How to Bake a Cake, How to Drive a Car, How to Teach a Poem
blackberry, blackberry, blackberry . . .
I am going to tell you two very different stories. They have nothing to do with teaching poetry in high school. And they have everything to do with teaching poetry in high school.
Baking in My Grandmother’s Kitchen
As a child, I usually spent summers in Portugal, where both my parents are from, in my grandparents’ sleepy village of Murtosa. I spent them immersed in late-night telenovelas and even later-night reading of anything I could find, from chapter books to encyclopedias of herbs. I climbed orange trees and entertained a pet duck, and in that abundance of summertime freedom, I developed a love of baking.
My grandmother’s hands, those of a gifted seamstress, could work magic with any food she touched. What she gave me, though, were not instructions, but instead all the flour, sugar, and eggs I needed and a kitchen to use. When I was afraid to light the match required to get the oven working, she would light it for me, but that was the extent of her involvement in my elaborate experiments. I would ride my grandfather’s old bike down the road to gather as many blackberries as I could: these were the special ingredients I would add to the supply of baking items ready for me in the kitchen.
I never used a recipe. I had no exact measure. I used random mugs as cups and regular spoons for smaller measurements. Whatever my heart wanted on a given day were how many eggs would get tossed into the flour. Baking powder, I discovered—as if it were a miracle—would make things rise, so more of it! But then, not too much! I created and observed and tasted.
And the cakes were good! Not once did my grandmother, the best cook and baker in the whole of our family, tell me how to bake, despite saving me her recipes written in her beautiful cursive. Those were for when I was older and would need them.
She knew that then, as I was just beginning, I needed to make delicious and wild mistakes—spontaneous and whimsical combinations of ingredients that did, against all likely possibilities, turn into edible cakes. I remember those summer afternoons with those moist, dense cakes and the richness of my grandmother’s love and the possibilities of what it meant to be free to experiment and learn.
To this day, I love to bake.
The Slow Road to Getting My Driver’s License
I got my driver’s license at 241. I was living in Los Angeles without a car and it took that level of extremity to finally convince me that it was time.
This is not to say that I did not want to get my license in high school, as every teen movie / CW drama would suggest. My school did not then offer driver’s ed, so I diligently took it upon myself to obtain a New Jersey Driver’s Manual from the DMV— which was not within walking distance of my house nor easily accessed by public transit, one of my first encounters with the maddening paradoxes of driving culture in the United States.
In my free moments during my senior year of high school2, I took out my Driver’s Manual. I highlighted. I read and re-read. I quizzed and tested myself. Then, I took the written portion of the exam and promptly failed. I do not remember any questions on that exam, except that it had me memorize exact numbers, obscure street signs, and theoretical situations including visual concepts that were close to impossible to understand without first getting behind the wheel.
Getting behind the wheel was, in fact, one of the last things I did in this process. My father had family in Portugal to care for during a chunk of my senior year and I had no family nearby willing to teach me—an anxious and overly cautious 17-year-old—how to drive. I certainly had relatives willing to comment disparagingly on my inability to obtain my license and fascinatingly, none of these family members were offering to give me lessons.
As someone who has spent her life devouring books, I applied my universal solution to this specific problem: read. And I did. I continued to re-read my New Jersey Driver’s Manual with its obtuse explanations and highly technical facts about driving, like always making sure that you have 1 car distance between you and the next car for every 10 mph you are driving— which is, of course, incredibly helpful for someone who takes rules literally and then is in bumper-to-bumper traffic, wondering how that rule could possibly apply.
Years after failing my New Jersey driving exam several times, I signed up for driving classes in LA with an instructor who would not yell at me for every mistake I made (yes, I did experience that and it was not helpful, unsurprisingly). I was honest with myself and with the instructor: everything I know about driving is mostly from a book that was not very well-written, I think, and I have close to zero practice on the road for years now.
I was terrified, but I drove. I learned the skills by doing, by putting foot to gas, and to brake, and alternating. I merged on a freeway, which still feels like a miracle. I drove and by driving, I learned how to drive. It was that simple and complicated all at once. I passed my California driver’s exam on the first try— in the rain, I might add.
To this day, I do not like to drive.
First, Feeling
Those summer afternoons (yes, poets, I am thinking of Robert Hass3) in my grandmother’s kitchen, experimenting, playing with elements of food until they became food, adding freshly picked blackberries, all without recipe, all without measure— they became the foundation for a lifelong love of baking. I am not an exceptional chef, but I am more than decent at baking and what encouraged this were those days when I was allowed to make mistakes and when I did not burden myself with learning a bunch of different instructions about baking and just— baked!
Do I use complicated recipes from time to time and am I meticulous with how I measure out my ingredients now? Yes and yes. Would I still be baking today if this is how I approached it at the start?
Absolutely not.
How I learned to bake was the opposite of how I initially tried to learn to drive. And now, patient reader, I am going to make this whole extended metaphor become super clear: how I learned to drive is also how many of our students learn how to read, write, and examine poetry.
Teaching poetry by first reducing it to memorization of its parts—the vocabulary and the (pause for boos and hisses from the poets) “meaning”—is like teaching someone how to drive by making them memorize the parts of an engine. No! You have to get behind the wheel and put the key in the ignition.
And yet, instead of doing this, we make our students memorize what iambic pentameter is without first having them literally feel it in action. Instead of having them write out the definition, let them hear it, whether in a 90s rap song4 or by literally clapping it out together. Make the beat happen first and then, name it.
Rachel Carson, a scientist who had the eyes of a poet, writes in what is probably my most re-read book ever, The Sense of Wonder: “I sincerely believe that for the child, and for the parent seeking to guide him, it is not half so important to know as to feel. If facts are the seeds that later produce knowledge and wisdom, then the emotions and the impressions of the senses are the fertile soil in which the seeds must grow.” Carson wrote this book about the importance of staying alive to the natural world and how to teach this to children. Her words resonate with how I think we can teach children to stay alive to poetry, instead of falling asleep in class.
Yes, technical definitions can be helpful to know. But if we are teaching our students to memorize facts about poems rather than allowing them to get lost in the wonder of what poetry is—and to let ourselves feel it too!—then, we lose something remarkably valuable and so integral to poetry itself: the connection to the senses.
I know in my last newsletter, I discussed the importance of not being too precious about poetry, but indulge me for a second: poetry, I think, more than any other form of writing, is about fully experiencing our five senses, about living and being and noticing within these sensory details. And when we emphasize the technical knowledge—those obscure street signs and technical rules out of context—at the expense of the senses, our students begin to think that a poem is something they can and should “get.”
Wait—do you think you can get a poem? I don’t. I don’t get poetry. I am only being a little facetious here, but truly, I do not understand this goal of attempting to “get” a poem instead of getting into a poem. When I finally learned to not lead with the vocabulary lists5, I stopped asking students to even try to understand poetry. I ask them instead to experience it and I guided them through their senses:
What do you see in this poem? What do you feel? What do you hear? What do you taste? What do you smell?
Your students will not remember the definition for dactylic hexameter. Listen, I am the biggest nerd about this stuff and I had to look that one up. But they are going to remember the experience of walking into a poem when you present it as a sensory adventure and not as a list of facts to memorize or, even worse, a riddle with one specific meaning to be teased out.
I get the pressure of wanting to teach your students all the fancy vocabulary and all the technicalities. As they say on the internet, we live in a society. This society unfortunately continues to make our students take high-stakes tests and yeah, memorizing a bunch of random junk—or even, what we might consider to be the valuable minutiae of a poem’s endoskeleton—is a skill that we as high school educators are often tasked with teaching students. If we ignore this entirely, the stakes are, unfortunately, fairly high.
But could I suggest that you let the poetry unit—or elective or even just two or three days of reading poems you set aside in April—that you teach be like my grandmother’s kitchen?
Provide them the tools. Give them the ingredients. Help them light the match. Maybe even save some specific recipes for later. But let them experiment and feel and be in the poems.
Let them make mistakes in their interpretations! Let them write crappy poems6! Let them bring in crappy poems to class that they love and let them love them! Guide them and remember: “it is not half so important to know as to feel.” The rest will come—the close-reading, the deeper understanding, even the technical terms—but first, joy. First, wonder. First, feeling.
Endnotes & & & …
Thursday, I’ll share a letter addressed to my students about how to close read a poem that I used to begin my poetry unit this past year. One of my students told me that they imagined me chuckling as I wrote it (they were not wrong). Then, Friday, some light murder (mystery) and more close-reading. Saturday, let’s get going with our first poem and lesson plan.
In case you are worried that signing up for this newsletter now means you’ll be getting emails from me 5 times a week, rest assured that this will soon turn into a weekly newsletter (Saturday by 3pm is the weekly goal). I wanted to get these more general introductions out all together during the first week. I can also promise you, we are going to begin digging into the actual poems as of this Saturday. I know— it’s a lot of introduction, but I definitely should never be allowed to write prose and yet here I am, learning as I go, making a lot of mistakes, tossing in as many eggs into the cake as my heart tells me.
What I’m Reading: Thanks to Politics & Prose in DC, I am now reading Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season by late Iranian poet Forough Farrokhzad, translated by Elizabeth T. Gray; a fascinating poet whom I discovered by exploring the (very good!) poetry section of this bookstore. A lot of bookstores do not have a good poetry section; this one really did.
What I’m Listening To: Darius Rucker’s version of “Wagon Wheel”
What I’m Watching: probably season 4 of Virgin River, which has basically been a compelling hate-watch from the beginning, but the cozy town vibes are ~ * impeccable * ~
What I’m Feeling: crisp cool sheets
What Boba Flavor I’m Currently Craving: Blue Jasmine (thanks, Spot of Tea in Union Market - Washington, DC!)
24 and a half, if we are splitting hairs and sure, why not?
My memory of my senior year is not really having many of these “free moments” and it is one of the reasons why today, I am so zealous about teaching students the intrinsic value of rest. More on this in a whole other newsletter (eventually, probably).
“Meditation at Lagunitas,” to be specific, which if you haven’t read it yet, please go ahead and let your little internet feet take you here.
I am very excited to share how I used Will Smith and DJ Jazzy Jeff’s song “Nightmare on My Street” to teach meter and iambic pentameter in particular. Look for this in a newsletter in late October!
Yes, they have their place and I am a huge fan of Marzano vocabulary squares, which can be particularly helpful for English language learners. What I’m saying here is that I think it is most helpful not to begin with them and certainly to never emphasize technical vocabulary at the expense of reading poems as a sensory experience.
I write crappy poems regularly and it hurts no one.