I meant to write this post last night, but a beautiful summer storm (complete with magnificent lightning that imbued the sky with a violet hue) got in my way. I'm going to take advantage of the calm of this rain-cleaned morning to try again.
My Book 2 class had their final last Friday, which meant that our class officially ended last week. This week, consequently, has been pretty informal, mostly consisting of saying goodbye, giving final grades, and reading poetry together. It's been bittersweet.
You all know how much I love poetry... and I wanted to share that love with my students, so I decided to make them each a card, with a personal note on one side and a poem on the other (this proved to take much more time than I anticipated, like many of my projects do.) I wanted to give them a crash course in English language poetry, so I picked a poet that seemed to match the personality of each student, and then chose one of that poet's most famous works. The results:
I'm not sure if they actually understood anything on the card, but my hope is that they'll at least know how much I appreciated them, and that they might be interested to keep reading. I want them to know the beauty and flexibility of the English language, not just its mechanics, and I hope that, starting with one poem, they might be able to take ownership of the language and fall in love with it. We read the poems aloud, they gave me some notes of their own, we took pictures, and we said goodbye. Some of my students have continued to come to the compound each afternoon, and we'll spend a few hours discussing the poems that most interested them (so far we've done Maya Angelou's "Still I Rise" and Sonnet XVIII) but, really, the end to my time in Haiti has come, and the goodbyes are starting to pile up.
I have one last day here, and I'm going to try to make it count.
Some of the students from my Book 2 class:
The poems that made the short list:
Sonnet XVIII by William Shakespeare
"The Day Lady Died" by Frank O'Hara
"The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams
"Ariel" by Sylvia Plath
"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" by William Wordsworth
Canto 120 by Ezra Pound
"Hope is the thing with feathers" by Emily Dickinson
"i thank You God for most this amazing day" by E.E. Cummings
"Skunk Hour" by Robert Lowell
"One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop
"Still I Rise" by Maya Angelou
"The Tyger" by William Blake
"Harlem" by Langston Hughes
"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" by Wallace Stevens
"Pomegranate" by D.H. Lawrence
"A Supermarket in California" by Allen Ginsberg
"The Road Not Taken" by Robert Frost
excerpt from "Song of Myself" by Walt Whitman
"Bright Star" by John Keats
"Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden
excerpt from "The Wasteland" by T.S. Eliot
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