Few people know that literature is so much fun and as an English teacher it's my job to show my students the beautiful word art that maybe no one before has shown them. When I was very young, I would read phrases or hear them in class and my skin would get covered in goosebumps because God gave me this kinship with words. As a young person, while my fellow peers groaned - I never understood why I felt so moved and alive by Maya Angelou, Pablo Neruda, Khalil Gibran and other literature giants like them. College was my favorite because I was exposed to so many writers, cultures, genres and periods and the more that I read the more that books continued to have such an important place in my heart. I found a community of people who felt this great connection to literature and those years learning with fellow word enthusiasts are such fond memories. Later, I discovered that not all writers were dead, some of the people that I admired still had beating hearts and getting to meet some of my literary heroes was sublime.
In a time of technology when kids have so many options for entertainment, the classroom setting can be a challenging place for many reasons one is just simply keeping them engaged. That is why I love to bring my passion for words as well as my need for creativity into my classroom. When I was in high school I had a math teacher who for the various holidays throughout the year she would give us these color by number worksheets that had math problems, she gave us the opportunity to find the hidden picture while using math equations to color. While in the lower grades’ teachers thrive in bringing creativity into their classrooms, in high school the classes can become very bland, that's why I try to always engage my students using creative ways to present information. When working with Freshman near Halloween I like to bring in works by Edgar Allen Poe. Here I included part of a short unit based on "The Raven." We read the poem out loud first, then I had them create storyboards. Each student was asked to create an eighteen-piece storyboard using their own words to translate what the poem was saying and then drawing a picture for each stanza. The first artifact is a student sample, he had beautiful pencil sketches and great translations, the scan doesn't do it justice. After they completed the storyboard we read the poem again and then we watched an episode of "The Simpsons" where Matt Groening pays tribute to the Poe classic. I provided popcorn and the kids had a great time on Halloween in class.
Every year I like to conclude with a poem that we construct as a class. On the white board I write: "The time we spent together..." and each student is required to complete the sentence. I then take all sentences and combine each one of their responses to create our very special poem. I present the poem the last day of class and I am always amazed by surprised they are to see how together we created a very personal poem.