In Between Multiple Choice

It is standardized testing season across Tennessee. Our days will be filled with administering or proctoring tests and crossing our fingers that we have prepared our students for this test that will put a value sticker on their education, their minds, and (in their minds) their worth.

My wife, a wonderfully bright product of homeschooling, has been working as a teacher's assistant with MTReads. She is seeing for the first time how the sausage of the public education is made. She does not like seeing her 3rd grade students bored out of their mind during testing and feeling insurmountable pressure dumped on their shoulders.

We have been spending our evenings debriefing on standardized test and it has us thinking a lot about language. The burden of these tests is a burden of words. Students will encounter words they have never seen before and when they ask my wife what word it is, a word they may know even if they cannot read it, she cannot help them sound it out. I have 16 year old students asking me what "benevolent" or "imperative" mean and I cannot answer their questions.

Words, beautiful words, and how they are hanging down between our students as a barrier. A true Word Wall between what they know and their ability to prove or express that they know it. We are not there yet, and they are not there yet.

So when people ask me why poetry matters to high schoolers and why it matters in urban education, this is what comes to mind. Words matter. There is a different between benevolent, kind, good, nice, and compassionate. It seems like it doesn't matter but to these kids it does. The EOC cares about these words. The world cares about these words and so should teachers. Poetry does matter as long as words matter.

To me words are the wings that allow me to go where I choose. I can be with Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg, I can be with Oppenheimer after the first nuclear blast, I can be in Middle Earth with Tolkien, or I can be at Airship One with George Orwell. I can be over Tintern Abbey with Wordsworth or Charging the Light Brigade with Lord Tennyson. I can express and create these wonderful places with my words, many of our students cannot.

They are trapped by words. Words are collar around their neck. So we need poetry as the key to these locks. It will teach them to fly. It matters. It has to matter. As long as words matter, poetry will matter. Words aren't going anywhere. So I stand on my soap box.


For Micha's Mother, Who Signs
BY ROBERT A. FINK

It is not poetry you fear, but poets,
their indelible brand
of words. How will your daughter
escape the mark men hanged
young women for in Salem?
I am nothing more than a teacher,
like you. See, I have removed
my shoes and socks. I am rolling
my trousers above my ankles.
No cloven hooves. Long feet and toes
like you and your beautiful daughter.

It is language that has won
her over, earth-bound words
walking orderly across the page
like children holding to
the rope attached to your wrist,
teacher and students
traversing the noisy street
at the crosswalk, with the light
of your fingers composing
the line your children read,
each syllable's afterimage trailing
your quick passage of hands
conducting the boys and girls
safely from one curb to the other.



Take heart. There is hope in our words. We as teachers can empower them.
Grace and Peace,
Rory