Spirit Week or Been There and Did the Denim

Where’s Fonzie when I need him for fashion advice?

It’s Spirit Week next week, which gives a bit of a break to the countdown tedium of stuffy classrooms. Rumor has it we have AC. Thanks, I’ll get back to you on that.

I’m one of those wacky teachers that likes to dress up, yet not so much I don’t regret it by third period. Wearing silly gets thin after about two hours for me.

Here is the venue: I am so open to suggestions

Monday: 90′s–denim?

Tuesday: 80′s–legwarmers workout spandex?

Wednesday: 70′s –Flashdance?

Thursday: 60′s–I got the overalls and love beads (peace  out)

Friday: lost in the fifties (I own saddle shoes)

This will be a nice respite from the dress code violations of tube tops and short shorts. “But everyone else wears them!”

I don’t get into countdown mode until after Memorial Day weekend. But I’m reconsidering it after this week.

What We Say #1

The Word Geek in me is rising forth once again.

Having loaned out a book so long ago I thought I had inadvertently donated to Somewhere (Friends of the Library book sale, Goodwill, who knows), I did a happy dance to have it once again returned to me.  I gleaned it long ago when deleting old and dilapidated items from the school library.  Only a Word Geek would appreciate this title:

It’s full of idioms and the background of why we say what we say.  Published in 1953, it’s actually older than I am; however, when I do utter some of these expressions now and then my students do that sideways eye glance at each other, and I will know they haven’t a clue what I am talking about.  This book, now back in my possession, helps me explain why we say what we say.

For instance:

“His excuse about not reading the assignment was above board.”

>What’s she talking about?<

>I dunno.  It’s one of her odd things she says<

Well, it’s not that odd when you think about it.  Sailors deal with the water in two ways: what goes on below, and thus unseen, and what goes on above, which is most easily seen.  When things could be seen easily, clearly, straightforward, and even honestly it was considered above board, or above the water line.

Hence, the student’s excuse about not reading the assigned homework was honest.  I believed the reason.

>Why didn’t she say that in the first place?<

>I dunno.  She says stuff like that all the time.<

Has anyone got an idiom you say but haven’t the foggiest what it means?  Betcha my lil book explains it.  Send ‘em my way.

 

Poetry Workshop: #2 Definition Poems

DEFINITION POETRY

Take any word or concept or topic and define through a mix or poetical flow and concrete definition to better understand what it is all about, especially on a personal level.

 So It Is With Language

Grammar is the spine

Of prose and all we know

That is called language,

Which is can be spoken

Or written down.

And all those nouns

And verbs

And prepositions

And modifiers that often dangle

And nominative clauses that

Sometimes tangle

Up

Our understanding

Are the vertebrae

And without our vertebrae

There would be not spine

To stand us up

So it is with language

CM-2012

 Childhood

Childhood is that momentary suspense

of disbelief and discovery

That happens all too quickly

Yet,

that eye blink lasts a goodly twelve years by the book

Or quicker

depending on the generation

And for a lucky few

childhood remains

only hidden in discretion

likely to pop out

as the sun peeps behind

the seriousness of gray skies

to offset the dour day

CM-2012

What I appreciate most about definition poetry is how it allows flexibility of perspective.  It captures connotation and denotation without being all textbookish.  And isn’t it oh so clever to sneak in a vocabulary lesson whilst having fun creating wordplay?

Related articles

• Rule One (leeroyberlin.com)
• “Playing With Definitions” (studentpoetry2013.wordpress.com)
• Shaping Up Poetry: Found Poems (cricketmuse.wordpress.com)

Poetry Workshop: #1 Repetition Poems

I take seriously the celebration of poetry (understatement–AP terms #179).I took on the personal challenge of posting once a day some poetically inclined muse about poetry and as we wrap up the month I shall share some workshop poems from my creative writing class.

Poetry Workshop Poem #1: Repetition Poems

REPETITION POETRY

1. Pick a word or short phrase for the first line
2. Add a word or phrase to it for the second line
3. Take the ending line to create the consecutive lines, adding a new word or phrase each time until poem reaches a satisfactory conclusion

In the garden there is a tree

And in that tree is thinking spot

And in that thinking spot are my daydreams

And in my daydreams are pathways

And on those pathways are choices to make

And from those choices to make I will decide

And from those decisions will become my destiny

And from that destiny I will live my life

And I will live my life always dreaming, always thinking

And I am thankful for trees

CM–2012

 

Repetition poems are perfect for those students who lament how they can’t get into the poem groove and get something on paper.  It’s also perfect for those who can take its simplicity and play with it.  And yes, I create poems along with my students.  Who can resist coaxing a poem onto the page?

Happy Poetry Month!!

Related articles

• Shaping Up Poetry: Found Poems (cricketmuse.wordpress.com)
• Shaping Up Poetry: Concrete Poems (cricketmuse.wordpress.com)
• Coming to Terms with Poetry (cricketmuse.wordpress.com)
• April is National Poetry Month (silverbirchpress.wordpress.com)

Forming Poetry: Terse Verse

Terse: short or brief

Verse: associated with poetry, as in a line that rhymes

Terse Verse: a short poem in which the answer is a two-word rhyme definition of the presented word

Examples:

Kleenex–sneeze please
Perfume-swell smell
Bib–drool tool
Binder–holder folder
Pencil–school tool
Baker–flour power
Candy–sweet treat
Shakespeare–stage sage
Turkey–absurd bird

Submit your best (or worst–PG, please) Terse Verse.

Over the years I’ve collected quite a few, and the students keep amazing me with their ingenuity.

Related articles

• A Garden of Verses (cricketmuse.wordpress.com)
• Shaping Up Poetry: Concrete Poems (cricketmuse.wordpress.com)
• Coming to Terms with Poetry (cricketmuse.wordpress.com)
• Shaping Up Poetry: Found Poems (cricketmuse.wordpress.com)

 

Spoken Poetry

Poetry is an… (Photo credit: liber(the poet);)

Have you ever attended a Poetry Slam?  This  is where poetry gets to break out of its stuffy stereotypical silently read and reflected mode.  A Poetry Slam is where poets perform their poetry.  Recitation is accompanied by dramatics and the audience gets in on the action through rating the performance.  It’s amazing.  It will forever change your opinion that poetry can only be recited in dull monotones from a podium in front of barely stirring, half-asleep listeners.

One of my favorite Spoken Poetry artists is Taylor Mali. Not only was he formerly a teacher, he is one of the few poets who is actually making a living as a poet.  Go to his website or type in his name on YouTube for any number of his videos.  Much of his poetry deals with his experiences, opinions, and outlook as a teacher.  I can definitely relate to the subject matter–yet, his words reach to a wider audience as well.

His most repeated poem is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuBmSbiVXo0

We held a poetry slam at our local library a few years ago.  One of my students performed her work and left the audience, mainly middle-schoolers with a smattering of high schoolers, cheering and clapping.  She was supposed to go on the regionals and couldn’t due to her age (16). Who would have thought talent could be hemmed in by being too young?

Check out Poetry Slams and next time someone says poetry is boring you can plug in a Taylor Mali and then ask for their revised opinion.

Happy Poetry Month!

Related articles

• National Poetry Month: Host a Poetry Slam (bloomingedu.wordpress.com)
• “Future Perfect,” My First Poetry Slam (shoshanasarah.com)
• Coming to Terms with Poetry (cricketmuse.wordpress.com)

The Epicness of Poetry part two

Today we look at Homer.

This one:

Not this one:

Homer wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey, but you knew that.

These are both considered epic poems and boy, oh boy are they epic in the sense of BIG.  They are big in size (The Iliad is nearly 16,000 lines and The Odyssey is about 12,000), big on adventure, and have big heroes as well.  These two poems have also made a big impact on literature, culture, and on Hollywood.

Quick rundown:
The Iliad is mainly about Achilles and his fighting in the Trojan War (yes, think Brad Pitt in Troy), while The Odyssey is mainly about Odysseus and his adventures trying to get home from the Trojan War.

Cover of Troy – The Director’s Cut [Blu-ray]

Why should you care about these really, really old poems (besides them being so incredibly epic)?  I’ll let the PhD expert analysis people at Shmoop explain all that:

The Iliad
You want large scale clashing armies? You’ve come to the right place. Even matched duels or obviously unmatched duels? Check out the long one-on-one combat descriptions, or that crazy nonsense between Paris and Menelaus. Spy thriller? Odysseus’s nighttime raid totally fits the bill. Nail-biting special ops missions? The Trojan Horse ruse has your name written all over it. Swords-and-sorcerers magic adventure? Try anything with the gods busting in on the action, like, say, that whole Laocoon fiasco. Snakes—yikes. In short, anything exciting you’ve ever seen or heard or read started right here.But that’s not all. Not only does the Iliad put the act into action, but it puts the philosophy in there, too. This isn’t just a reductive Good Guys versus Bad Guys bit of disposable nothing. Instead, what’s behind all that fighting is a whole lot of thinking about what the fighting means.

The Odyssey
Do you like stories full of adventure, danger, and suspense? How about stories set in fantastic worlds full of strange creatures like Cyclopses, witches, sirens, and gods? If so, then you’re in luck, because Homer’s Odyssey is Western literature’s original adventure story, and its first foray into the fantasy genre. If you need any proof of how much Homer’s poem defined this genre, just consider the fact that we now use the word “odyssey” simply to mean adventure.

Beowulf, The Iliad, and The Odyssey are old, or classic, epic poems.  We now move on to contemporary, or considerably younger epic poems.

Next Post: Lost in Paradise is not the same thing as Paradise Lost

Related articles

• Review of “The Song of Achilles” by Madeline Miller (rhapsodyinbooks.wordpress.com)
• Study suggests Homeric epics were written in 762 BCE, give or take (santafe.edu)

The Epicness of Poetry

Beowulf, The Iliad, and The Odyssey.  How could you get through public education and not have to study at least one of these? (Actually, I did–but that’s a different post). In our hurry-up world t’s not often we sit down and commit to reading 3,000 plus lines.  Welcome to Epic Poetry 101.

We tend to think of these triads of classic adventures as stories or myths.  Actually they are all poems.  Really long poems.  This is what makes them epic.

A brief pause…

Understanding Epic.

Today’s meaning:

image: suilynn.wordpress.com

Actual Meaning: (thanks Dictionary.com)

ep·ic

/ˈepik/

Noun A long poem, typically derived from oral tradition, narrating the deeds and adventures of heroic or legendary figures or the history of…

Adjective Of, relating to, or characteristic of an epic or epics.

Synonyms noun. epos – epopee adjective. heroic – epical

Back to our blog post…

Now that epic real definition versus epic contemporary understanding is out of the way, moving on to epic poetry will make much more sense. Epic poetry is epic because it is BIG. It’s big in scope, deed, theme, length–it’s just, well, epic (dude). Plus, it’s so big that it is italicized (or underlined or bolded) instead of the usually “quotes around poems” bit of mechanics.  Yup, this poetry is so big that it gets to change the punctuation rules.

Although technically I should address Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey first, I’m going with Beowulf, not so much because it’s considered the foundation of English literature and it introduces the dragon slayer archetype as well as mix pagan and Christian thematic elements–I choose it first because of Gerard Butler made Beowulf come to life for me.

image: tumblr.com

If you’ve never studied Beowulf, you should–don’t believe the Angelina Jolie version is Beowulf.  Nope. T’snt at all. Gerard Butler’s version isn’t either. So heads up Hollywood, we need a REAL version of this monumentally important epic poem.  Here’s to get you started…

Beowulf Key Facts ala Sparknotes:

full title  ·  Beowulf

author  · Unknown

type of work  · Poem

genre  · Alliterative verse; elegy; resembles heroic epic, though smaller in scope than most classical epics

language  · Anglo-Saxon (also called Old English)

time and place written  · Estimates of the date of composition range between 700 and 1000 a.d.; written in England

date of first publication  · The only manuscript in which Beowulf is preserved is thought to have been written around 1000 a.d.

publisher  · The original poem exists only in manuscript form.

narrator  · A Christian narrator telling a story of pagan times

point of view  · The narrator recounts the story in the third person, from a generally objective standpoint—detailing the action that occurs. The narrator does, however, have access to every character’s depths. We see into the minds of most of the characters (even Grendel) at one point or another, and the narrative also moves forward and backward in time with considerable freedom.

tone  · The poet is generally enthusiastic about Beowulf’s feats, but he often surrounds the events he narrates with a sense of doom.

tense  · Past, but with digressions into the distant past and predictions of the future

setting (time)  · The main action of the story is set around 500 a.d.; the narrative also recounts historical events that happened much earlier.

setting (place)  · Denmark and Geatland (a region in what is now southern Sweden)

protagonist  · Beowulf

major conflict  · The poem essentially consists of three parts. There are three central conflicts: Grendel’s domination of Heorot Hall; the vengeance of Grendel’s mother after Grendel is slain; and the rage of the dragon after a thief steals a treasure that it has been guarding. The poem’s overarching conflict is between close-knit warrior societies and the various menaces that threaten their boundaries.

rising action  · Grendel’s attack on Heorot, Beowulf’s defeat of Grendel, and Grendel’s mother’s vengeful killing of Aeschere lead to the climactic encounter between Beowulf and Grendel’s mother.

climax  · Beowulf’s encounter with Grendel’s mother constitutes the moment at which good and evil are in greatest tension.

falling action  · Beowulf’s glorious victory over Grendel’s mother leads King Hrothgar to praise him as a worthy hero and to advise him about becoming king. It also helps Beowulf to transform from a brazen warrior into a reliable king.

themes  · The importance of establishing identity; tensions between the heroic code and other value systems; the difference between a good warrior and a good king

motifs  · Monsters; the oral tradition; the mead-hall

symbols  · The golden torque; the banquet

foreshadowing  · The funeral of Shield Sheafson, with which the poem opens, foreshadows Beowulf’s funeral at the poem’s end; the story of Sigemund told by the scop, or bard, foreshadows Beowulf’s fight with the dragon; the story of King Heremod foreshadows Beowulf’s eventual ascendancy to kingship.

If you are up for reading the poem:

Gutenberg Project

If you want an entertaining analysis:

Shmoop

If you want to skip Beowulf and go to The Iliad and The Odyssey

New Post

Related articles

• Wealtheow: Her Telling of Beowulf (2012introductiontowritingandenglishstudies.wordpress.com)
• Three: Poetry Class, Day 1 (poeticallyversed.wordpress.com)
• bonnie’s #CBR5 Review #14: Grendel by John Gardner (cannonballread5.wordpress.com)

Coming to Terms with Poetry

education (Photo credit: Sean MacEntee)

They say the best education we receive is that learned while teaching.  I found this to be especially true for poetry fundamentals.

I don’t recall studying poetry in jr. high English, unless studying Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sounds of Silence” counts.  As for high school, I remember short stories, yet nothing on the poetry radar comes up for remembrance. College yes, ohmagoodness, poetry aplenty. I do recall a cacophony of emotions as I partook in the banquet of poets found in my Norton Reader. I transversed from embarrassment to  gratitude as I feasted on William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Plath and others I had not known existed.  Why, oh why, did I feel the compunction to resell my Norton at the campus bookstore?  College students out there?  Think twice before reselling your textbooks.  All those annotations and well-visited markings really do become appreciated some day.

norton reader (Photo credit: cdrummbks)

These days I’m teaching to Common Core Standards and have come to terms with poetry.  They are an absolute on the schedule of attained knowledge.  I also have my AP crowd to cater.  Although I have over 200 literary terms we learn over the course of  the year in AP, I start out my ninth graders with double dozen or so.  How many do you know or remember?

1. accent: emphasis or stress given a syllable or a particular word.
2. alliteration: the reiterated initial consonants in prose or poetry.
3. anaphora: repetition of an opening word or phrase in a series of lines.
4. assonance:  the repetition of two or more vowel sounds in successive words, creating a type of rhyme.
5. ballad: a song which tells a story; also be a poem with songlike qualities which tells a story.
6. blank verse: the most common meter of unrhymed poetry in English; it lacks stanza form and rhyme.
7. caesura: a pause within the line of verse.
8. conceit: a fanciful expression, usually in the form of an extended metaphor or an analogy that usually displays intellectual cleverness due to the unusual comparison being made.
9. consonance: a close similarity between consonants or groups of consonants, especially at the ends of words, e.g. between “strong” and “ring.”
10. couplet: two consecutive lines of poetry that rhyme, and often have the same meter
11. diction: the selection of words in a particular literary work, or the language appropriate for a particular (usually poetic) work.
12. doggerel: crude verse that contains clichés, predictable rhyme, and inept meter and rhythm.
13. elegy: a poem which mourns the death of someone.
14. enjambment: when one verse runs into another verse
15. epic: a long narrative poem on a serious subject, usually centered on a heroic or supernatural person.
16. epigram: a short poem, which can be comical.
17. figurative language: language which goes beyond what is denoted (see denotation), and has a suggestive effect on the reader; a figure of speech is part of figurative language.
18. free verse: poetry which lacks a regular stress pattern and regular line lengths (and which may also be lacking in rhyme). Free verse should not be confused with blank verse
19. haiku: Japanese form of poetry of seventeen syllables with three unrhymed lines of five, seven and five syllables
20. heroic couplet: a couplet with iambic pentameter
21. iamb: a metrical foot of one short or unstressed syllable followed by one long or stressed syllable.
22. imagery: often taken as a synonym for figurative language, but the term may also refer to the ‘mental pictures’ which the reader experiences in his/her response to literary works or other texts.
23. kitsch: sentimentality, tastelessness, or ostentation in any of the arts.
24. limerick: a five line humorous poem involving a fixed aabba rhyme scheme
25. lyric: a short non-narrative poem that has a solitary speaker, and that usually expresses a particular feeling, mood, or thought.
26. metaphor: a direct comparison–it does not use “like,” “as,” or “than.” In literature it is a figurative statement asserting one thing is something that it is not.
27. meter: the recurrence of a similar stress pattern in some or all lines of a poem.
28. ode: a relatively lengthy lyric poem, usually expressing exalted emotion in a complex scheme of rhyme and meter.
29. onomatopoeia: a word or expression which resembles the sound which it represents, like the meow of a cat or the quack of a duck.
30. pastoral: usually written by an urban poet who idealizes the shepherds’ lives. The term has now been extended to include any literary work which views and idealizes the simple life from the perspective of a more complex life.
31. prosody: the rhythm of spoken language, including stress and intonation, or the study of these patterns
32. repetition: the duplication of any element of language such as a sound, word, phrase, sentence, or grammatical pattern.
33. rhyme: the identity of the sounds of the final syllables (usually stressed) of certain proximate lines of a poem.
34. scan: to assign stress patterns to a poem.
35. simile: a figure of speech that draws a comparison between two different things, especially a phrase containing the word “like” or “as,” e.g. “as white as a sheet.”
36. symbol: a person, place, thing, or event that stands both for itself and for something beyond itself.
37. syntax: how an author chooses to join words into phrases, clauses, and sentences; similar to diction which is focused on individual words, yet syntax is concerned with groups of words.
38. theme:  the central idea or insight about human life revealed within the work.
39. tone: the attitude, as it is revealed in the language of a literary work, of a personage, narrator or author, towards the other personages in the work or towards the reader.
40. voice: the writer’s distinctive use of language, which is created through the use of a writer’s tone and diction.

 Okay, there is about a triple dozen and a dose for good measure here. Some terms crossover into prose which is why we start off with poetry before short stories. We’ve found our students grasp analyzing smaller chunks of literary concepts and then retain those terms and skills for the longer works.

So, how did you do?  I didn’t include the various types of poems in this set.  Stay tuned…

Happy Poetry Month

Poetry (Photo credit: Kimli)

Related articles

• A Garden of Verses (cricketmuse.wordpress.com)
• What is ‘Iambic Pentameter’? (redvinylchair.com)
• American Rhyme and Reason (cricketmuse.wordpress.com)
• Five Things We All Love About Poetry (nakanno1.wordpress.com)

 

The Ruing of Breaking

rue ¹ (r)

v. rued, ru·ing, rues

v.tr.

To feel regret, remorse, or sorrow for.

v.intr.

To feel regret, remorse, or sorrow.

n.

It never fails.  About the time I begin to feel *normal* I go back to work.  For those of you who are not teachers I may not get much sympathy–after all, most of the world does not get large chunks of time off scattered throughout the year like educator types do.  Skip this post then.  I really don’t want to read comments about whatever am I complaining about getting almost two weeks off for Christmas Break.  This post is more about coping with the deprogramming I go through while on break.  I definitely feel regret, remorse, and/or sorrow; I rue.

Now don’t get me wrong.  I don’t rue my choice of career.  I love teaching.  Some days I even like it (old joke).  What I rue is how intensely I view my career.  I don’t stop thinking school during my break and I am constantly forming  lesson plans, looking up new sites, checking mail (answering questions from students–yes, I will write you a reference letter), and refining old units as I create new ones. That creative energy, that inertia of teaching doesn’t just quietly wait for me in the classroom; it follows me home and won’t let me enjoy reading a book without marking a passage to share with students, I can’t read the newspaper without clipping out an article that underscores a lesson recently covered, and I’m unable to work on my writing because of all those teacherly cobwebs covering up my creativity.

Until today.  Today I woke up and felt like teaching is a distant memory, a fond reminiscence, something I once did.  Today I really got the urge to write, write, write.  New ideas, a resurgence of purpose, a desire to edit and revise and investigate new publishing opportunities.  Aah, then there is the crashing reality of it being Friday and knowing I return to the classroom on Monday, meaning writing will once again take a nestled backseat to my day, that is f I have time and energy after grading papers and configuring another day’s set of lessons.

Today is today.  Monday is Monday.  I shall not rue my break, only embrace the fact it gives me glimmer of what retirement might be like.

P.S. I found this documentary at the library: American Teacher. Wow! What an eye-opener.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzvD9v7CbEE

To all teachers out there: January is that much closer to June. Hang in there!