If you’re still reading, this must mean that you read the first newsletter1 and realized that I will not be providing a one-size-fits-all manual for how to teach poetry to high schoolers . . . and you’re totally cool with that. Wow, you are one rad reader. Welcome back! This is a long one, so make yourself your favorite cup of tea or coffee, and make sure your seat is comfy.
Let’s jump back into letting you know how my future newsletters will be informed by my specific experiences as an educator. I’m providing this context because the lessons I’ll share, from the nitty-gritty of formative assessments to philosophical musings on teaching poetry in a global pandemic, will inevitably be shaped by these experiences. I like to be transparent with my students and it’s something I’m trying to do with you as readers.
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In the Bay Area, I taught in one of the wealthiest zip codes in the country—Atherton, CA—while also teaching first-generation immigrants from neighboring—and worlds apart—East Palo Alto. EPA is not too unlike the Ironbound community of Newark that I grew up in: tight-knit, rich with immigrant families, and disparaged because of structural inequities set up to benefit wealthier neighborhoods at its expense. EPA, in particular, is harmed by the xenophobia and racism which is evident even to a casual reader of the history of that corner of the Bay Area.
My high school served the communities on both sides of the 1012, as EPA’s only public high school shuttered in the 1970s amid attempts towards desegregation. I taught honors English to a mostly white student population with a small Asian minority and an even smaller Latinx minority. The other class I taught was English Language Development (ELD)3; my students in those classes were all recently arrived immigrants, most from Mexico and Central America, with a few from Tonga, China, Russia, and Turkey.
It was an honor and one of the greatest joys of my life to teach first-generation immigrant students: when both of my parents arrived in the United States as children, there were no dedicated English language instruction classes for new arrivals. I tried to be the kind of teacher I would have wanted my parents to have had when they first arrived in the States. I did not always succeed and the learning curve was steep in being an effective ELD teacher; the joy, however, was abundant. Teaching—and learning from—my immigrant students changed me as a teacher and as a person. My ELD students helped me become more thoughtful, more flexible, and more capable to fully embrace our shared humanity in the classroom.
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I moved back to my beloved home state of New Jersey during the first summer of this ongoing pandemic to teach at my alma mater, a dream I had held since graduating from there. This was the place where I first knew that I wanted to become a high school English teacher— a testament to how wonderful my teachers were. Led by the Sisters of Charity, this high school in Newark provides as much financial aid as possible to its students, who are generally lower-income and young women of color—predominantly Black and/or Latinx.
Culturally responsive teaching is the foundation for everything I do as an educator— particularly, I have focused on bringing the margins to the center and on teaching students to question why people of color, LGBTQ+, women, nonbinary, and disabled people are so often forcibly moved to the margins. In my classroom, we name white supremacy for what it is and does. We close-read structures of power and interrogate harm. We imagine other possibilities. In my classroom in Newark—room 302, the very room where I wrote some of my earliest poems—I learned how to better put theory into practice.
In California, during my first year of teaching, I unsuccessfully advocated to have the work of known racist and homophobe Orson Scott Card removed as the one required text for incoming 9th grade summer reading. My failure in having it removed and subsequent disappointment led me to create a unit that would remind me why I became a teacher: an intersectional feminist poetry unit focused entirely on living poets.
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That unit became the prototype for my 21st Century Poetry elective at my high school in Newark. The start of the 2021-2022 school-year marked the shaky return to in-person learning after over a year of entirely remote education. It was my second year teaching at this high school and only six students signed up for the course. Only one had chosen it as their first choice. In six years of teaching my poetry unit, I have noticed that poetry at the high school level is often a hard sell. I think that is what happens when you exclusively teach dead white men, which I also think is unfortunately what too many K-12 English teachers are doing.
It was a tough semester. I was frazzled and frantic more than I was anything else, due to circumstances that had nothing to do with teaching my students. And yet, when I sat down with my poetry students—“The Living Poets’ Society,” as I definitely had too much fun nicknaming us—I received an abundant reminder of why I teach and why I teach poetry in particular. In Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, writer, activist, and fellow teacher bell hooks writes that “the classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy.”
That is what we experienced together—the possibility to connect at our very roots and to dream beyond our own expectations. We talked about being daughters. We talked about late-stage capitalism. We talked about poems. We made space for rest and for laughter and for mistakes.
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Poetry is not broccoli. We—poets especially and especially poets who teach and that means me, too—could do with being less precious about it. I did not go into teaching that elective with the goal of making everyone like poems the way a parent might encourage their child to eat their greens.4
And yet— I know firsthand how poetry can change or save your life (sometimes both!). It’s hard not to treat it like a freaking miracle when it has been for you personally. When it could be for your students. And so I made space for that radical possibility while never treating poetry like a vegetable I was trying to force-feed.
By the end of the semester, the six young women of color in my class knew more about poetry than they did coming in, which was the goal, and each could name a poem they loved, which was the dream. Their close-readings of poems dazzled me. They used the skills I had taught them to reveal what I had not yet seen in poems I’d read dozens of times, and I felt awakened again to the doors and windows poetry can open.
Those doors truly opened for me when I read my first poetry book by a living poet: I was 17 years old and it changed the whole direction of my life. In teaching poetry to high schoolers, I cannot honestly make the bold claim that I’m changing their lives, but I know for certain that they are changing mine indelibly. Whether it was through the poems my students brought into our classroom or how we began to shout “Do not go gentle into that good night”5 as a farewell or just the simple presence of sitting in comfortable silence writing together, they changed me the way students always will, if you allow yourself that grace.
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In sharing the socioeconomic classes and racial backgrounds of the student populations of my students, I am wary, lest anyone mistake me for one of those annoying at best, racist at worst “inspirational high school teacher movie”6 kind of teachers. As a white woman who teaches high school, I think that it is fair for people to make those assumptions of me and that the burden is on me to prove otherwise.
Let me be clear that these are facts about where I have worked which I share now to provide context for why I think the way I do about education, not some pat on the back that I am giving myself. I do not know why I would congratulate myself for doing something I have deeply enjoyed doing and which I do not take for granted having been able to do. I am uninterested in the nonsense of fellow white people praising themselves for working in inner-city schools or with children of color or immigrant students: we are not saviors and our students do not need saving; they need to be listened to and provided with resources by people who will not patronize them.
My most important educators as a teacher have been my students. Whether in learning how to be actively anti-racist or a better advocate for my queer students, it is through my students directly that I have learned how to be more aligned with not only the kind of teacher but also the kind of human I want to be, one who encourages the “radical possibility” hooks discussed. What I will share on teaching poetry comes from years of listening carefully and with humility to my students.
I am not and never have been and never will be a perfect teacher. I do not aspire to it. I think we all need the grace of imperfection. I afford it to my students and I ask for it, humbly, in return. I am asking it now of you as readers.
What I will share is what has worked for me or the kinds of materials that I think would work and would love to experiment with in the kinds of classrooms I have taught in. I am deeply hopeful that they might offer help or shine a light in some way for other classrooms. These short essays, lesson plans, and general musings will be a way to provide maps for the journey of teaching poetry in the high school classroom, or at least a reliable compass.
On Wednesday, I’ll be talking about driving and blackberry cake. And also teaching poetry. The week after that, I think I’ll get into close-reading a poem and also murder (maybe) and after that, sonnets (likely). Thank you for reading—do not go gentle into that good night!
What I’m Reading: I am still slowly rereading this beautiful book, Rotura, by José Angel Araguz’s Rotura (from Black Lawrence Press: get it here!)
What I’m Listening To: Dolly Parton’s “Jolene”
What I’m Watching: the day turn to night
What I’m Feeling: a hug from an internet friend I finally got to meet in real life
What Boba Flavor I’m Currently Craving: Taro Milk Tea (hot)
It’s okay if you didn’t. I’m not grading you. I wouldn’t grade anyone if I could. But also this newsletter might not make too much sense if you haven’t read the first one, but then again, life often is nonsensical, so I will not try to stop you (I also cannot stop you; I’m an English teacher, not a sorcerer.)
In 2013, the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights of the San Francisco Bay Area argued that the district’s school selection plan for East Palo Alto students violated their legal rights and successfully pushed for the district’s public high school closest to EPA to begin accepting the majority of EPA students. A few years later, this is where I taught my English Language Learners from EPA. For a comprehensive understanding, look to the Lawyers’ Committee report, “Pushing the Line: Addressing Inequities in Sequoia Union High School District’s Student Assignment Plan,” linked here.
This type of class is commonly known as English as Second Language, or ESL, in many schools.
For a variation on and inspiration for this theme, see Frank O’Hara’s “Personism: A Manifesto.”
I would not have chosen the Dylan Thomas poem for my class, but one of my students chose to share it in the poem show and tell session (more on that in later newsletters!), and it became a surprise hit!
There is exactly one good “inspirational high school teacher movie” and it is Dead Poets’ Society starring Robin Williams.