Poetry Friday -- Poetry Gifts

Photo via Unsplash

I've received three (edited to add one more) thoughtful (thought-full) poetry gifts in the past week.

1. I wrote this haiku for #haikuforhope, and Amy Ludwig VanDerwater wrote a response haiku that helped me get my head on straight for the day. Thank you, Amy!

avocado toast

(practice mindfulness)

four days until winter break

(sipping my hot tea)

new student today

©Mary Lee Hahn, 2018

Honey Nut Cheerios

 (a little scared) 

four days until winter break 

(drinking orange juice) 

will my new teacher be kind?

©Amy Ludwig VanDerwater, 2018

2. Steve Peterson tweeted me this poem, proving for good that proximity of geography is not required for a friend to know the nooks and crannies of your heart. Thank you, Steve!

3. A childhood friend I haven't seen for decades (along with geography, add time to the equation of friendship) tagged me with this article on Facebook: Why Reading Poetry Is Good For Your Brain. Some of the studies are a bit dubious, but none of us are going to argue with the conclusions, right?

4. How could I not celebrate YOU?!? This community of poet-teacher-writer-allaroundgreathumans feeds my soul. Special wink and nod to the #haikuforhope crew. It's been a wonder-full month. As always, I won't want to stop. Daily writing in a form brief enough to keep me writing daily...yeah, I'll probably keep going.

Happy Friday! (That one's especially for the active duty teachers in our crew who might be reading this on Saturday or next week! We've got this! One more day of joy and craziness with our classrooms full of beloveds!) 

Happy Poetry Friday! Buffy Silverman has the Full Moon/Solstice edition this week.

Poetry Friday -- A Visit From Poets!

My class was lucky enough today to visit with Irene Latham and Charles Waters via Zoom! What a generous gift of time for Irene and Charles to answer the students' questions.

Here are two found #haikuforhope from their talk:

nothing will change if

we shut our mouths and refuse

to talk about race

(Irene's words)

writing

is telling

the truth

(Charles' words)

Last Friday, I reviewed Can I Touch Your Hair in an initial post about the conversations we've had around race in my classroom so far this year.

This week, I added more thinking about our conversations.

Laura Shovan has the Poetry Friday roundup this week.

Conversations About Race and Gender

(This post is the back history I promised in my Poetry Friday post about Irene Latham's and Charles Waters' book, Can I Touch Your Hair? Poems of Race, Mistakes, and Friendship.)

My Journey
Last summer, I received a review copy of Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness by Anastasia Higginbotham, so I checked out all of her books from the library. Her writing taught me so much about how to have honest conversations with children about tough topics.

Who knew how calm and straightforward I would manage to be when I overheard a student defending transgender people. I joined the conversation and affirmed that there was nothing "weird" about transgender people. When asked, "What is transgender anyway?" I was ready, thanks to Higginbotham, to talk about the genders we are assigned at birth -- the genders that others can see -- and the true gender we feel within us, and how transgender people experience themselves as a gender they weren't assigned at birth. Transgender people may or may not choose to change their appearance to match the gender they experience. The student who asked for more information said, "Oh. That's all it is? That's not weird." Success.


I listened to So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo.

Oluo taught me more about my whiteness and my place in our white supremacist society than anything I've previously read. 

She showed me how wrong I was a couple of years ago when I was so outraged that a parent thought I was racist. If that parent thought I was racist, I was. I cannot deny her lived experience with my behavior. If I could go back, I would approach that parent with honesty and humility to learn what I had done so I could change my behavior.  

The Journey in My Classroom

Our first read aloud, The Cardboard Kingdom, gave us characters who were gender fluid in their imaginary play, bullies with back stories, a diverse mix of races and cultures and families. I projected this graphic novel via Kindle on the Smartboard. Our conversations about each of the short stories and about the characters were rich.

Our next read aloud was 24 Hours in Nowhere by Dusti Bowling. This book opens with a racist bully pushing Gus' face into a cholla cactus. Rossi, a Tohono O’odham Nation girl, rescues him by giving her beloved dirt bike to the bully. From the Amazon blurb, "Conversations among the young teens reveal Gus’s burgeoning awareness of his white privilege as he listens to the experiences of his Latinx and Native American friends." We had amazing conversations about the stereotypes that were revealed and deconstructed over the course of this story. The only thing about this story that was perhaps lost on my urban/suburban students was the level of poverty of the characters. I don't think my students have ever seen, let alone been in, a trailer home!

When October 8 rolled around, we were in the perfect place in our study of the indigenous cultures of Latin America (and in our conversations with 24 Hours in Nowhere) to talk about why that day is simultaneously Columbus Day and Indigenous Peoples Day. We could talk about perspective and about who gets to tell the dominant story of history. I hope my students began to learn that they need to seek out alternative perspectives on historical events and to always consider which voices are dominating the popular narrative and which voices are being left out or silenced. 

If you remember from my previous post about conversations around race, I have a unique place in my classroom. Along with myself, four of my twenty-six students are white. The rest of the class is Middle Eastern, Latinx, African, African American, or Chinese. When I speak to my class about race, I must always be aware that I'm speaking from behind white skin to mostly people of color. My skin represents the dominance and power in our society. There was an incident in class that might shed light on this dynamic, if I'm reading it correctly. I was pushing a heavy table and someone commented that I was Hulk. A child said I couldn't be Hulk because I wasn't green. Another child said I was the White Hulk, and this was met with, "Oooohhh!" That child had clearly stepped out of bounds by identifying me as white. I was puzzled. I said, "What's the big deal? I AM white!" I reminded them that one particular student was never afraid to identify himself as black and talk about his beautiful dark skin. Another talked about his African father. Why was it a big deal to talk about my whiteness? They got more and more uncomfortable, with several asking, "Can we please talk about something else?" This was an eye-opener. But instead of keeping me quiet on race, I was more determined than ever to have these conversations.

I read and re-read Not My Idea in preparation for reading it (and Can I Touch Your Hair) aloud to my students. Even though we had had what I thought were conversations about race, that surprising response to the direct naming of my whiteness made me nervous to read this book aloud. I focused on the ending, where Higginbotham reminds whites that we have a choice about the kind of white person we will be. Whites can sign on to historic whiteness that uses race to keep people of color down or whites can move forward with justice in our hearts and be the kind of white that works for equality and truth.

Hopefully, Not My Idea will help my white students start to understand and grapple with white privilege, while helping my students of color to realize that there are all different kinds of white people. And although the current narrative in our society presents white supremacy as the norm, we can ALL tell a new story about race, a story that begins in our classrooms with honest conversations, a willingness to make mistakes but then own them, and the desire to move forward to a truly inclusive society. 

Poetry Friday -- Talking About Race With My Students

We finished reading aloud Can I Touch Your Hair? yesterday. It was not the first book I've read aloud this year that gave us the opportunity to talk about race. Our conversations started with The Cardboard Kingdom, and continued with 24 Hours in Nowhere and Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness (a book which made NPR's list of Best Books of 2018!). I'll write about the whole journey in a separate post. Just remember, we had had growing and ongoing conversations about race before we got to this book. Also, a note about the demographics of my classroom. Along with myself, four of my twenty-six students are white. The rest of the class is Middle Eastern, Latinx, African, African American, or Chinese. This is just to say that your conversations would certainly be very different than those in our classroom. When I write that other post about our journey in talking about race, I'll dig into the dynamics of teacher/student race.

Can I Touch Your Hair: Poems of Race, Mistakes, and Friendship. The power of this book lies within each word of the title.

Poems. There will be small packages of text that will allow the reader to stop, ponder, and discuss.

Race. Get ready, because you are going to explore some hard topics here.

Mistakes. If you're going to talk about race, you're bound to make mistakes. But making honest mistakes is a far better path than averting our eyes and not talking about it at all. (If you haven't read So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo, I highly recommend it.) When you know better, you can do better the next time.

Friendship. The book's characters, Irene and Charles, begin by only seeing each other skin deep. As they get to know each other, they find they have so many more important things in common that race (and even gender) becomes insignificant. What a powerful message for children (adults, too!!) to hear over and over again. It's the danger of a single story. If we're going to move forward as a human race, we've got to stop seeing each other as just this or that. We have to get to know each other as complicated, diverse, interesting individuals!

As I said, the pairs of poems are the perfect amount of text to read, then pause for conversation. As we read along, we talked about the topics that came up -- shoes, hair, church. But when one of the students prefaced his comment with, "In movies they make the black people the athletes," I had the perfect way to move the conversation to a safer place by talking about the stereotypes that are perpetuated by the media. It's not that black people ARE the athletes, it's that "they make" the black people the athletes. Everyone had LOTS to say about stereotypes around race, gender, and age! We ended that rich conversation by sharing times when we "broke" a stereotype.

I highly recommend reading this book with children. I highly recommend making this book one part of an ongoing conversation about race.



Thank you to all who signed up to be Poetry Friday roundup hosts in January-June 2019. We filled the schedule in under one week!

Liz has the Poetry Friday roundup this week at Elizabeth Steinglass.

Poetry Friday -- Rivalry

I don't give two hoots about college football, but I've endured decades of silliness spawned by this rivalry. Here's my take on the whole shebang:

football rivalry

the streets are empty

non-fans win the day

©Mary Lee Hahn, 2018

Carol has the roundup this week at Carol's Corner. The call for January-June Roundup Hosts is here.

Poetry Friday -- Call for Roundup Hosts

It's that time again. Six months have passed since last we queued up to host the Poetry Friday roundups.

If you'd like to host a roundup between January and June 2019, leave your choice(s) of date(s) in the comments. I'll update regularly to make it easier to see which dates have been claimed.

What is the Poetry Friday roundup? A gathering of links to posts featuring original or shared poems, or reviews of poetry books. A carnival of poetry posts. Here is an explanation that Rene LaTulippe shared on her blog, No Water River, and here is an article Susan Thomsen wrote for the Poetry Foundation.

Who can do the Poetry Friday roundup? Anyone who is willing to gather the links in some way, shape, or form (Mr. Linky, "old school" in the comments-->annotated in the post, or ???) on the Friday of your choice. If you are new to the Poetry Friday community, jump right in, but perhaps choose a date later on so that we can spend some time getting to know each other.

How do you do a Poetry Friday roundup? If you're not sure, stick around for a couple of weeks and watch...and learn! One thing we're finding out is that folks who schedule their posts, or who live in a different time zone than you, appreciate it when the roundup post goes live sometime on Thursday.

How do I get the code for the PF Roundup Schedule for the sidebar of my blog? You can grab the list from the sidebar here at A Year of Reading, or I'd be happy to send it to you if you leave me your email address. You can always find the schedule on the Kidlitosphere Central webpage.

Why would I do a Poetry Friday Roundup? Community, community, community. It's like hosting a poetry party on your blog!

And now for the where and when:

January
4    Sylvia at Poetry for Children
11  Kat at Kathryn Apel
18  Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect
25  Tara at Going to Walden

February
1    Tabatha at The Opposite of Indifference
8    Laura at Writing the World for Kids
15  Jone at Check it Out
22  Robyn at Life on the Deckle Edge

March
1    Linda at TeacherDance
8    Catherine at Reading to the Core
15  Heidi at My Juicy Little Universe
22  Rebecca at Sloth Reads
29  Carol at Carol's Corner

April
5     Karen at Karen Edmisten*
12   Irene at Live Your Poem
19  Amy at The Poem Farm
26  Carol at Beyond LiteracyLink

May
3    Jama at Jama's Alphabet Soup
10  Liz at Elizabeth Steinglass
17  Michelle at Michelle Kogan
24  Dani at Doing the Work That Matters
31  Mary Lee at A Year of Reading

June
7    Margaret at Reflections on the Teche
14  Laura at Laura Shovan
21  Linda at A Word Edgewise
28  Buffy at Buffy's Blog

Flexible

Photo via Unsplash

Every two weeks we change desks. This limits disorganization to a short cycle, and for all the good it does (I currently have no voice), every two weeks we clean all the surfaces in the room with antibacterial wipes. I "assign" seats with a random pull of sticks, so it moves the students around the room and leaves the responsibility for behavior with them.

Last year, we started a new addition to this routine. Next to the ceiling on my big bulletin board, I started the year with a 12x18 paper that said, "Be..." and we added a word beside it on another 12x18 paper that would tell what we would be. We started the year agreeing to be "awesome," and we changed the word at random intervals until late in the year when I tied it to the desk change.

Now, in addition to a new spot every two weeks, we have a new way to be.

This week, Diana chose FLEXIBLE. It seems like a message from the universe. Without a voice, not only have I had to be more flexible in what I teach and how I teach it, but the flexibility of our classroom community has been tested...and has proven to be solid enough to carry us through.

This week, we are looking for structures (chronology, comparison, cause/effect, problem/solution, etc.) in informational texts. Rather than whisper the science lesson I had planned, we had a TKSS (The Kid Should See This) Film Festival, watching videos and identifying the overall structure of each video, as well as the use of multiple structures within a video.

Flexible.

Poetry Friday

Rise and Fall

Fall takes her leave,
pelts down grainy snow,
swirls the last of the leaves
with darkness and cold.

Rising at the back of the warm stove:
leavened dough.


©Mary Lee Hahn, 2018




While I was waiting for my turn at the dentist yesterday, the words leave, leaves, and leavening came to me. What you see here is about draft number seven, written in the waiting room, in my head as I washed dishes from yesterday's first batch of candy, and finished now as the dough for cinnamon rolls is rising.

It's good to be writing (and blogging) again.

I'm planning to write going to write a haiku-a-day in December, as I have for the past several years. Catherine (at Reading to the Core) suggested a shift from #HaikuForHealing to #HaikuForHope. I like that. I also like #HaikuForChange. Just plain #haiku seems like a popular hashtag as well, along with #amwriting.

Next week, watch for the Call for Roundup Hosts (January-June 2019 edition).

Last, but not least -- Happy Thanksgiving! I am thankful for each of you and for this community of writers/poets/teachers/readers.

Irene has this week's Poetry Friday roundup at Live Your Poem.

Celebrating the Winners of the 2019 Charlotte Huck Award for Excellence in Children's Literature

The Charlotte Huck Award® was established in 2014 to promote and recognize excellence in the writing of fiction for children. In particular, the award recognizes fiction that has the potential for transforming children’s lives by inviting compassion, imagination, and wonder.

WINNER:

From the ashes of Victorian London emerge a girl, her Golem, and the sparks of child labor reform.

HONOR BOOKS:

Discomfort precedes understanding. Understanding precedes change.

Can Lucy be her father’s missing arm? Recovery, resilience, and the ripple effects of PTSD.

Humanity comes in many colors. Can you see me?

Familia, the glue that keeps the heart and mind together.

When war invades the hearts of adults, it is the children who make their refugee classmates feel welcome.

RECOMMENDED BOOKS:

The Vision of an Extraordinary Educator

Raising Student Voice: Speaking Out for Equity and Justice

“Our students’ voices matter. Their voices matter in our schools, our communities, and beyond. As teachers, we want our students to discover their own voices. We want them to know the power of their voices. We want them to know the power of others’ voices, and we want them to know the power of their collective voices. Most important, we want to help them discover how their voices might impact our world and to be empowered to use their voices to speak out for equity and justice.

“Stories can help our students discover and clarify their own voices. Stories can help us to know our world better. Stories can help us to understand our world and the people in it. Authors, teachers, and librarians work to ensure that every child has books, digital texts, and other media in which they see themselves. They also work so that students have books that can help them understand others. Our students deserve stories that impact who they are and who they can become. They deserve stories that help them understand people and situations that are different from their own. They deserve stories that help them build confidence and empathy. They deserve books that validate their world as well as books that challenge their views. And most important, they deserve to tell their own stories.

“When we meet in Houston, Texas, in November 2018, it is my hope that we will focus on the ways literacy creates change and the ways in which our students can raise their voices to impact their communities. NCTE members create spaces for students to sound their voices. In 2018, we’ll come together in Houston to celebrate our students’ voices and the impact they make in the world.”

--Program Chair Franki Sibberson

Some of the featured speakers who will be at #NCTE18:

More convention information here.

The blog's been quiet this fall, but when you see this convention that Franki's been planning, you will understand why she's gone missing. It's so...Franki! The focus on student voice, the importance of equity and justice, the diversity of the featured speakers, the innovation of the "Build Your Stack" sessions. 

Me? A bit of a rocky start to the school year and 300+ books read for the Huck Award since the middle of August.

We're both eager to be back. But first we're going to soak in the words of these (and other) amazing speakers, have joyous reunions with friends we only see once or twice a year, and do work that we love almost as much as the work we do in our classrooms.

Please join me in celebrating an extraordinary educator, my co-blogger and friend, Franki Sibberson, who will assume the presidency of the National Council of Teachers of English at the 2018 NCTE Annual Convention. A fifth grade classroom teacher with the vision, passion, and energy to lead at the national level.