What I am not going to do in this newsletter is speak for all teachers, nor will I ever claim that my own experiences as a high school English teacher are in any way universal or applicable to every possible situation. My perspectives on education and on teaching poetry in the high school classroom are deeply informed by my specific set of life experiences: I am the daughter of Portuguese immigrants; I grew up in Newark, New Jersey; and among a wide variety of teaching-related work, I taught as a full-time high school English teacher in a large (~2300 students) Bay Area public high school for four years and in a small (>300 students) Catholic all-girls high school in Newark (my alma mater) for two years.
I am going to share my experiences as a teacher in detail for this sole purpose: to provide context for how and why I teach as I do. If you are looking for a one-size-fits-all manual on how to teach poetry to high schoolers, I have bad news, worse news, and then good news.
Bad news: this isn’t it. Worse news: no “how to” guides on teaching anything are ever going to apply to every possible classroom context. The good news: this is wonderful. Education is not cake—more on cake in a later newsletter, I promise—there is no recipe to follow that will work perfectly in every setting.
You and your own set of experiences are going to walk into a classroom filled with individuals, each with their own sets of experiences and the biggest one-size-fits-all advice I can give is to remember this: your students are human beings with lives outside of the classroom that deeply inform who they are within it—true of you, too!—and the more you value and respect that, the more likely students are to value and respect your shared time in class together. To add to that, the more you value and respect the communities your students are from—not just geographical places, though certainly those, too—the more engaged your students will be with what you are trying to teach them.
So, if you decide to continue reading the ramblings of a wordy poet who is clearly free-styling it in prose, please understand that I am not giving you an instruction manual. I’m letting you know what works—or what I think could work—for me based on the specific classroom contexts I’ve taught in, which I’ll describe in tomorrow’s newsletter, along with broccoli and dead poets.
I’m grateful you’re here reading this newsletter—to borrow a phrase from friend and fellow poet, Amy Poague, you could have taken your “little internet feet” anywhere and you took them here. Very cool of you, I think.
Image description: Woman (me) with black hair in two braids and light olive skin, brown eyes behind clear glasses, smiling, and holding a cellphone in front of bathroom mirror. I am wearing a blue shirt with watermelon print underneath dark blue denim overalls and one of my watermelon earrings is visible. The background is a mural of giant pink flamingos against black and beneath, there are white bathroom tiles on the wall.
Photo taken at the Sundress Academy for the Arts residency at Firefly Farms in Tennessee, where I received time to dream up and draft this newsletter. Artist for the mural is Janie Stamm (@ glitterpuppies on Instagram).