Roll of Thunder, Hear Our Cry

I’ve been teaching a unit with my seventh graders based on Mildred D. Taylor’s novel, Roll of Thunder, Hear my Cry. As I previewed the book, I found myself recoiling from the harsh depictions of racist violence, which are very true to what really went on in Mississippi in the 1930′s, ’40′s, and ’50′s. I wondered if my classroom–a racially disparate group of 12 year-olds–would be able to handle it. I’m not sure what I was so afraid of… I guess I felt like reading about those events really hurt me, and so perhaps it would hurt them, especially if they didn’t have the maturity to understand it. I was feeling similar to a group of parents who wanted to censor the book back in 2004, saying the content was too mature and disturbing for middle schoolers to be exposed to.

But then a little bell rang in my head. Why was I trying to shield these kids from the truth of what happened in history? If I did so, wasn’t I just playing accomplice to the thousands of sugared-over history textbook editions that have lain, guilty, in classrooms across the nation for decades? If I was nervous to talk so directly about racism in my classroom, with black kids and white kids, Latinos and Hmong, wasn’t that my own little contribution to racial tension in our own society? After this mental tug-of-war, I convinced myself that I would tackle it, and after an introductory explanation about the need for grown-up behavior, sensitivity, and reverence, we plunged in headfirst.

Best move ever. The responses from studying this novel have been the most heartfelt, complex, and complete responses I’ve gotten from my seventh grade. Not that it’s been without pain–for instance, when I was explaining how tar-and-feathering was a humiliating and excruciating “punishment” that whites inflicted on blacks for the most minor offenses, I was interrupted mid-sentence by a cocoa-faced, curly-haired girl with watery eyes: “But why would someone do that? Why would anybody ever think that was ok? What made them think that wasn’t wrong? It’s wrong!”  The only answer I could give her was, “I wish I knew the answer myself. To be honest, I really don’t know where racism or hate of any kind comes from. But it’s bad, bad, news and it’s really hurtful, isn’t it?”

One of the most interesting  lessons we did involved using poetry to talk about how race interactions were more complicated than simply pitting whites against blacks. For this activity, we analyzed Jeremy’s friendship with the Logan children by connecting it with Countee Cullen’s “Tableau,” which I’ll post here–

 TABLEAU

Locked arm in arm they cross the way/The black boy and the white

The golden splendor of the day/The sable pride of night

From lowered blinds the dark folk stare/And here the fair folk talk

Indignant that the two should dare/In unison to walk

Oblivious to look and word/They pass, and see no wonder

That lightning brilliant as a sword/Should blaze the path of thunder.

Here are a few of my favorite student responses to the poem:

I say what happened in the poem was two kids (black and white) fighting against racism. They were signaling out that skin color does not effect a person’s feelings. And when the lightning struck and cut through the segregation, it burned all thoughts of hatred and led people to think. If God made different races for a reason of hope, why was it used as a reason for bad individuality, segregation, and downputting of someone of another skin type or race? All races form the reason of life. People, living, and being are the cause of the new age. In Roll of Thunder, segregation was at full cruelty. But every action has its own special consequence.

I love this poem because I think it is so true about white kids and black kids becoming friends, without anybody having the right to say anything. Countee Cullen is impressing with this poem. He’s awesome!!

I see hope in the poem where they don’t care what people are thinking about them. I think that it would be unfair if we couldn’t hang out with someone because of their race or their religion. It’s unfair to judge people because of the color of their skin and it’s rude and cruel.

I think the poem is trying to say “don’t care about what people think.” If you think or know what you are doing, have trust in yourself and go for it. They are trying to tell us even when it is hard, don’t give up because we’ve come a long, long way just to give up. In the book, the blacks are going through hard times. A couple nice white people are trying to help them go through that and say something like, “What is the difference between us?” but without words.

I’ll end this post with the wisdom of Mildred D. Taylor herself, in her response to the attempted censorship of her novel. Here’s a quote from her, courtesy of the National Coalition Against Censorship website:

“As a parent, I understand not wanting a child to hear painful words,” Taylor wrote. “But also as a parent I do not understand trying to prevent a child from learning about a history that is part of America… I must be true to the stories told.”

Thank you, Ms. Taylor, for reminding us that we have to look the world straight in the eye in order to form our own opinions of it. Even if we’re twelve years old.

P.s. Every day, I am greeted at the door by a different child that whispers to me, “Ms. H, can I read first today?” 

Poetry Progress Report

Mr. Keating enters the room and, in a no-nonsense fashion, requests a student to read from the distinguished introduction of the class text on poetry. The room is silent but for a few rustling sounds as the boy reads, outlining a technique for evaluating poetry through graphical analysis of the poem’s application of devices and its “importance.” Keating waits until the student finishes, then softly says, “Excrement. That’s what I think of Mr. J. Evans Pritchard. Now, I want you to rip out that page. Go on. Rip it out. Rip it out! RIP!”

The students sit still, in disbelief, then eventually start to rip out the beginnings of their textbooks. Keating delightedly grabs the wastebasket, all the while shouting “RIP!” and “BEGONE Dr. J. Evans Pritchard, Ph.D!” Keating proclaims that poetry is not about quantitative data, but about thinking and feeling for oneself. After all the students have ripped the pages, Keating beckons them to huddle around him. In the middle, he kneels and says:

“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, “O me! O life!… of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless… of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?” Answer: that you are here. That life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?”

Keating’s character is one of my heroes, but that’s not the only reason I showed this clip to my class. I showed this five-minute clip from Dead Poet’s Society (Peter Weir, 1989) to spark discussion on two ways to view poetry: (1) as a demonstration of a mastery of form and (2) as a vehicle to portray the human experience. Structuralism vs. Reader Response. Logic vs. Emotion.

So, I asked my class what they thought about this clip. Who did they agree with–the book or the teacher? I got a wide variety of responses. Many students agreed with Keating, expressing a desire to “speak from the heart,” to “throw out the rules and focus on what we feel,” and to “make poetry our own.” This group was excited about the chance to express themselves and to use poetry to get across what they felt was important. Other students opted to agree with the textbook view, feeling a security and accountability that results from the perfect execution of form and the knowledge of patterns of rhyme and rhythm, because that’s “what poetry really is.” That’s “how you write poetry and what makes it different from other writing.”

This discussion got to the bottom of what I really wanted to say over the course of this unit, which I shared with them as the discussion wrapped up: “Even literary scholars today are having this same debate. Some people say that poetry is about devices and terms and patterns and how you use them. To these people, a poem’s perfection comes from their mastery of these things. But others are more focused on what a poem makes us feel. To these people, poetry is about life, and feeling, and love, and passion. It’s about where we are in this human experience we all share, and why it matters. And it’s ok to feel either of these ways, or even both. That’s what we’ve been doing in this unit all along–we’ve looked at standard poetry devices and figured out what they are and how they work. We saw examples from famous poets. But then, we experimented with these devices in our own words and used them to tell our own emotions and stories. We wrote some of our own verses. And that’s something I hope you guys came away with: that studying poetry is really about both of these things…”

At this point, I had to quell my fervor. My supervisor was in the room and I had a review game to get rolling. My students performed beautifully, too–I hardly had a single wrong answer during the review, and later in the week test scores would prove to be very decent overall. I also had them submit a revised poem as part of their assessment grade, and many of them blew me away with the creativity, spirit, and truth that they weaved into their poetry. Especially since their classrooms have been very regimented and worksheet-heavy up until now, their achievements were spectacular to me. My students represent so many races, languages, cultures, economic backgrounds, and personalities–they each have amazing stories to tell. And their form wasn’t bad, either.

I can’t believe this unit is already over.

I’m very proud of my classes, and I can’t wait to see what else they can do. I hope Mr. Keating would be proud, too.

(Nothing says “English teacher” like being so attached to a fictional character!)

Finding Poetry

My dreams are loud.

That’s something nobody told me would happen when I became a teacher. My brain is humming, constantly, with ideas: How can I present this material? How do I make it interesting? How do I make it interactive? How will I assess it? How will my students respond? How would I revise, mid-lesson, if this fails? Does this really serve my students in regards to the standards? Does it serve them as human beings? On and on, the questions and ruminations run through my mind. And the reason for this, I’m finding, is that I care. I care a great deal about my students–I see them coming down the hall and I can’t help but smile. It is my job to give them the absolute best education that I can. I am commited to that. I am determined not to waste a minute of their time in the classroom.

Starting this coming week, I will be starting to transition into the leadership role of the primary teacher in my classroom. As this begins, so does our unit on poetry. This is exciting to me, because I think that poetry, often sold short (and drab, and impenetrable, and lofty, and overly flowery), is one of the most exciting literary forms. It’s also one of the most personal, intense, and creative. These are things that I know my students will be able to relate to, if only I can get them to tap into it. Figuring out how to do that, though, is producing much of the aforementioned brain humming, through sleeping and waking hours alike. Once I actually get my disorganized, frenetic ideas to settle into something intelligible, I am excited to create some poetry lessons and activities.

This is what I know so far:

*Poetry offers freedom from strict, standard academic grammatical and syntactical rules, yet it also offers a platform for teaching about them in a playful, low pressure way.

*Poetry gives us a chance to use words to describe something that, without it, would be beyond words.

*Poetry = image
*Poetry = music . . . . . Things everyone understands, deep down.
*Poetry = rhythm

*Poetry is not impossible to interpret, but it is impossible to limit to a single, complete literal meaning.

*Some of the greatest literature ever written has been poetry.

*Poetry occur in all cultures. We all have poems inside us.