Poetry Essay
What do you get when you ask a class of eighth grade students what they think about poetry?
A) Screams of agony and fear.
B) Whispering and swearing.
C) That one kid who stands on his/her desk and yells in joy.
As you may have noticed, eighth graders are in fact not fond of poetry. Mr. Raisdana had devised a chart as proof of this.
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1
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2 “Eh whatever, I read a poem once, so who cares I mean we’re getting graded” |
3
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4 “I LOVE POETRY YEAH OH YEAH OH YEAH” |
Most people were about here on the fine line between hate and tolerate, or here at the calm area of “I like it, it’s not bad.” One or two people were in the fourth column and a few kids that absolutely loathed the subject.
But Mr. Raisdana was clever and persuasive. He seemed to have the ideology and mindset of a door to door salesman. One student was on column one, Mr.Raisdana asked him this question. “What kind of music do you like?”
“The Red Hot Chili Peppers, why?” Responded the student.
“Well…Anthony Keidis the main singer cannot go a day without writing a poem and every single song they have is a poem.” With this wisdom the perception of poetry across our class took a significant turn for the better…….and as the number of people who began in the first column diminished, the other columns were content with gaining a respectable population.
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2 “Eh whatever, I read a poem once, so who cares I mean were getting graded” |
3 “Poetry…well its ok, I have some poetry books at home” |
4 “I LOVE POETRY YEAH OH YEAH OH YEAH” |
Our project was that we (the class) needed to compile our poems we wrote in class, into a book. My book was called “Another Case of the Measlepox.” For this book we needed to do an introduction about the author, and at least five artistic pictures, and all the poems we did.
Now alongside this project we had another project. The Teen Life Project I prefer to call it the teen life collab, but for the essay partly because I’m lazy and partly because it sounds cool I will call it the TLP. We all have blogs in our school and we all have experience with the internet. Mr.Raisdana had a great idea and introduced us to three other schools on the other side of the world; Mr. Hide’s from Colombia, Mr. Fischer’s in Canada and Mrs.Baber’s class residing in the States. Our classes were split into groups. Each group had two people working from each of the different countries that were participating in the TLP. Each person in our class part was required to make a motivational image and a poem, for our TLP group. The poems and images were then handed over to the rest of the six people in our group to create a video.
I was an Academic achiever because I demonstrated progress in all areas. You ask me how? Well, there is a type of poem out there for everyone. All the other types of poems may not be to your liking but you need to understand them in order to understand poetry. I tried to progress in areas of poetry that I was not good at such as, the message poem.
Another way I was an Academic achiever is that I continually assessed, evaluated and adjusted my work to maintain high standards. No poem is perfect when you first write it. I had to do various rewrites to get the poems close to perfect. Sometimes when I slaved away for three hours on a poem, I finally read it and still chucked it out. This was my assessment of this particular poem. What if next time I tried to build on my cruddy poem and make it even better? That may produce outstanding results.
A really important aspect of this ESLR is the ability to work both independently and collaboratively. THE TEEN LIFE PROJECT is the most collaborative project I ever participated in. I not only worked within my class, I worked across the world and teamed up with people from other countries on the project. In contrast you cannot write poems collaboratively because poetry is an expression of oneself. No individual can express another’s feelings because it is a personal thought.
I also accessed information from a variety of sources which is another area of this ESLR, such as the internet and of course from Mr.Raisdana. In the TLP we needed to research on a topic before we wrote our poem.
But what I think is the most important part of the ESLR is the ability to demonstrate technological literacy and the use of technology as a tool for the efficient and creative completion of a project. We used blogs, videos, cameras, I-movie, laptops, projectors, audio programs like garage band and podcasts and other technology that is very new in this world. Tech products like podcasts are so new that Microsoft Word is showing that the word “PODCAST” is misspelled. We needed to understand how to get all these various cameras working and how to work with recording programs like garage band. We also made videos for our class and a keen understanding of I-movie was needed for this. If I needed to grade myself on my knowledge of technology after this unit I would be proud of myself and give myself an A.
To be an effective communicator you must, Demonstrate creative talents to convey ideas, hmmm creative talents. Poetry has no definite theory or way to write it. Poetry is all creativity. The poetry book incorporated inventiveness and ingenuity, because we needed to use our own intuition to write it and make it pleasing. Creativity is the on area where everyone must have excelled. I give the class an A+ for this. You also need to Incorporate/Utilize technology as a tool for communication. As I said in the Academic Achiever ESLR we used very advanced technology for this project and I used Photoshop for a lot of the pictures I made. What if we did not use technology? I think that if we did not use any technology this project would have been very different. First of all there would have been no TLP. To show this better I have made a table to show the comparison between tasks that can be performed with or without technology.
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Possible only with technology |
Possible with or without technology |
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Teen life project |
Writing and learning about poems` |
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I-movie |
Presenting poems |
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Podcasting |
Last years poetry night |
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Blogging |
Etc. |
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Photography |
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Class slideshows |
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This years poetry night |
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Etc. |
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As you can see technology was a gargantuan part of these projects, and the stuff on the column on the right are even boosted with technology, writing about poems, we write with Microsoft word and print now that is not possible without technology. Furthermore, when presenting poems the clarity and strength of your voice is enhanced with the influence of a microphone. Another element of the ESLR is to Listen respectfully and ask questions to facilitate understanding and achieve insight. We needed to ask questions to the people in the other countries on how they are going and what they need for our project in the TLP. The next part of the ESLR is the ability to demonstrate the skills of effective collaboration. Once again we needed to collaborate with people in other countries. Collaborate with others in appropriate learning situations to achieve group goals another part of the ESLR. MAN! All the ESLR’s are exactly the same! Anyway every class needed to make a class movie in school and we had different tasks and we came together and joined them to finish the movie. The final component of the ESLR is to understand and convey written, oral and visual information using appropriate media, we needed to read research and turn it into a piece of art, a poem. Like turning water into wine I would say. We also needed to put together appropriate music with appropriate images and video. Finally we had to read our poems with the correct enthusiasm and clarity.
In order to be a Self Directed Learner, I needed to take creative risks in developing untried ideas, well my favorite poet is E.E Cummings his poems are very ingenious. Such as a poem called leaves where the words are formatted in a way that they look as if they are falling. I wrote a poem named stairs. All the words are written in a way that they look like a staircase. Another part of this ESLR is Demonstrate competency in goal setting, time management, and organizational skills We needed to juggle the time between doing our poetry book, and the TLP I guess I did this very well as I am notorious for leaving things to the last minute but this time I didn’t. Monitor, adjust and document work in progress is another part of the ESLR, That is why we made a planning wiki space for our TLP group which was basically the drawing board. Accept responsibility for my own learning is the most important aspect of the self directed learner. The poetry book we made was a project we needed to do this by ourselves. We were not supplied with materials, or even strict guidelines. We were not being graded on the teen life project so we needed to take the responsibility of actually doing it. Finally in this ESLR of self directed learner I had to identify my needs and apply appropriate learning strategies. I needed to know what poems I am good at and what poems I was bad at writing. Then improve on the ones I was not particularly good at at. Also on the poetry night I needed to carefully choose what poem to read, in order to get a roar of laughter or joy instead of a regular clap.
I was a Critical thinker by doing the following. Identify, evaluate and use resources effectively for the purpose of problem solving and Gather, analyze and process information from a variety of sources are two quite similar areas of this ESLR. I had many resources to use in this project such as the internet, books, my peers and more. I needed to use these correctly and in proper moderation. Build meaning and understanding using prior knowledge and new information, one more area of the ESLR. I knew how to use humour and write some poems in the past so this came into effect in writing my poems. I also knew a lot about computers so this helped me in various ways in the TLP. Apply problem-solving skills to facilitate learning, Solve problems using a variety of strategies, and Select, monitor, and adjust problem-solving strategies are all basically the same areas in this ESLR, Well I did not face many problems except for the fact that on a few days my computer committed suicide so I solved these problems by using the computers at school
I was also being an involved citizen, how? Well… The poems we wrote for the TLP were message poems for a world issue we are concerned about; my particular issue was teen smoking. In comparison to my other poems of wit and humour this was a calm strongly voiced poem to get the issue across in the ESLR it falls under the category of Demonstrate awareness and respect for the rights of others and Demonstrate care and concern for their environment. Another part of the ESLR is to Interact respectfully with people of diverse cultures, the world is a fragile place that is why this area in this ESLR is important we are a school of 50 or so nations luckily. But this area of the ESLR is mostly demonstrated in the TLP. We were dealing with other countries. Which can be very hard to do in today’s world. I think another reason Mr. Raisdana did this project was to learn about the lives of other nations. People were asking us if we lived in huts and sold rice, so this shows that the world does not know each other very well.
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