Monthly Archives: April 2012

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?” (more...)

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. (more...)

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!