At the beginning of May, I'll march with my classmates signifying the end of college. After a three-week summer class, I'll officially have my degree. Sitting in my room here on sixth floor, it really doesn't seem like four years have passed since I was a freshman in the room my suite mates live in now.
So what'll be next?
No idea. But I'm starting to plan. I'm doing some career planning with my advisor. His big question is, "If you could get paid to do anything, what would that be?" My answer: "Get paid to find poetry." I'm good at it. Admittedly, although my sense are tuned to what I like, not necessarily others, many of my friends have appreciated pieces I have found.
As my advisor and I were talking, I mentioned that I could see myself possibly teaching one day. To do that, I know I would have to go back to school, but it just seems like something I'll want to do. Of course I would probably teach along the lines of English, literature, or poetry, and then my advisor asked, "What level do you see yourself teaching at?" I responded most likely high school or college. There is a certain level of deepness in literature and poetry that younger kids would have a more difficult time grasping.
"Not necessarily," he said, and loaned me a copy of "Rose, how did you get that red?" by Kenneth Koch. I've recently been going through it, and it's an instructional book of how to teach great poetry to children along with lots of examples directly from his classroom. One could basically mimic what he did using the book.
While I thought it was interesting, it didn't really go beyond that. Kids aren't my thing. They're rowdy, illogically, and disrespectful. Ok, that trend extends to many high schoolers and college students, but I feel like I can connect easier with older students.
This summer, Joan, a woman from a local bookstore, emailed me about an idea they were working on in a couple lower economic elementary schools. There are clubs that the students can sign up for as part of after-school activities, and Joan wanted to get a newspaper group going. We emailed a bit, it sounded interesting, and I told her I'd get in touch when I was back in town.
It took me a few weeks, but we finally met to talk. Unfortunately, I didn't have that time frame open thanks to my class schedule. That wasn't the end of the world because they already had something scheduled for this semester. But Joan's ideas weren't limited to this one idea. I told her about my passion for poetry, and she got a bit excited. Not a big poetry buff herself, she still sees the importance of it and was very enthusiastic that I had this interest. I fed off her excitement, and we started discussing ideas for bringing poetry into the mix. The ideas were rough, but I told her I'd think about it.
I left feeling on top of the world. College has taken up a lot of my time, but I've always been interested in volunteering somehow in the community. There could be no other perfect way than this opportunity that had come up.
So sitting at The Mill going through Koch's book, I started to get ideas of my own. I wouldn't be able to do anything as extensive as he did, but I got an idea for an abbreviated version that might use some of his material. Joan said that if I couldn't do something regular, doing a workshop over a break might work. I liked that and came up with some categories I could cover. Here they are:
- Feelings
- Family and Friends
- Future
- Fiction and Fables
- Favorites
- Familiar Places
This is only tentative. Depending on the time frame, I might only cover three or four. We'll cross that bridge later. I might take some relevant poems from Koch's book or find my own that would be good examples of those categories. My focus would be to get them writing about things that are familiar to them and that they care about.
So that's an idea for now. I really hope there will be a time when I can execute it. And cross my fingers really hard that it would actually work and not flop.
0 comments:
Post a Comment