Engaging

I love my Year 10 class. They are full of charisma, opinions, personality and energy. But they hated poetry.

I love poetry. I love how writers cleverly manipulate language to create the most expressive phrases and show me the world from entirely new perspectives. We have great (southern) New Zealand poets, and I thought I was introducing them to the students in interesting ways. They didn't think so.

Brian Turner's 'Pebbles' seems to me both a commentary on the changing environment, as well insight into a different sense of belonging and perspective: 'We belong in water / untroubled by envy for anything / born to live in the loneliness of air'. I got the students to think about their own knowledge of rivers, and to choose their own interpretation of rivers.We followed this up with a brief comparison with another Turner river poem, 'Audible'. They were able to complete sentences, but as for independent thinking, well...

For 'Deep River Talk' by Hone Tuwhare, we spent a period in the computer lab researching Tuwhare and traditional Maori world views. I made a jigsaw; to help visual learners this had photographs to represent the verbal images in the poem. This did work well, but there were gluestick issues (as in issues with glue sticking to the door, walls and whiteboard).

I tried to engage them with a values activity about mining before we studied 'Mining Lament' by Cilla McQueen. With its 'rounded hill of golden ore', this poem critiques the destruction mining can cause the environment. As we have a coal mine nearby, I thought this might generate some discussion. Nah.

Yep, pretty sure a lot of it comes down to me. How could I have managed student behaviour better to enable greater learning? How can I differentiate learning even more for those kids who really struggle with reading and writing? What can I do to deliver even more varied and engaging learning opportunities? I do think that some of it does come down to the class and situation - heading down to the last couple of weeks of term, reluctant learners, Year 10 mix...

Goodbye poetry.

Hello Rugby World Cup activities. And hello excited and engaged class. Noisy, certainly, but a productive and high energy noise, where students are chatting about what they are doing, comparing answers and checking with each other. This is the level of involvement that I need to maintain - but I wonder how much ruby poetry there is out there?

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