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.
Look Ma! Test has gotten smaller!
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!
My school begins our testing window for second and third year high school students tomorrow. Every morning from 9-12 they will be sequestered into the same classroom for their math and reading tests. Third year students also have an entire day on Thursday from 9-2:30 with one break and a 45 minute lunch.
Not much of my poetry so far this month has been directed at the students, or written for them to hear. This one is for them. My ninjas. The last thing I will do tomorrow before the test begins is stand in front of the test takers, bow and grunt, like we do. Then everyone gets a fist bump. And as cheersing without eye contact is bad luck, bumping my fist demands focus. The last moment of human contact they will have until the test is over (unless you count the droning proctor script before each test begins, but I do not..that interaction is not human).
Time to motivate these rascals!
Get it, yo! We are listening!
Do It For Your First Grade Teacher
remember back to the days
of naptime and snacks
when arithmetic flashcards were adorned with cartoon owls
and all the numbers had limbs and smiley faces
remember back to the days
when recess started every hour on the hour
and the swing set felt like a rocket ship
when there was lava
under the monkey bars and chicken peck kisses
by the basketball courts
remember hugging the woman
with tree trunk legs and horn-rimmed glasses
with her spring time sundresses
gradebook in hand greeting every student
at the door thanking them for coming
remember those days
when every child was a student of the week
she chose you because she waited everyday
until you did something spectacular:
cleaning the classroom trash, sharing your bag of cookies,
handing in the neatest work, making friends with the smelly kid
she was the first person outside of your family
to recognize your brilliance
she was the first one to be awed by your amazing
and maybe it wasn’t her
but at some point you believed in a teacher
because they believed in you
you went to school for an entire year energized and happy
because you were made to feel invincible and valuable and epic.
you are still epic
that teacher was not writing a fiction of you
you have always been valuable
even as the school system shortchanges you
and despite these tests, this stress,
the fear of the unknown on your horizon
you will always be invincible
nothing could ever convince me otherwise
but I don’t want you to think of me when you are stuck
three years into high school
three months before summer vacation
three days into these standardized tests
do it for your first grade teacher
prove everything she believed in you came true
prove to her
no matter how much education has sucked away your soul
or cornered your creativity
she made you invincible
not for me, not for your school, not for the data
do it for the first teacher who believed in you
show them you believe too
Courtesy of Word It Out
I did this last Saturday as well. These words are a visual representation of the 7 poems I wrote this week about our conflicted education system.
The more frequently I wrote the word, the larger it appears in the word cloud. I am happy to note that the word test is smaller than last week! I think the value of this word cloud is to gain a glimpse of what I value as a teacher. Students, people, teachers. And words like believe, reflection, attitude and being.
I have two more weeks of this poem a day project. I hope you continue to share on Facebook and Twitter, offering encouragement, and keep the issue of shaping our youth close to your heart.
π like a boss
π
3.1415926535897932384626433832795098841971693992751 058209749445923078164062862089986280348253421170679 821480865132823066470938446095505822317253594081284 811174502841027019385211055596446229489549303819644 2881097566593344612847
Study these facts for the Math test on Tuesday.
I am 3.14 decades from mastering my craft as a teacher.
592 more essays to revise before I can save 65 students from misusing commas.
The length of 35,897 staff meeting doodles can stretch across the equator 932 times.
38,462 Domino’s pizzas are served in 6,433 cafeterias every Friday for school lunch.
There are 832 different texts in my school’s 79 square foot library.
509 students are interacting through Xbox right now.
8 of my students are writing poetry on a Friday night slamming the 841 ways a heart can break.
There are approximately 97,169 minutes until graduation and 3,992 dreams that will change, expire, birth and evolve before then.
75 pages of Watership Down are assigned for Wednesday’s class, but the students have to answer 1,058,029 test questions between now and then so only 7 will come to class prepared.
There are barely more than 49 months before this year’s eighth graders will be trying on their gowns and mortarboards for the greatest day of their life.
44 students are existentialists contemplating their place in life and overlooking the 592 parallel universes in which their individual dramas play out in life.
30,781,640 people in this country believe that evolution should not be taught in schools and 6,286 people believe Noah will run for Vice President on Adam’s ticket in the next election.
208 school districts being seduced by 99 lobbyists are affecting exactly 8 positive outcomes for education.
Sometimes I wish only 6 more students would care to learn about the power of a persuasive essay.
2,803 more minutes are about to slip away from my life before this exercise ends.
3,482 parents have to take on second jobs each school year directly resulting in 53,421 uncompleted homework assignments.
I have on good word that all 17 people in my classroom will go on to create positive change in the world and 0 will forget my name.
On a good day, 679 synapses fire back to grade school when I teach about suffixes and prefixes.
I leave school every day wishing I could do 82 things differently tomorrow.
The 14 people working in my high school defy 808 impossibilities every morning.
I believe in the number 65. I do.
Did you know the number 132 is a pronic number, the product of eleven and twelve?
Interstate 82 connects Ellensburg, WA and Umatilla, Oregon. And 30 kindergarten students would laugh at the word Umatilla. And probably 6 high school juniors would too.
The average college student today will pay upwards of $64,709 on college tuition at a public university.
There are exactly 38 United States capitals that my students are aware exist. I am sorry, Dover and Augusta.
44 is a pretty number.
609 is the area code of South Jersey, the capital of American shore pines.
55 students are truants every day in order to homeschool themselves.
Exactly 0 people are excited about π at this point.
Somewhere around 58,223 I lose count.
March 17 is the only day of the year until I get to wear an Irish tie without being obnoxious. And even then, there is a 25% chance I will be 35 times more obnoxious than the 940,812 other teachers wearing similar ties.
There are approximately 848 more poems to write about teaching this March, of which only 11 of them will be worth reading..
74 people will obtain four-year college scholarships and spend a 5th year of college on their own dime because they want 0 of the real world.
There are 28 days of February and nearly 410,270 teachers go crazy during this time.
In 1938, John Dewey published a seminal book on education and less than 5,211 educators know this man other than the Patron Saint of Librarians.
0 people believe 555 is a legitimate area code in movies.
9,644 teachers are currently considering the 6 ways they could do something other than teaching with their lives only to show up for the next 22 years in order to reach retirement age and cash in on those 9 golden years before realizing they’ll need to continue working for the next 489 years.
’54 is the year of a landmark case made real a few years later when black girls like Minnijean Brown became women in Little Rock, and 930 months later in the third decade of this century, 38,196,442 students will still deal with inequalities with their education.
My 88 year old grandfather fought approximately 1,097 days in the Pacific during WWII.
5665 is a palindrome and 9 thousand people mistakenly think 3344 is one too.
The release of Highway 61 influenced a generation of Americans to believe Bob Dylan is our greatest American troubadour in need of revisiting.
28 is the second mathematical perfect number, with two of its factors being the neat and tidy 4 and 7. You can’t make that stuff up.
Roots and Wings students out in the world.
“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!
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