Yearly Archives: 2012

In fall 2012, T&W will launch a searchable Digital Resource Center (DRC) on our website. Initially drawing on material from T&W's 45 years of print publications, the DRC will also include resources provided by other members of the WITS Alliance--a professional network of literary arts education programs and individuals who serve K-12 students and provide professional development for their teachers.

Help us shape this new resource by completing our short survey here. Thank you!

Voice Choice
by Caron Levis

Take 1: HOLLA TO MY PEEPS! O.M.G!!! I am, like, so totally PSYCHED to be posting MY FIRST BLOG EVER!
No, that’s not me.

Take 2: Greetings, readers, I am honored to have been invited to partake in this online adventure of Teachers & Writers Collaborative and am pleased to present to you my inaugural posting—
Oh, definitely not.

Take 3: Hello my dears, goodness, now isn’t this exciting? My very own, how do you call it? Oh yes, Blog Post. Blog. What an adorable word, what will they think of next? Oh, for goodness sakes, I hope I’m doing this right. I mean who would’ve thought? Me, blogging?
Yeah, I don’t think so.

Argh. So what, then, is my blog voice? What is Voice anyway?

I had to ask myself this question when I was hired to teach “voice” to seventh-graders. Somewhere I read that it is “the essence of the self.” What’s essence? What’s self? Wonderful questions, but I had forty minutes, and I wasn’t expected to philosophize, I was expected to get kids writing. People speak of the “elusive voice” as if it is some intangible, magical element of writing. Now, I enjoy intangibles and magic, but I needed something I could write on a chalkboard. I got out my dictionary, I Googled, I read works of authors with “strong voices,” found notes from grad school and acting class, searched my own experience, and in the end I had to teach voice the only way I knew how. I decided that for me, voice is HOW who tells what.

I introduced myself to the class three different times, as three different characters: one was a pretentious middle-aged professor, another an apathetic teen, and finally a shy five-year-old. Then I tossed a pack of tissues on the table.

I asked how each of the characters might describe the pack of tissues. Students called out that the five-year-old might think the tissue looks like a snowflake or a cape, the professor would remember the embarrassment of having to blow his nose during a lecture, the teenager would say whatever, they’re just a freaking bunch of tissues. We kept a list and we compared.

Voice is CHOICE

I wrote it on the board and students brainstormed all the choices a writer makes about HOW to tell a story: details, vocabulary, length of sentences, emotions, memories, images, metaphors, similes, spacing, secrets…

Was I teaching voice? I’m not sure but I hoped so; according to NORC's recent report, about “Teaching Artists and the Future of Education," Voice—with a capital V—is something most teaching artists want their students to develop. Merriam-Webster defines voice as “an instrument or medium of expression.”

I couldn’t give them their instrument, all I could do was encourage my students to listen, imagine, take risks, and… throw more objects on the table, and ask them to choose one, describe it, and tell a story. “Don’t worry about spelling or grammar mistakes for now,” I said, “Those are important, but those things can be taught. Voice is something you have to find for yourself. So, look at the tissues. Tell me what you see, feel, remember. Make choices and let me hear you.”

Caron Levis is a playwright and T&W teaching artist. You can read more about Caron by clicking here.

T&W is accepting applications until July 2 for writers to teach during the 2012-2013 school year.  Our roster of teaching artists includes writers whose work has been published, staged, or filmed; and who have experience teaching in K–12 schools and/or youth-serving community organizations. Preference is given to individuals who have taught in New York City or other large urban school districts.  People who can teach in Spanish are especially encouraged to apply.

Writers who teach for T&W do so as independent contractors. We will acknowledge your application within one week of receiving it; we plan to conduct interviews beginning in late July.

To view our application, please go here.

It’s not as hard as it seems.  For who is more adept at the art of persuasion than poets and revolutionaries?  When I think of who convinced me to drop my fears and limitations, my boundaries, to pick up my anger or to set it down again, to love or to know when to cut love off, to stand for life even when it meant injury, I think of the poetic revolutionaries: Alice Walker, Malcolm X, Harvey Milk, Audre Lorde, Sojourner Truth, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur.

For one of my first lessons for a persuasive writing residency at a high school, I shared SojournerTruth’s “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech given during the Women's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851.  A debate was raging about whether women “deserved” the right to vote.  After a male critic stated women were too physically, thus mentally, weak to vote, Sojourner stepped to the podium and spoke: “The man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or give me any best place! And aint’ I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman?”

Through her refutation of someone else’s definition of what it meant to be a woman, Truth touched upon the vast divide between the experiences of white and African-American women.  She questioned not only the notion of womanhood but personhood at a time when slavery was still legally practiced.

Born into slavery in 1797 in Ulster County, New York, Truth escaped with her baby daughter in 1826. After receiving a spiritual message to travel the land, she re-named herself Sojourner Truth and journeyed the country speaking on the rights of slaves and women both free and in bondage. Once students were intrigued by Truth’s background, we read the speech aloud.  In one class, we listened to Maya Angelou’s recording of Truth’s speech (a fabulous suggestion made by one of the classroom teachers with whom I collaborated on this residency).  We discussed how Truth persuaded her audience to understand her point of view by re-defining the central term in the conflict and how she used repetition, refrain, and poetry.

For the writing portion, I asked students: “What is it that people say you can’t do?”  Through a group brainstorm, we wrote phrases on the board: “Can’t finish high school,” “Can’t go to heaven,” “Can’t be in love,” etc.

Based on the brainstorm, students wrote their own “Ain’t I a ----?” pieces. They wrote funny pieces, mocking stereotypes of being Asian, thoughtful pieces about being gay and denied entry into heaven, as well as gender-bending pieces which upturned Sojourner’s original question.

Sojourner Truth is considered to be one the first to openly address the peculiar position of women of color in American feminism.  For further development of this lesson, I have taught her speech alongside Angela Davis’s essay, “The Anti-Slavery Movement and the Birth Of Women’s Rights” Howard Zinn’s “Slavery without Submission, Emancipation without Freedom” and Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.” 

Through these juxtapositions, deeper historical questions can be asked about the relationship between abolition and suffrage, the realities of slavery and emancipation, and notions of womanhood, personhood, freedom, and truth. 

-Bushra Rehman

Bushra Rehman is a T&W teaching artist who writes poems, essays and short stories.  You can read more about Bushra here.

Further Reading:

An excellent book for poets who are nervous about teaching Persuasive Writing:
The Art of Persuasion: A National Review Rhetoric for Writers (Bridges and Rickenbacker, 1993) 
Women, Race, & Class by Angela Davis
A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn

Student Writing:

Ain’t I Asian?

       Well, Children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that 'twixt the nerds of the South to the dorks of the North, all talking about the Asian phenomenon, the Asian people will not be in a fix pretty soon. But what's all this here talking about?

       That nerd over there says that all Asians are getting 2400 in SAT, and lifting over Princeton, and having the best boring jobs everywhere. Nobody ever finds me with high SATs, or Ivy Leagues, or gives me any doctor, lawyer, or engineering jobs. And ain't I Asian? Look at me! Look at my eyes! I have stayed on staring at computers, and slept for 11 hours, and no race could head me! And ain't I Asian? I could work out as much and be lazy as much as a White man - because I could - and listen to U2 as well! And ain't I Asian? I have borne Kumon, and seen most all sold off to overly competitive wealthy parents, and when I cried out with my Asian's shame, none but Buddha heard me! And ain't I Asian?

       Then they talk about this thing in the head; what's this they call it? [member of audience whispers, "nerdiness"] That's it, honey. What's that got to do with an Asian's life or nerd's life? If my cup won't hold but a quart, and yours holds a pint, wouldn't you be mean not to give praise that I have a quart of nerdiness?

       Then that little man in black, he says Asians can't have as much creativity as them, 'cause free thinking wasn't for Asians! Where did your gunpowder come from? Where did your Nintendo come from? From God and Asians!

       If the first Asian God ever made was strong enough to make the culture upside down all alone, these Asians together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they are asking to do it, the other races better let them.

       Arigatou and XieXie to you for hearing me, and now yellow Asian ain't got nothing more to say.
- Anonymous

Ain't I a Woman?

Just because I may be
a little different (special)
or not seen as a biological
woman . . . . Ain’t I a Woman? 

I mean. . . I look like any
one of your daughters, sisters, nieces
girlfriends, or mother. . . 
Ain’t I a Woman ?

The way I dress to the way
I speak, to the way I brush my hair
to the way I strut down the street
you would see me as any other woman.

So why look at me different?
Know just because I’m sharing
out to you the way I
was born to the way I think . .
to the way I carry
myself in the street

Let me just remind you
I am a woman!
-Anonymous

Ain’t I Human?

You say it’s an abomination
to be gay.
You say I can still be saved,
or that I’m too far gone in
my wicked ways.
There’s no room in Heaven for
someone like me.
But ain’t I human?
Aren’t we all equal?
What makes you different from me?
We both read and walk and talk.
We both have morals. We both love.
Is that not human?
You haven’t killed anyone or
committed adultery. I haven’t either.
We’ve both lied and stole.
We’ve both been jealous.
You place your money
and family before God.
And I place the truth before both.
Are we not the same?
Does God not say he loves us all?
If God is only love, and love
does not judge,
doesn’t God love me?
Doesn’t God not care
that I’m gay?
Doesn’t God not care
that you’re a bigot?
Aren’t we human?
-Liz

Kenneth Koch (1925-2002) is often linked to the founding of the New York School poets in the 1950s, a group that includes John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and Barbara Guest. The seemingly spontaneous, cosmopolitan and exuberant poetry he wrote helped define not only characteristics of the New York School, but Koch’s work in New York City public schools.

“I was onto this new way of writing that I could tell people about, and help them to write, give them feelings of power, confidence, excitement,” Koch told Teachers & Writers Collaborative in an interview. Often, getting students to feel this excitement involved opening them up to poetry in the first place, which initially proved difficult.  "A lot of the best writers in that school already hated poetry,” Koch said, when talking about his work at P.S. 61, where he started teaching in 1968. He blamed some of this hatred on what he called “essay-poems,” poetry that was overly academic and that contained obligatory allusions to figures like Helen of Troy or Cuchulain. Koch wanted to make language fresh and concrete for his students.

“When I had kids write directly –I mean directly in the sense of, when they write about what they think about the President or what they think about their block, they always wrote dull,” he said. “I obviously wanted very quickly to make people do something else when they seem to me to be stuck in other people's language, other people's ideas.” Koch urged students to write about their own wishes and dreams, to make things up if they wanted. “You can put in a lot of colors, wishes, lies, dreams, bananas, grapefruit, songs,” he told a class.

His success in the classroom led him to write several books about teaching poetry to children, including Wishes, Lies and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry (1970) and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? (1973).  He credits his work through the Teachers & Writers Collaborative as the seed behind these texts. “One thing I liked, that was wonderful about Teachers & Writers, was I had to keep a journal. Without that, I don't think there would have been a book.”

Koch produced many books in his lifetime, in many genres: over 30 volumes of poetry, plays, fiction, nonfiction, and even several librettos. Still, he saw his teaching as among his most valuable work. “I discovered a way really to help a lot of people,” he said.

Still, the accomplishments of Koch’s poetry shouldn’t be overlooked. In Poetry magazine, Paul Carroll wrote that’s Koch’s works “embody the poetic imagination as it rejoices in the ebullience of its health and freedom, its fecundity, its capacity for endless invention, its dear, outlandish ability to transform everyday, pragmatic reality into an Oz or a tea-party at the March Hare's house, its potency in, possibly, achieving a bit of immortality as a result of having brought forth some children of the soul." Not only did Koch help bring poetry to children, but his poetry is credited with drawing out the inner child of adults.

-Lee Conell

Lee Conell lives in New York. Her writing has appeared in the Chronogram, on Women’s Studio Workshop Blog, and in The New York Times.

Your students have been working hard to prep for the ELA tests.  Reward them with a springtime poetry program that will recharge their imaginations and remind them that writing can be deeply satisfying and (wait for it...wait for it...) FUN. 

A T&W poetry program will not only celebrate Poetry Month right, but it will also increase your students' participation in class and their motivation for writing. 

Take a look at the T&W poetry programs that are already underway:

• With funding from the New York Community Trust's "Beyond Teaching to the Test" initiative, T&W has partnered with CFN #534 to implement several poetry writing programs in middle school social studies and science classrooms.
• Students at Booker T. Washington (054M) are writing poetry as it relates to the American Revolution with one T&W writer.
• Two T&W writers are leading poetry workshops with first and second graders at Adolph Ochs (111M).
• Spoken word and performance poetry are getting shout-outs at Liberty Partnerships Program/LaGuardia Community College and at VISIONS @ Selis Manor. 
• T&W writers have been teaching poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and even bookmaking in Gifted & Talented programs at four schools: Mamie Fay (122Q), Louis Marshall (276K), Adam Clayton Powell (153M), and Helen Keller (153X).
• At the Newbridge Road School in North Bellmore, New York, one T&W poet is in his sixth year of residence.
• And after our successful pilot program at two schools last year, T&W and the Center for the Art of Translation have trained additional writers in  Poetry Inside Out, a curriculum that increases students' ELA skills through translation and exploration of world literature.

To learn more about the details and costs of our student programs, contact us at 212-691-6590 or workshops@twc.org today!

April brings us National Poetry Month,and to mark the
occasion the spring Issue of Teachers & Writers Magazine 
features three exciting new exercises for bringing poetry 
to the elementary, middle, and high school classroom.
Written by experienced teaching artists, these exercises offer suggestions for using contemporary poems to inspire fresh writing from students. This week we feature Sarah Dohrmann's exercise, inspired by Ross Gay's poem, "The Truth."

Three Classroom Writing Exercises for National Poetry Month
Three:

Because Poems:Teaching Ross Gay's "The Truth"
to Middle and High School Students

Sarah Dohrmann

At the age of 14 my first “real” job was at Wendy’s. I worked the potato ovens for several weeks until I burned my hand badly. I was then switched over to cashier, but when my drawer was forty bucks short one day, I was demoted to sweeping up the dining area. This presented another problem in the form of a school nemesis who’d come into the restaurant, order French fries, sit in the dining room, and toss her fries one-by-one onto the floor so she could watch me sweep each one with a broom into a long-handled dustpan that I could never seem to hold right.

At the same time I worked at Wendy’s, my family was about nine years into a disperate attempt to patch itself together after my mother’s death. The patching process is still underway these thirty-odd years later, because recovery is slow when no one talks about loss. We prefer to mime our way through innuendo and pain, making our non-actions as weighted and important as anything we might actually say or do.

Perhaps it’s my personal background, then, that first drew me to Ross Gay’s poem “The Truth”, which appears in his first collection, called Against Which:

The Truth

          Ross Gay

Because he was 38, because this
was his second job, because
he had two daughters, because his hands
looked like my father’s, because at 7
he would walk to the furniture warehouse,
unload trucks ‘til 3 AM, because I
was fourteen and training him, because he made
$3.75 an hour, because he had a wife
to look in the face, because
he acted like he respected me,
because he was sick and would not call out
I didn’t blink when the water
dropped from his nose
into the onion’s perfectly circular
mouth on the Whopper Jr.
I coached him through preparing.
I did not blink.
Tell me this didn’t happen.
I dare you.

(From Against Which by Ross Gay (CavanKerry Press, Ltd. 2006). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Like all poems we choose to teach, Gay’s poem moved me. It moved me not because of what the narrator chooses to do, but because of what he chooses not to do. I liked that it is a humble reflection, and that the narrator made a choice that others may not approve of. And I liked the repetition of the word “because,” how it lilted me along until I came to a full-stop of truth. Naturally I also liked that the narrator is fourteen years old, working at a fast food restaurant just like I once did—only this narrator is the better version of me, the less narcissistic one capable of thinking beyond his own discomforts while he works at a job he probably doesn’t love. (more...)

April brings us National Poetry Month,
and to mark the occasion the spring Issue of
Teachers & Writers Magazine features
three exciting new exercises for bringing poetry
to the elementary, middle, and high school
classroom. Written by experienced teaching artists,
these exercises offer suggestions for using
contemporary poems to inspire fresh writing from
students. This week we feature Bushra Rehman's
exercise, inspired by the poems of Ishle Yi Park.

Three Classroom Writing Exercises for National Poetry Month
Two:

Rosebuds Folded Over in Sleep:
Teaching the Sonnets of Ishle Yi Park to High School Students

Bushra Rehman

 “Peer closer: a soul and a soul. He folds over her like a rosebud in sleep.”
 ~ Ishle Yi Park

How to bring a love of sonnets to my high school students? Easy. I was a student, once upon a time in the old hip-hop life of Queens, and I am armed with sonnets so fierce that whenever I’ve taught them, students are unable to resist. I teach the work of Ishle Yi Park, a Korean-American woman who was a touring cast member of Def Poetry Jam and whose book, The Temperature of This Water, was the winner of the pen America Beyond Margins Award. The poems I teach are drawn from Angel & Hannah: A Love Story in Sonnets, published alongside Park’s performance in the 2006 Hip Hop Theater Festival. They center on what is still forbidden for most students: interracial teenage love.

As the sound of a fight on a playground makes the ground electric, Park’s poems shock and excite students, spur them to keep reading. Her sonnets trace the trajectory of love between Angel, a Puerto Rican boy from Brooklyn and Hannah, a Korean-American girl from Queens. I prefer to teach the entire book, but when short on time, I choose the following three poems as touchstones: “Quinceañera Sonnet,” “Wind Sonnet,” and “Gold Hoop Sonnet.”  ( “Quinceañera Sonnet,” “Wind Sonnet,” and “Gold Hoop Sonnet” all reprinted with permission of Ishle Yi Park)   (more...)

T&W is serving as a nominator for the 2012 Ellen Levine Award, which is administered by the New York Community Trust. The $7,500 award is given to the author of an unpublished fiction book.

Award criteria:

• A nominee for the Ellen Levine Award must be a previously published (not self-published) author of a print edition of one or two works of fiction.
• Manuscripts submitted for the award must be works in progress of at least 75 pages for which there is not yet a publishing contract.

If you want T&W to consider nominating your work for the Ellen Levine Award, please send the following to aswauger@twc.org by Thursday, May 31:

• Brief bio listing one or two previously published works of fiction.
• Outline of manuscript submitted for consideration.
• Unpublished manuscript of at least 75 pages to be considered for the award.

Please send the bio, outline, and manuscript as Word document attachments to an e-mail. T&W will not review submissions that are not sent via e-mail and in Word format.

Note: T&W will nominate only one author for the Ellen Levine Award. Individuals who submit their work to T&W will be informed by early July if they were selected as T&W's nominee. The New York Community Trust will announce the winner of the 2012 Ellen Levine Award in the fall.

Please send questions regarding the Ellen Levine Award to aswauger@twc.org or call 212-691-6590.

April brings us National Poetry Month, and to mark the occasion the spring Issue of Teachers & Writers Magazine features three exciting new exercises for bringing poetry to the elementary, middle, and high school classroom.  Written by experienced teaching artists, these exercises offer suggestions for using contemporary poems to inspire fresh writing from students.  This week we feature Jane LeCroy's exercise, based on a poem by May Swenson.

Three Classroom Writing Exercises for National Poetry Month

One:

Exercising the Imagination:
Teaching May Swenson’s “Cardinal Ideograms” to Elementary School Students

Jane LeCroy

‘‘Cardinal Ideograms” by May Swenson is a poem that works like a puzzle; experimental in form and appearance, it engages the imagination by inspiring playful connections with the familiar. Poetry is so much about the play of language leading one to see things in a new way. A successful poem, like Swenson’s, creates space for new thoughts to emerge, expanding our world and our thinking. Students in a classroom setting generally focus on being correct; this impulse is often detrimental to experimentation and creativity. Here is an excellent exercise in playing with language that can encourage students to imagine and take risks as writers, and to see things in a new way.

I introduce “Cardinal Ideograms” by inviting the students to think of it like a game. “Who can figure out the game of this poem? I know you won’t know the meaning of every word but you can figure out what the poet is playing with. Listen and look closely, follow along as I read, and see if you can figure it out.” I read aloud, without clarifying any of the vocabulary so that the students have a raw experience with the text, giving them a chance to discover what is happening within it themselves. It’s a great way to get them to take responsibility for interacting with the poem, and it builds confidence in kids when they discern meaning from a text without having a complete grasp of every word in it. (more...)