An Example of a Teaching Essay - Goddard College's Intranet

Teaching Essay, Ken Damerow
• I Used to.../But Now... to look at comparisons and contrasts and
change;
• and a culminating Mix-up Poem in which the children are encouraged
to use a combination of all the poetical ideas learned thus far.
We began with a collaborative I Wish poem in which each child would write one line
beginning “I wish.” In starting with a collaboration, I was hoping to hook reluctant writers,
to ease their preconceived notions of poetry as something remote, something they felt they
couldn’t do. Each student was not responsible for the whole poem but for only one line.
I used a few models from Koch’s book, reading them once myself and then asking
for volunteers to read into the microphone to “get the poem into our ears and into our
minds.” The read aloud also serves the purpose of creating a classroom community
centered around the sharing of a poem, of providing kids the opportunity to practice public
speaking, and of providing the teacher an opportunity to teach through modeling that poems
are works of art to be seriously considered and highly valued. I then asked the students what
things they noticed about the poem. I asked them, “Who’s talking to who about what?” to
get at meaning and reader response. Then I prompted them to think about language and
structure elements asking how the poet achieves the meaning and how the poem looks on the
page. My goal here was to encourage them to come first to an individual reading of the
poem and discus different interpretations and second to identify ways in which poets craft
their work. The first question excited them by encouraging personal connections with the
work while the second taught them to read for craft. These were the insights I was hoping
would spill over into their prose writing.
I continued to be impressed about how students can pick apart poetry and talk about
it intelligently. Koch’s point about using kid language is important, however. I was careful
in not using formal terms like metaphor, assonance, alliteration, etc. as I had done in previous
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