Toward a Literary OC
What is the point of a teacher? Wouldn’t it be easier to just Google what we want to know at our own convenience? No, of course not, and I’m not just saying that to protect my job.
The point of a teacher is to facilitate and engage the students. We inspire and instill passion. Although this may sound like the clichéd and obvious pathos from a Department of Education valediction, often times we find ourselves looking into the discouraging, apathetic faces of the pupils we are failing to reach.
One thing I’ve learned from this quarter of teaching at El Sol that it is not enough to be educated and competent, if we are not also entertainers. Many classes we would figuratively sit there going “Here’s poetry!” and expect the kids to care. They won’t. They’re teenagers. They’re more concerned with whoever is cute and whether they are liked by said cute person than they are concerned with an image of a parakeet corpse being flown as a kite with fishing wire,* more or less what it represents.
Many of our adolescent student’s brains are experiencing true narcissistic misery for the first time. Even though this is a goldmine for poetic inspiration, we cannot tap into it if the students are ignoring us.
At this age children may not be able to distinguish creative writing from the sentences that they have to write as assignments in English class. We can’t just tell them what to do and expect an appreciation of the intrinsic value of poetry. We have to be HIGH ENERGY and EXCITED about poetry. If we’re not excited how can we expect them to be?
The goal of the teacher is to take poetry down a peg, because our students won’t climb up to its idealized pedestal. That is democratizing poetry. Taking out the pedantic and replace it with what is real to the students. This is how the students will be engaged. We can teach poetry just as well with Slim Shady as we can with Silvia Plath. You can teach emotion in art with the image of a dying dove on Christmas morning* written in measured lines just as easily as you can with Simba asking the corpse of his father to get up and take him home.
Is this dumbing down the curriculum? If our goal is to familiarize the students with poems then sure, I guess. If you look at it in the sense where time in which they are hearing about The Postal Service is time not used for Louise Gluck. But what’s the point of reading Gluck if they don’t know how to read a poem? Since our goal is a greater understanding of poetic devices, art, and how to use these ideas in their own writing, then no we are not dumbing down the curriculum. We’re making the subject matter more available to people who won’t or can’t reach for it themselves. In other words, we’re being teachers.
I feel that any of our challenges previously mentioned might have stemmed from our forgetting of these lessons, or maybe our forgetting that our audience isn’t as entranced by poetry as we, the instructors, are. Let’s remember this when we teachers lose our students along our talks.
*this is my image, not from a poem taught in class.
