Monthly Archives: January 2012

Welcome to the Teachers & Writers Collaborative blog, where you’ll find discussions, insights, and reflections from the T&W community.

Our blog will feature lesson plans for teaching the craft of writing to children and adults in schools and communities; student writers’ poetry and prose; sample articles from Teachers & Writers Magazine, a print quarterly that’s winner of 10 Educational Press Awards for Excellence; T&W news and events; writing prompts, Haiku interviews, and a compelling history of T&W’s early writers such as June Jordan, Kenneth Koch, Anne Sexton, Herbert Kohl, and many others.

And who knows what else? Like all good writing projects, our blog is a living experiment.

As part of the T&W community, we encourage you to read, comment, read, respond, write a few lines of poetry, start your next book project, learn some great teaching ideas and expand upon them as you see fit for your own writing practice, for your students, or your writing group. We look forward to hearing from you!

Eliciting Playfulness and the Unexpected: Teaching the Poems of Kenneth Koch

Joanna Fuhrman

In addition to being a central member of the group of poets whose surreal, funny, and chatty poems came to be labeled “New York School,” Kenneth Koch (1925–2002) is well known as an innovator in teaching poetry writing to children. My pedagogy, like that of many poets who teach in elementary and high schools, has been deeply influenced by Koch’s writing about teaching poetry. In his books, Wishes, Lies and Dreams and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red? Koch explains his method: Students will read a poem, and then use a structural element in the poem as a starting point for their own work. For example, after reading Williams Carlos Williams’ poem “This is Just to Say” (in which the speaker says he is sorry for eating the plums in the icebox, but then brags, “they were delicious/so sweet/ and so cold”), (more...)