossibly dense.  Of course, I chose a poem that was not impossibly dense, so that they could master it.

Now master might be a strong word here, but they did contribute insightful analysis, in addition to the usual randomness.  Best of all, when I asked them to imitate the poem's form, they did. 

I realized during my first in-class reading of the day that I had chosen a poem that reminds me of losing my dad.  I do that pretty often- fail to realize that the reason I love a poem or a passage is because it connects with this most intense emotional memory and experience.  And then I'll be reading it again, sometimes in front of a classroom of students, and think: Oh shoot.  No crying.

No crying today; lots of writing and reading.  And that's really all that I can ask of a Tuesday.