Must tell you how impressed I am with Lincoln Magnet School on 11th. I’ve sub taught there four times, and every time I depart that building, I know I could not have better spent my time, even if I had been a passenger in the back seat of an F-16 during a practice flight with the US Air Force Thunderbirds. Some schools in this city exude person-to-person warmth of the kind encountered at family reunions where they’ve all missed each other for the last 10 years. Others, especially in the classroom, lead the sub to believe he has been dropped into Abu Graibe Prison, and the primary focus for the subber is to keep the subees quiet and not grabbing each other.
The most daunting part of subbing to many newcomers is engaging students in conversation connected to the lesson at hand. Today, a science book I’ve used three or four times this year was figuratively thrust into my hands, and I was instructed by the very competent and convivial Mrs. vdS, to lead them in reading and discussing the text on pages I had never seen before. No big deal you say? The students were doing the reading aloud anyway so all I had to do was keep selecting new readers every three paragraphs or so? Not quite. We also had a study sheet. Students woud read to a place where we could answer three or four study sheet questions based on what WE had just read.. . . and resume reading. The challenge is to keep young minds focused on questions at hand and discourage outbursts of questions and unrelated banter, however well-intended it may be. Impetuous talk waters down the lesson the way water dilutes wine. With these students in first period, it went well, though I did feel I was too busy following the students (fanning away mosquitoes) to concentrate on the alligators (teaching and leading the learning process). Things became smmother with each new class. During teacher prep, I was asked to take over another teacher in her English class, and THIS is where the subject of Vachel Lindsay came up . . . . as it always does when I teach English and/or Language Arts.
Before we got rolling with the proscribed lesson, I asked them if anyone had ever heard of Vachel and if anyone had written a poem. Several had heard the name — “Yes, there’s a school named after him.” and “He was a poet.” BLESS YOU YOUNG MAN! You are now my favorite student! If y’all are good, we’ll come back to Vachel before the end of class.
This was the hippest bunch of eighth graders I’ve encountered. They read the assigned reading aloud flawlessly, and I didn’t have to coordinate study guide questions. The reading assignment was completed faster than expected, leaving 25 minutes for them to “study QUIETLY.” And they DID!
I was determined not to waste the entire remainder of the period so unproductively, so in launching into Vachel, I told these ultra-hip students I understood of they don’t dig poetry. That’s okay, not a big deal. All I ask is for you to study quietly while I talk with those who do.
I had decided not to squander the opportunity by simply sharing Vachel’s “The Pet Turtle.” They were focused and perceptibly more mature than 6th & 7th graders. I wanted them to hear how serious poem sounds. It was also essential that they know there is a difference between reading a poem aloud to a piece of paper and reciting a poem as it should be recited. After explaining how, back when Vachel lived, people in cities loaned their colts to friends on farms to teach them how to pull a wagon and get used to a harness, I recited “The Broncho That Would Not Be Broken.” Yes, I know the spelling of “broncho” is yesterday. That’s how people spelled it in 1913. When I was done reciting the poem, 15 or so students APPLAUDED. Beyond the flattery element, it was an important reaction because it showed me they KNEW they had just heard something out of the ordinary, something good, something to remember. I asked if anyone else had written a poem and five hands went up. One young man showed me one he had written: very interesting triplet stanzas about what young people worry about at his age. HE passed it around, and that was fine. THEN I recited “The Pet Turtle.” They applauded my introductory reading, which always grabs attention and smiles, and then I taught it to them. We repeated it in unison twice by the time the bell rang, and we had an excellent time doing it. The whole class got involved with this. Two periods later in the lunch room, one of the students walked up to me and said he enjoyed “The Turtle.”
As long as there are students as sharp as those at Lincoln Magnet and other fine schools in Springfield District 186, I will never stop being a poet. The day reinforced my belief in poetry as RELEVANT today. That combined with the fab experience at the Museum of Funeral Customs reading last Saturday really “re-girded my loins” for a renewed run at writing new poems and inflicting them on my friends and total strangers.
BTW, to read “The Broncho That Would Not Be Broken,” Google that title. First on the list takes you to the poem text at The Academy of American Poets. I will post it, with my take on the poem and some background at my page — www.civag.com/lindsaypoems.htm — Will update you when it’s there.
Thanks for reading.
Live long . . . . . and proper.
