Seven at the Golden Shovel
An old post that never got published:
We began our poetry unit today, of course by reading Seven at the Golden Shovel by Gwendolyn Brooks. You might know the poem:
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Strike straight. We
Lurk late. We
Sing sin. We
Thin Gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
This poem never fails to incite a lot of discussion. I think this is true for many reasons…one being that it’s short enough for ANYONE to read and attempt to make sense of. Only 24 words….with so, so much meaning packed into them. Within those 24 words are cutting school, drinking gin, jazz music, dying, sin, lurking…it is truly a little gem of a poem. We held a vote in all of my classes about favorite lines and the lines that won were thin gin and die soon, depending on the class. It disturbed me a little bit that “We die soon” was a top line. You can make of that what you will.
In the midst of the first day of poetry, I talked with my students about their interpretations of poems and told them that a great thing about poems is that they are open to your interpretation. I told them that writers write poems and then release them to the readers. Just as I know that everyone gets different meaning from reading prose, I believe the same thing about poetry. I believe that as long as you can substantiate your interpretation, you can find your own meaning in poetry. And I was so excited, and they were so into it. And then one of my students said, “but what about on tests. On tests, you have to know the right answer.” And I just deflated, and felt like I was letting my students down by my previous comment because I might have been empowering them to interpret poetry on their own but it was true, I wasn’t empowering them to take the test. And I admitted as much, that T. was right and that was real and I think I might have apologized. I just felt sad.
In the course of that same class, we were reading a poem called Where I’m From by George Ella Lyon. Here are the last lines of the poem:
Under my bed was a dressbox
spilling old pictures,
a sift of lost faces
to drift beneath my dreams;
I am from those moments -
snapped before I budded-
leaf-fall from the family tree.
My second period class is chock-full of engaged, thoughtful students who really seem to like school. One of my brightest (there, I said it) students raised her hand and asked a question that I have always had about these lines: The line “snapped before I budded” seems to imply that the author has died, but that doesn’t make sense with the rest of the poem.” Before I even could respond, one of my favorite and yet most enigmatic students’ hands shot up to respond. He said, “I think it means that she has old pictures of people who died before she was born.” Another student then chimed in and commented that leaf-fall from the family tree meant that those people had died. This totally made me choke up, as I am perhaps a bit embarassed to admit that these types of conversations rarely occur in my classroom. I know it sounds small…but it was huge. I complimented them profusely and told them that they had answered a question that I had, also. It was pretty freakin’ cool!!!
So yeah…that was the introduction to poetry. Now I’m laid up at home with my foot up from having surgery and my students have been emailing, texting, and MySpace messaging me because I told them that I would be super bored if they didn’t.
We began our poetry unit today, of course by reading Seven at the Golden Shovel by Gwendolyn Brooks. You might know the poem:
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Strike straight. We
Lurk late. We
Sing sin. We
Thin Gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
This poem never fails to incite a lot of discussion. I think this is true for many reasons…one being that it’s short enough for ANYONE to read and attempt to make sense of. Only 24 words….with so, so much meaning packed into them. Within those 24 words are cutting school, drinking gin, jazz music, dying, sin, lurking…it is truly a little gem of a poem. We held a vote in all of my classes about favorite lines and the lines that won were thin gin and die soon, depending on the class. It disturbed me a little bit that “We die soon” was a top line. You can make of that what you will.
In the midst of the first day of poetry, I talked with my students about their interpretations of poems and told them that a great thing about poems is that they are open to your interpretation. I told them that writers write poems and then release them to the readers. Just as I know that everyone gets different meaning from reading prose, I believe the same thing about poetry. I believe that as long as you can substantiate your interpretation, you can find your own meaning in poetry. And I was so excited, and they were so into it. And then one of my students said, “but what about on tests. On tests, you have to know the right answer.” And I just deflated, and felt like I was letting my students down by my previous comment because I might have been empowering them to interpret poetry on their own but it was true, I wasn’t empowering them to take the test. And I admitted as much, that T. was right and that was real and I think I might have apologized. I just felt sad.
In the course of that same class, we were reading a poem called Where I’m From by George Ella Lyon. Here are the last lines of the poem:
Under my bed was a dressbox
spilling old pictures,
a sift of lost faces
to drift beneath my dreams;
I am from those moments -
snapped before I budded-
leaf-fall from the family tree.
My second period class is chock-full of engaged, thoughtful students who really seem to like school. One of my brightest (there, I said it) students raised her hand and asked a question that I have always had about these lines: The line “snapped before I budded” seems to imply that the author has died, but that doesn’t make sense with the rest of the poem.” Before I even could respond, one of my favorite and yet most enigmatic students’ hands shot up to respond. He said, “I think it means that she has old pictures of people who died before she was born.” Another student then chimed in and commented that leaf-fall from the family tree meant that those people had died. This totally made me choke up, as I am perhaps a bit embarassed to admit that these types of conversations rarely occur in my classroom. I know it sounds small…but it was huge. I complimented them profusely and told them that they had answered a question that I had, also. It was pretty freakin’ cool!!!
So yeah…that was the introduction to poetry. Now I’m laid up at home with my foot up from having surgery and my students have been emailing, texting, and MySpace messaging me because I told them that I would be super bored if they didn’t.
posted by Allyson B. at
10:31 AM
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