The Final Stretch

          In just over a month I will be graduating from the MAET program at Michigan State University.  As part of the capstone course for this program, I have been doing a lot of collecting and reflecting on my work from the past three years.  I am so proud of what I have been able to accomplish in this short amount of time.
          The next month is going to be a lot of hard work, but I look forward to having my weekends back soon!

Twitter Pitch

I choose the road that involves perceiving, patterning, abstracting, embodied thinking, modeling, and playing; and that will make all the difference.

Elevator Pitch

You may also watch this pitch on Youtube.

Birth of a Salesman

Birth of a Salesman

A Sales Pitch for Creativity in Curriculum Planning

Chloe Tingley

Children are born with a natural inclination toward exploring and questioning.   Our challenge as educators is to teach them the material in the curriculum in a way that lends itself to these instincts.  While it may be easier and faster to hand them material, practice it with them, and finally assess it to make sure that they’ve learned it, this is not an effective practice.  This method of teaching takes away the student’s control over their learning and fails to recognize that a specific method, even one that has proven itself to be effective with a number of children, will not lead to understanding for all of our students.  In order to reach more students, we must demonstrate to our students that we value creative thinking and let them help us to use creativity in our classrooms.

            It is really fulfilling to witness the moment in a student’s learning when they make sense of a concept or find the answer to a question they’ve been researching.  It is also important for students to be a part of the questioning process.  They need to challenge the boundaries of what they have learned in books by asking their own questions.  In chapter two of Sparks of Genius the authors discuss the problems that can arise when we treat each school subject as an independent entity.  If we can show our students how art can help them with math or how math can help them understand poetry, then we can help students use their strengths to overcome their weaknesses.

            I do not consider myself an artistic person, but I do enjoy it.  The product of my efforts is sometimes disappointing, but the process never fails to feed my spirit.  I chose poetry as my content area not because I consider myself a poet, but because it is a challenge for me.  I hoped that by exploring poetry using the tools in the book, I would feel more comfortable teaching and even writing poetry.  Fortunately, that is exactly what happened.  I discovered that my strengths in other areas can help me make sense of poetry

In school we read poetry to students and ask them to write poems of their own.  I do not recall, however, being asked to observe poetry.  Observing and using imagery can help us better understand poetry as well as other subjects.  A word or concept will bring different images to mind for different people.  Discussing these differences can help us see other points of view.  Using observing and imaging are often thought of as strictly visual behaviors.  In Sparks of Genius we learned about how we might observe using our other senses.  We might know what an insect looks like, but what it sounds like or smells like may tell us more about it.      

Patterns are everywhere and we experience them with all of our senses.  There are patterns in music, language, history and science.  By recognizing patterns we are able to find solutions to problems and sometimes identify problems that we didn’t know existed.  I often associate patterns with math.  Rarely does the word pattern come up when I am teaching other subjects, but it is just as important to the other disciplines and completely appropriate.  Once students are comfortable with recognizing patterns, they can more easily form patterns of their own.  We want students to make connections and form patterns that will help them make sense of things.  In the process they may also show us new ways of seeing things.  We can challenge our students to question patterns, alter them, or continue them.  The concept of patterns can be applied to subject areas other than math.  In language arts I ask students to connect the things they read to other stories or events.  This is a way of recognizing patterns.  Asking students to form patterns is a bigger challenge.  Poetry almost always fits a pattern.  Poems are also very conducive to creativity.  Just writing poetry in itself is an act of creativity.  The challenge then is to help students not only to recognize the patterns in poetry, but to form them for themselves and to give them the opportunity and freedom to challenge the patterns. 

Abstracting involves really focusing on the basics of an object or concept to get to the fundamental workings of it.  It might involve using all of our senses.  Picasso told us that we must see with our minds, not our eyes.  Truly getting to know to know the nature of something is challenging, but rewarding.  When something is stripped to its core we are better able to see how it relates to something else.  Analogizing takes place when we “remove all traces of reality” to find the “idea” of something.  Analogies are the relationships that two things have based on a single, basic characteristic.  Analogies are relationships where no obvious similarities can be seen.  Children may be better than we assume them to be at creating abstractions and making analogies.  They are likely to have fewer preconceived notions to prevent them from seeing things in new ways.   Abstract poetry uses rhythms, textures, and sounds to convey its message.  It is sometimes the way the words are printed on the page that tells us something about the author’s intention. 

There are many things we can do without thinking.  Some of those things we can do because we have done them so many times that they have become automatic.  We rely on muscle memory.  Other movements we just feel.  It was the process and not the final product that the artists in chapter eight were trying to convey.  The sculptors revealed that it was a very physical experience to create their pieces.  They referred not simply to the act of adding to or removing from their medium, but the way they had to use their bodies in order to feel what it was they were trying to express.  Dance is a physical experience already, but when I am learning new choreography and my instructor asks if we want to try it with the music or without, my response is always with.  The steps don’t fully come together for me until I feel how they interact with the music.  I can know the steps, but it is the music that will tell me how to perform them.  I had not thought of empathizing in such a physical way before reading this chapter.  I always described empathizing as seeing a situation from someone else’s point of view.  I hadn’t considered that it also means imagining what it is like to actually be someone or something else.  Poetry is rarely a physical experience for the reader.  The author of a poem, however, may have to live an experience as the sculptors in the chapter did in order to write about it authentically.  In order to express an experience in words you must first know exactly how it feels. 

The chapter on dimensional thinking talked about many ways to think about dimension that I had not thought about before.  One example is the way that shadows behave under different conditions.  A single object can have an infinite number of differently shaped shadows depending on its position, the position and type of light, and the material from which it is made.  I was thinking back to the first zoom in from this course for which we zoomed in on an object and asked others to figure out what it was.  Perhaps students could capture several shadows of an object with the same goal in mind.  Similarly, what would different objects look like when sliced into layers?  Two different layers of the same food or toy may look like completely different objects. 

I sometimes forget in the routine of the day to stop and look at the concepts I am teaching from other angles.  In math, zooming in on a concept and really breaking it down into its simplest form can do a lot to help students see what is really going on.  Zooming out on the other hand, for instance in social studies, can help us to see how events in one part of the world relate to those in going on in others.  The events that are happening in other parts of the world affect events close to home.  To teach history without zooming out to capture the big picture would leave out large pieces of the puzzle.

            The chapter on modeling illustrated the importance of model building in order to fully understand something.  The act of physically creating a model allows a person to adapt and make changes when they are met with unforeseen challenges.  Models give us the feeling of being there and allow us to control a situation, or to find aspects of the situation we can’t control.  Even those who we consider to be original and innovative thinkers confess that they looked to people who came before them for a place to begin.  While their end product was something that had not been seen before, they used models created by previous artists and academics as inspiration.  Building models teaches us how to use imaging, analogizing, and dimensional thinking skills.  In the classroom models are imperative for teaching about things that we cannot show students in person.  A functional model can help us show students how the heart pumps blood through the body.  A physical model can show us what the inside of our ear looks like.  Models also serve to help students to imitate a process such as poetry or multiplication.  They can use our examples as models and try things for themselves. 

            In the classroom, as well as other areas in our lives, we get into the habit of separating work and play.  The people in the Playing chapter lived their lives in a way that enabled them to play within their fields.  Taking the play out of work makes it drudgery.  Allowing for play and worrying less about doing things solely for a given purpose makes the work feel effortless.  The math curriculum used in my district created games, some that kids already know, and tweaked them so that they reinforce the concepts taught in the text.  The games build on each other as students get older.  This way of giving students practice but making the learning fun is very helpful.  Students don’t feel that they are behind or being punished when they are offered the chance to play the games, yet they are getting practice they need.  Poetry is fun to read and to write if you find the right style and subject.  People play with poetry in many ways.  They play with the content, the rhythm, the words, and the layout as they write.  The definition of what can be considered poetry is in the eye of the creator.  I am encouraged to do some more creative poetry with students by letting them throw away some of the rules.  

An initial step to transformation has to be the acknowledgement that something other than what you “know” to be true is possible.  Instead of creating a picture based on the information they were seeing, they tried to make the pieces they had created fit- which they could not do.  Instead of asking if their information was flawed, they assumed that the new information was.  Transformational thinking only occurred after modeling, painting, and reenacting took place.  The chapter on transformation showed us that ideas, not conclusions, should be the goal.  We need to be looking for answers, not the answer.  Finding answers should not be the end of our exploration.  If the first method we attempt leads us to an answer we are often tempted to stop there.  If we think about that as a beginning, however, and look for other ways to think about a problem, that is when transformation happens.    Designing our curriculum to cover a topic for a specific period of time and then assess it and move on gives students the idea that they have learned all they need to know on that topic.  While assessment is an integral part of school, assessment should be presented to students as a way of finding out what they have learned so far.

Sparks of Genius has made me look at every area of my teaching in a new way.  I have always aspired to be a creative teacher, but sometimes that concept is a bit abstract.  What exactly does that mean?  This book has given me tools with which to examine teaching, thinking, and learning.  It is a lot to take in, but I am certain I will reference this book in the future to remind myself to look at my teaching in new ways.  

How Do I Love Thee? Play and Transformation

Robert frost referred to poetry as “serious play.”  Some poets, however, are not so serious.  Poets like Edward Lear and Shel Silverstein choose topics that are playful and silly.  Their books are beloved by children and adults all over the world.  Shel Silverstein writes about things relatable to children such as school, chores, and monsters.  While looking through some of these poems I came across this unique poem written in all characters.

A poem appeared in the May/June 1990 issue of Infocus magazine and has since been floating around the Internet. The original authors were Fred Bremmer and Steve Kroese of Calvin College & Seminary of Grand Rapids, Michigan.

The poem can only be appreciated by reading it aloud, to wit:

Waka Waka Bang Splat!

The first internet special-characters poem

<  >  !   *  '  '  #
     Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash,
    ^  "    `    $   $  -
     Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash,

    !  *  =  @  $    _
     Bang splat equal at dollar under-score,

    %   *   <  >  ~   #   4
     Percent splat waka waka tilde number four,

      @     [    ]   . .  /
     Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash,

     |       {      ,    ,   SYSTEM HALTED
     Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH.

If students were shown this poem what would it inspire?

If we give them permission to redefine what makes something a poem what will they create?

            Poets often decide which rules they will follow.  Some poems do not appear to follow any.  When teaching poetry to children, however, we tend to start by teaching the rules.  There is certainly value in the rules, but I believe we need to let students know that the rules of poetry can sometimes be broken.  

The Big Idea- Play and Transformation

            In the classroom, as well as other areas in our lives, we get into the habit of separating work and play.  What has been so inspiring and motivating about this course is that most of the time the work and play were intermingled.  The people in the Playing chapter lived their lives in this way.  As Feynman discovered, taking the play out of work makes it drudgery.  Allowing for play and worrying less about importance makes the work feel effortless.

Alexander Fleming was said to have taken games and made them more challenging.  The math curriculum used in my district does something similar.  The authors of Everyday Math took games, some that kids already know, and tweaked them so that they reinforce the concepts taught in a particular chapter of the text.  The games build on each other as students get older.  This way of giving students practice but making the learning fun is very helpful.  Students don’t feel that they are behind or being punished when they are offered the chance to play the games, yet they are getting practice they need.  I have even seen some students change the rules as Fleming was known to do, to make a game more challenging.  

It was easy to find examples of play in my content area.  Poetry is fun to read and to write if you find the right style and subject.  People play with poetry in many ways.  They play with the content, the rhythm, the words, and the layout as they write.  The definition of what can be considered poetry is in the eye of the creator.  I am encouraged to do some more creative poetry with students by letting them throw away some of the rules.   

An initial step to transformation has to be the acknowledgement that something other than what you “know” to be true is possible.  When Leakey’s team discovered hominid footprints, people were unwilling to believe, based on what they knew about hominids, that it could indeed be possible.  Instead of creating a picture based on the information they were seeing, they tried to make the pieces they had created fit- which they could not do.  Instead of asking if their information was flawed, they assumed that the new information was.  Transformational thinking only occurred after modeling, painting, and reenacting took place.  This has happened throughout history.

The chapter on transformation also discussed the idea that ideas, not conclusions, should be the goal.  We need to be looking for answers, not the answer.  Finding answers should not be the end of our exploration.  If the first method we attempt leads us to an answer we are often tempted to stop there.  If we think about that as a beginning, however, and look for other ways to think about a problem, that is when transformation happens.    The more representations of an idea we can generate, the more people we have the possibility of reaching.  As the authors mentioned, different representations will speak to different people.

Zoom In! Playing

My son the NINJA!

A closer look...

I took a picture of my husband holding my son in the air and a picture of my husband defending himself (from nothing).  After cutting my husband out of the first photo, the second was placed over it.  The "hole" in the first photo was filled in by the background of the second.


Here are the original photos:

Did someone say Christmas card?

How Do I Love Thee? Modeling

For this assignment I had trouble figuring out which direction I was meant to go in.  My content area being poetry, I thought about how modeling applied.  I considered how a poem could be expressed as a model.  I chose the poem Messy Room, by Shel Siverstein because of the visual nature of it.  I made a diorama of the “messy room” described in the poem. 

Messy Room 

by Shel Silverstein

Whosever room this is should be ashamed!
His underwear is hanging on the lamp.
His raincoat is there in the overstuffed chair,
And the chair is becoming quite mucky and damp.
His workbook is wedged in the window,
His sweater's been thrown on the floor.
His scarf and one ski are beneath the TV,
And his pants have been carelessly hung on the door.
His books are all jammed in the closet,
His vest has been left in the hall.
A lizard named Ed is asleep in his bed,
And his smelly old sock has been stuck to the wall.
Whosever room this is should be ashamed!
Donald or Robert or Willie or--
Huh? You say it's mine? Oh, dear,
I knew it looked familiar!

Although it is two-dimensional in picture form, it is three-dimensional as it sits on my dining room table.  I like the idea of asking students to create three-dimensional interpretations of a poem.  This one of course lent itself to a very literal translation.  Others might be more abstract and require more interpretation.  I also decided to create a life-size version of this poem.  Again it is represented in two-dimensions here, but from my angle was much more!    

I then thought that perhaps I should have looked at it from a teaching standpoint.  How could I model poetry and make it more visual.  I decided to look at some different poetry patterns and create models for them.  This is what I came up with.

          These models allow students to create their own poetry based on a specific pattern.  Having these models to refer to will help students to remember each pattern.  They make poetry visual, but in a completely different way.

What's the Big Idea? Dimensional Thinking and Modeling

The chapter on dimensional thinking talked about many ways to think about dimension that I had not thought about before.  One example is the way that shadows behave under different conditions.  A single object can have an infinite number of differently shaped shadows depending on its position, the position and type of light, and the material from which it is made.  I was thinking back to the first zoom in from this course for which we zoomed in on an object and asked others to figure out what it was.  Perhaps students could capture several shadows of an object with the same goal in mind.  Similarly, what would different objects look like when sliced into layers.  Two different layers of the same food or toy may look like completely different objects. 

I sometimes forget in the routine of the day to stop and look at the concepts I am teaching from other angles.  Sometimes, especially in math, zooming in on a concept and really breaking it down into its simplest form can do a lot to help students see what is really going on.  Zooming out on the other hand, for instance in social studies, can help us to see how events in one part of the world relate to those in going on in others.  The events that were shaping Michigan history in the 1760’s and 1770’s were certainly affected by the events taking place in the colonies at that time.  To teach Michigan history without zooming out to capture the big picture would leave out large pieces of the puzzle.

            The chapter on modeling discussed the importance of model building over simply sketching or designing something using computers.  The act of physically creating a model allows a person to adapt and make changes when they are met with unforeseen challenges.  Models give us the feeling of being there and allow us to control a situation, or find out aspects of the situation we can’t control and give us clues as to why.  Even those who we consider to be original and innovative thinkers confess that they looked to people who came before them for a place to begin.  While their end product was something we hadn’t seen before, they used models created by previous artists and academics as inspiration.  Building models teaches us how to use imaging, analogizing, and dimensional thinking skills which will help us to create and explore in our occupations and our hobbies.

In the classroom models are imperative for teaching about things that we cannot show students in person due to size, distance, or practicality.  A functional model can help us show students how the heart pumps blood through the body.  A physical model can show us what the inside of our ear looks like.  Models also serve to help students to imitate a process such as poetry or multiplication.  They can observe us writing a haiku or working through a division problem and then use our model to try it for themselves.  As mentioned in the chapter, “Precise models represent precise thinking.”

Zoom In! Modeling

It is ridiculous how much fun I had doing this!

How Do I Love Thee?

My content area is poetry, but for this project I thought I would explore a song that has always sounded like  poetry to me.  I listened to it and tried to physically create some of the images that I see when I hear this song. 

The song is Verdi Cries.  

It was written by Natalie Merchant and performed by 10,000 Maniacs on the album In My Tribe.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l4pE9-_gL88

What's the Big Idea? Embodied Thinking

          There are many things we can do without thinking.  Some of those things we can do because we have done them so many times that they have become automatic.  We rely on muscle memory to perform the task.  An example of this is brushing our teeth.  We weren’t born knowing how to do it, we didn’t need to know.  As toddlers, however, we were taught to do it first by observing and having others do it for us.  Then we began to try for ourselves, crudely at first, but by the time our milk teeth began to fall out we had a good enough grasp of the task to be able to protect our new adult ones.  As adults we barely give it any thought at all.  It’s routine.  Other movements we just feel.  I don’t dance with my husband terribly often.  We go to a wedding or some other formal event about once a year these days.  Still, nobody had to teach me how to dance with him.  It just works- it always has, from the first time.  If I were to dance with someone else it may not come so easily, but because I have known my husband since he was thirteen years old, a lot of things just come naturally from knowing who he is and who we are together.

Sometimes it is the process and not the final product that the artist is trying to convey.  The sculptors discussed in the chapter revealed that it was a very physical experience to create a piece.  They referred not simply to the act of adding to or removing from their medium, but the way they had to use their bodies in order to feel what it was they were trying to express.  Dance is a physical experience already, but when I am learning new choreography and my instructor asks if we want to try it with the music or without, my response is always with.  The steps don’t fully come together for me until I feel how they interact with the music.  I can know the steps, but it is the music that will tell me how to perform them.

I had not thought of empathizing in such a physical way before reading this chapter.  I always described empathizing as seeing a situation from someone else’s point of view.  I hadn’t considered that it also means imagining what it is like to actually be someone else.  This year my son has a boy in his class who is new to the school and who has some learning disabilities.  Some of his behaviors have made it difficult for him to make friends with the other students.  We have had many conversations about what it would feel like to come to a new school and how important it is that he has at least one friend, even if it is challenging sometimes.  I was in the room last week for their Halloween party and got to observe him a bit and noticed some of his ticks.  Over the weekend I had my kids try to perform classroom tasks while imitating some of the involuntary body movements that this student goes through.  They tried to read while bobbing their heads and tried to write while their arms were jerking.  We talked at length about how frustrating that would be and why putting that much effort into tasks that everyone else seems to do so easily might make someone act out.    My kids had many other examples of struggles that students go through and how it may affect their school experience.  

Toward the end of the chapter the authors point out that part of empathizing is thinking about what a person (or atom) wants.  My son who is concerned that this boy doesn’t complete his assignments because he doesn’t want to realized that it may not be that he doesn’t want to.  Perhaps he just wants to be able to do it as easily as other students can.

Poetry is rarely a physical experience for the reader.  The author of a poem, however, may have to live an experience as the sculptors in the chapter did in order to write about it authentically.  In order to express an experience in words you must first know exactly how it feels.  I like the idea of having my students write a poem about an animal.  In order to do that I would like them to have an experience similar to the one I had for the Zoom In assignment for this module.  I would like the students to “be” that animal for a bit and make some observations about what they see and feel.  I think this will bring a lot of useful information to our poetry unit. 

Zoom In! Animal Insticts

In honor of Halloween I decided to become a spider.

I traveled from the drainpipe to the doorway...

and managed to find my way inside.

I took refuge in the coat closet...

but got too brave.

and finally met my match.

(In reality my husband does not condone actually smashing spiders.  

We are a catch and release family, but that picture wasn't as interesting.)

How Do I Love Thee? Abstracting

          My content area is poetry, so this module has been poetry overload!  When I think about what poetry really is, I would have to say that it is, at its essence, a way to express an idea.  What else shares this function?  What else expresses an idea known only to the author, but open to the interpretation of the person who reads it?  A painting can also reveal the feelings of the artist.  Like a poem a painting doesn’t reveal all that the artist was feeling.  Some of the emotions put into the artwork will never be known to the observer.  There will also be feelings that people will get from a poem or a painting that the artist never intended.  The understanding is in the eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hands, and mind of the beholder.

Haiku:

The piece is revealed

What is veiled between the lines?

We may never know.

What's the Big Idea? Abstracting and Analogizing

          Abstracting is the process of looking at something in a different way.  It involves really focusing on the basics of an object or concept to get to the fundamental workings of it.  It might involve using one or more of the five senses that we wouldn’t expect to use.  For example, I know how a book looks and feels, but will I discover something new if I smell it?  Listen to the pages as they are being turned or listen to the book being dropped on the floor?  Picasso told us that we must see with our minds, not our eyes.  Truly getting to know to know the nature of something is challenging, but rewarding.

Abstraction can both come from and lead to analogizing.  When something is stripped to its core we are better able to see how it relates to something else.  When we are able to look at just one feature of something it becomes easier to compare and contrast it with other things.  Analogies are the relationships that two things have based on a single, basic characteristic.  Analogies are often confused with similarities.  Analogies, however, are relationships where no obvious similarities can be seen.  It is sometimes the functional resemblance that defines the relationship.

Children may be better than we assume them to be at creating abstractions and making analogies.  They are likely to have fewer preconceived notions about what things are supposed to be and the way things are supposed to work.  Without those walls to prevent them from seeing things in new ways, they may be better able to see things for what they might be.  When my kids were younger I would laugh when they would take something literally.  They still amaze me with their ability to really see things.  Although I will never know my students as well as I do my own children, I encourage conversations that will help me to see things the way that they do.  We often need to simplify things as teachers.  It is the nuts and bolts of things that make up the curriculum.  Students can help me to “remove all traces of reality” to find the “idea” of something.

Poetry, too, can show us the essence of something.  Abstract poetry uses rhythms, textures, and sounds to convey its message rather than (or in addition to) just words taken at face value.  It is sometimes way the words are printed on the page that tell us something about the author’s intention.  An excellent example of this is the poem by e. e. cummings from the chapter.  The way he organizes the words on the page lends itself to the way the poem is read.  Similarly, Gary Snyder used an analogy to Indian music to construct his poem “Burning the Small Dead.”  His poem used the ideas of melody and chorus to move the poem forward, and again the structure of the poem contributed to the feeling of it.

Zoom In!

Hot Chocolate

Broken down into its basic ingredients hot chocolate is cocoa, sugar, and milk or water.

The magic of hot chocolate however, is its ability to radiate heat throughout your entire body!

After a long afternoon out in the snow building snowmen or sledding until you can barely feel your toes and fingers, nothing warms you up as quickly and as thoroughly as hot chocolate.  It's like a warm blanket that heats you from the inside out.

Sometimes I think my kids play outside just so that they can have hot chocolate.  I can't convince them that you can drink hot chocolate without playing in the snow first.

What’s the Big Idea? Recognizing and Forming Patterns

          Patterns are everywhere and we experience them with all of our senses.  There are patterns in music, language, history and science.  By recognizing patterns we are able to find solutions to problems and sometimes identify problems that we didn’t know existed.  I often associate patterns with math.  Rarely does the word pattern come up when I am teaching other subjects, but it is just as important to the other disciplines and completely appropriate.  Helping students to see patterns in poetry, science, and history will help them to organize the material in their heads and hopefully help them to make predictions and imagine a different outcome supposing a certain aspect of the pattern was changed.  Once students are comfortable with recognizing patterns, they can more easily form patterns of their own.  In the chapter 7 there was an example involving a Koch curve.  Seeing the example, it was difficult not to play out the different variations in my head (and a few on paper).  Having simply been given the picture or description I may not have given it any further thought.  Knowing it was a pattern led my mind to consider what other outcomes this pattern could yield and what they might look like.  Isn’t that what we want from out students?  We want them to make connections and form patterns that will help them make sense of things.  In the process they may also show us new ways of seeing things.

            

          Before reading these chapters I thought about patterns as templates.  I imagined a teacher saying “Here is the pattern, now create something that fits this pattern.”  I had not considered that a pattern could be a scaffold.  After reading I can imagine a teacher saying “Here is the pattern.  What can you create with it?”  We can challenge our students (and ourselves) to question the pattern, alter the pattern, or continue the pattern.  I have already made some notes about how the concept of patterns can be applied to subject areas other than math.  In language arts I often use the word connection, which I believe can have a similar connotation.  I often ask them to connect something we’ve read to another story or event.  This is a way of recognizing patterns.  Asking students to form patterns is a bigger challenge. 

            

          Considering patterns in terms of poetry was not too big of a stretch.  Poetry almost always fits a pattern.  Some poets have said that it is a bigger challenge to write a poem that does not fall into a pattern.  Poems are also very conducive to creativity.  Just writing poetry in itself is an act of creativity.  The challenge then is to help students not only to recognize the patterns in poetry, but to form them for themselves.  Beyond that I hope to give them the opportunity and freedom to challenge the patterns.  In order to do that I will have to accept the same challenges for myself and the material I teach. 

How Do I Love Thee? Patterns

There are many patterns in poetry.  Poems by nature are based on patterns.  Poems can contain couplets, triplets, quatrains, quintains, sestets, or octets.  They can be written as haiku, sonnets, tanka, acrostic, diamonte, or open verse.  It has been said that even in open verse patterns are difficult to avoid.  Patterns can be found in word order, sentence structure, sound, meter, rhythm, stress, intonation, and even the way the poem is printed on the page.  

I always preferred the more structured poems when asked to write in school.  Poetry has never come naturally to me, so when I was asked to write a poem I always looked for a framework with which to build it.  Given an assignment to write about nature I would usually feel overwhelmed.  Writing a Haiku about nature, however, seemed more manageable.

Perhaps I could have played with poetry and challenged myself by changing the pattern of a poem.  For this assignment I decided to see what else changes about a poem when the pattern is changed.

I started with the poem Dreams by Langston Hughes. 

Dreams

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die

Life is a broken-winged bird

That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams

For when dreams go

Life is a barren field

Frozen with snow.

This is what it looks like when I changed the pattern to a Haiku:

Hold fast to your dreams.

Without them you cannot fly.

Life is frozen and barren.  

And an Acrostic

                                                           Do not let them go

                                                           Recession of hope

                                                           Emptiness and injury

                                                           Afraid to fly

                                                           Miles of barren field

                                                           Snow and frozen ground

And finally a Cinquain:

Dreams

Hold fast

Or don’t fly

Broken, frozen

Gone

Hidden Picture

This morning while making veggie bacon (or schmacon as my family calls it),

 I noticed a heart.

I'm sure you can see it, too, but just in case...

Have I horrified the meat eaters with these pictures yet?

I'm sure some of you are wondering how they get away with calling this bacon.

I love it!

How Do I Love Thee?

     What poem does this image remind you of?  Can you hear the words of Robert Frost telling you of the choice before him and what factors will influence his decision?  The poem I tried to capture with this image is The Road not Taken by Robert Frost.

The Road Not Taken

By Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

      It is too early in the season to have captured a yellow wood, but this image parallels the one described the poem.  You probably pictured it differently.  In fact no two people have the same mental imagery of the poem.  Had I chosen to take a video instead of a photograph, you would have also been able to hear the sounds that I heard while walking the path.  Those too would most likely be different from your own aural imagery.  I find that my imagination paints a different picture of these paths in a yellow wood each time I read it.  Sometimes I see fog because it is so early that the sun has not had a chance to lift it.  Sometimes there is an orange glow because the sunrise can be seen through the trees.  Certainly then, no photograph can serve to define what Frost saw during his illustrious walk.

     Readers experience this poem in many different ways. 

     This poem is most well known as a celebration of those who have made the less popular choice and benefited from having done so.  In the last lines the author looks back and reflects on his decision.  There is controversy in the literary world, however, about whether Frost meant the poem literally or whether it was farcical.  There is documentation pointing to the fact that he was instead poking fun at Edward Thomas who was a friend and fellow poet.  It is said that following many of their walks Thomas was known to complain that they should have taken a different path.  Frost may have been making fun of his friend when writing this poem.  I’ll admit that I was disappointed the first time I read this.  I am a glass-half-full kind of person and I like to look at things through rose-colored glasses.  I choose not to think of the poem as Frost’s way of poking fun at a friend.  I’m holding on to my interpretation in which he is truly grateful for making the less obvious choice.  

A bit if humor…

     I decided to go to Kensington Metro Park to look for my Road Not Taken photo since it is only a ten minute drive.  I grew up in Milford so I have been on the trails near the nature center at least a hundred times.  I remembered several forks in the trails and was sure I would have no problem getting my shot.  What I hadn’t remembered when I set out for my early morning walk, is that every fork is conveniently labeled with a sign indicating which trail goes in which direction.  I had it in my head that I wanted a very Frostian photo- without modern signage.  This meant that I was forced to shoot from odd angles and in strange positions in order to avoid getting them in my pictures.  After a couple hours I still did not have the photo that I was hoping for.  Several times during my walk I thought to myself, “Maybe I should have taken the other path.”  I could hear Frost laughing at me.

Or maybe that was me laughing… we may never know!