Guess what word doesn’t appear on the word cloud…TEST! I have been liberated. All it took was poetry! Oh wait there it is…And white is a little too big. Oh and first world is also prominent. Man, I gotta get my act together next week.

I have been trying to scheme my way to the end of this month of writing. How am I going to write 11 more poems about testing, education, our youth and my world? A few days ago I brainstormed some ideas of how to play with form to help guide my writing. Today, I toyed with the form of a ghazal. The most genuine structure of a poem of this sort is grounded in disparate couplets connected by a refrain or word at the end of each couplet. Some words within the couplets should be rhymes or slant rhymes before the refrain. In this effort, the rhymes and slant rhymes correspond mostly to the refrain test scores. And though a true ghazal is unrelated and the couplets exist in their own meaning, my ghazal is connected thematically throughout. Our country’s Poet Laureate, Natasha Trethewey, composed an impressive ghazal in her collection Native Guard.

My poem is dedicated to Bill Gates who is fueling the capital behind education reform in our country. If you are on Twitter, I suggest searching the hashtag #TestHearingsNow for a primer on the broiling fervor against an education of tests and Mr. Gates.

So there ya go! Context, creativity and deviance. Enjoy the weekend.

Here is the completion of the alphabet experiment. I have written a poem every day this month of March while maintaining my integrity as a teacher to plan and instruct at a high level. Each poem has been composed on the day I have uploaded it to the blog. Very little revision, very little hesitation. Much like the students have x-minutes to complete their test, I have the afternoon or evening to complete a draft of the day’s poem. Then I release it into the world, and wake up the next day ready to have a great day with my students. The poem arrives spontaneously through writing exercises, free writing and debriefing my school day. I hope to have time to more fully explore the process of how these poems were created, but for now I wanted to address a bit of my reality. Because, in some ways, between yesterday and today, I wrote 26 brief poems about education. And I might be going crazy! 

Here is today’s effort. One half of the alphabet. Even teenagers and teachers need to relearn the alphabet sometimes…

–or–
The One Impossible to Answer

I was  wondering how I would incorporate last year’s censored poems into this poetry adventure. Sure enough, on the first day of 2014’s testing window, I am ready to share the work that originally got me in trouble.

On March 19, I posted poems to this blog that released sensitive testing material to the public. I was told I had compromised my standing as a highly qualified and ethical teacher in New Mexico. My poetry almost invalidated the test scores for my students because someone could have read the poetry (that day I had 12 hits on my website). I was furious but humiliated. Emboldened but hesitant. I wanted to release the poems back out into the world, but was told that my license could be put in jeopardy. My advice from last year’s director was to seek legal counsel if the poems were released again.

And today, a year later, the same testing material that inspired those poems was the basis for a reading portion of the test. Again. For the third year in a row. If I really wanted to expose sensitive testing material I would have just told students the answers to questions they’ve already seen before!!!

So here I have for you The State-Censored Standardized Testing Poems. I played with their form and the black outs are where the poet deemed the content to be too sensitive. I got your back, Hannah Skandera!

In reflecting, as poems this work wasn’t that amazing to begin with. The first, Word Choice, felt forced. It still does even with a bit of erasure. And in re-visioning Reading Comprehension, I realize I had said a whole lot bringing not so much to the table. Now it has a little something from distillation.

The power here isn’t the poetry, but those black lines. The silence is on my terms now. And during this month, I have had nearly 1000 hits to my blog. Now people are reading and thinking. At least in this case Art and Activism is more powerful than picketing.

Onward Educators! It’s all in the core!

 

“For our children to thrive in the real world, we must give them the world as their classroom.”

My dear friends at Roots and Wings Community School, an Expeditionary Learning school in Questa School District, are raising money to solidify their wilderness program. The founders of RWCS also wrote the charter for our public charter school in Taos. We are all trying to navigate how to spend funds within our budget to provide a new paradigm of public education. We hope to offer an alternative world within the classroom and an alternative classroom out in the world.

Some of my greatest memories of teaching occurred on our school’s backpacking trips. Students make new friends, explore the inner workings of their head and heart, dig into the depths of their courage and soul. These trips are structured and supported so that our young people can become whole humans who value the environment and themselves.

Heed the call. Click on the embedded link and offer a token of your support. Leave no child inside and support their efforts to continue bringing students into the wild.

If you pledge $40, you will receive a haiku from all students. DIG IT!

(For the layman, all teachers are required to advance their licensure to remain highly qualified in their certification. This weekend, I will be completing my dossier to jump from Level I to Level II. I am in the process of creating a portfolio to demonstrate my ability to work with my community and colleagues, plan highly effective lessons with measurable outcomes, and analyze student work. In the end, the dossier needs to be about 100-130 pages and requires at least 25 hours. Fun times tomorrow! And thus the inspiration for the structure of today’s work.)

Sometimes I have to deviate from my core beliefs about teaching and reframe the learning process in light of egregious interruptions. Today was one of those days. Test prep!

My class professionalizes students. When we interview community members and share their stories, we are ethnographers.

When we clean up a watershed marred by illegal dumping and bullet casings to make a mural of our community’s laziness, we are civic activists.

When we record podcasts exploring our relationship with drug addiction and abuse, we are radio storytellers.

When we prepare for the tests we are ninjas. Highly trained, clandestine, centered, focused and immortal.

Today’s lesson began with a venting of student fear, frustration and negativity concerning standardized testing. Students wrote on one side of an index card to release their tensions. The lesson proceeded with test taking strategies and reminders of their ninja training. During a lesson like this, motivational throwaways demand seriousness and presence from the ninjas and resolve and honesty from their ninja master. You have been molded for this moment. You are as ready as you need to be for such an inferior foe. Ready for the challenge ahead, the students reflected at the end of the session with their positive energy and faith in their abilities.

Student A demonstrates a proficient creative expression of penmanship developed from forging parent signatures for the last five years and exploring the many ways of signing one’s name for the days when their celebrity may be famous. The variety of ways to spell FAIL is impressive in its scope and presentation. Some variations are bubble or block letters while many seem to be intentionally sloppy to signify the metaphor of rushing for quality work on a test. In the lower right corner, FAIL is encircled by a nebulous creation juxtaposing this experience with the barbed wire fence enclosing our school.

By the end of the class, Student A reflected with a similar presentation of the word PASS. Again there are many derivations of the basic way of writing. But gone are the block and bubble letter; this speaks of the prescient moment at hand and the attitude that passing will demand a level of consistency not originally emphasized in Artifact 1. This student is ready.

Student B is a rhetorician using pathos and alliteration. This student is speaking from the heart and addressing the emptiness of the ‘Buricratic Bull Shit! Becoming of a Stupified System. Spelling is overlooked, but passion abounds. This student has a deep belief in the efficacy of the class and school underlining ‘Vista Will Kill It.’ This phrase demonstrates a grade level understanding of metaphor and voice. Although not advised, ‘Fuck you system’ is a stinging reproach of education today.

Student B was an active participant in the lesson and the second reflection demonstrates a corner has been turned. In Artifact 2, Student B wastes not a word. The metaphor of murdering an inanimate object remains, but now the word ‘test’ completes an interesting rhymed couplet. The self-confidence remains strong and will be an asset for this student in the coming days.

Student C is a bit more tangential and paradoxical. One can recognize both an affirming attitude and deeply troubling laments. The writer wisely parodies the structure of a multiple choice test filling in the negative space with A, B, C, D. As a whole, the reflection screams of Jackson Pollock’s earlier work rendered anew trading the paint for print. Obviously, this student is an artist and a highly interesting human being.

After completing the lesson, Student C demonstrates an exasperation of the entire process. Gone is the self-motivation, the confusion and put downs. The prompt reads simply and the answers are empty. This student grasps the greater shortcomings of a testing culture in education while reframing the classic trope of a multiple-choice question. High-level interpretation indeed. This student is ready to move on with life.

 

Math Homework

I am the oldest daughter of three playing mother to myself
since the days when x and y were playing house. she promised
years in a better home with crackrotted lies passing from her mouth
like smoke. I have seen her with the variables of boyfriends
more than I have memories of my father. I recall her reducing
the lowest common denominator of the abuse and the abuser to me. I am

the bipolar teenager who knows homelessness
like rational expressions. the fullest years of my life made me a factor
of zero. I have demons and imaginary friends cancelling each other
out. I am a woman of my generation in that
the real people I call friends are common
like me, flowers with irrational roots.

Last year, my job was threatened when I wrote poetry about the Standardized Testing climate of our tiny charter school as evidence of a nationwide problem in education. My poems contained cryptic references to the content for one excerpt of one reading. I was reprimanded. Those poems are still in the shadows, gathering dust and legend. But I am no less inspired to…go there.

This year I will be chronicling The Tests with a poem a day exploration in March. I know my career will be safe this year. I know my limits. But there is a story worth capturing during these months.

There are less than ten school days left in February which means I have some time to offer some other school related content before my mighty task.

Keep you posted. Share away so no one misses a verse!