Week 4: Richard Blanco Visit and Comprehensive Reading Inventory

 

Richard Blanco, "One Today"

On Tuesday of Week 4, we met with Richard Blanco, the youngest, first Latino, and first openly gay person to ever read an Inaugural Poem. As the Woodrow Wilson Visiting Fellow for the Writer's House at Elizabethtown, a session was organized between the Education majors in our class and Blanco to discuss facilitating teaching poetry in the classroom. As we talked, Blanco mentioned only discovering a real love for poetry when he realized how much writing was involved in civil engineering, and how beautifully words could be manipulated. Having one right answer as to themes and symbols seemed to be the overarching fear that everyone who disliked poetry had with it. As a class, we were encouraged to expose our students to poetry as much and as early as possible. Blanco facilitated a mini-lesson with us using one of his poems, "Looking for the Gulf Motel". He said he would "teach the poem like a poet", a strategy to teach poetry in the classroom. He first read us his poem, and then asked us to absorb all of the information through our senses, splitting the room to find imagery that specifically related to sounds, sights, smells, tastes, and touch. Blanco, as evidenced through "One Today" and "Looking for the Gulf Motel", very much writes on the rule of "show, don't tell". He uses verisimilitude, replicating the experiences he's had throughout his life to evoke the emotions of his audience through writing. Blanco emphasized encouraging students to develop emotional responses to images within poems. Teaching students that poetry connects people to one another, rather than one way to interpret a poem's meaning, eases the pain of the poetry unit. At the end of our session, we wrapped up with tips to teach poetry, and a few stuck with me based on my past experiences. I wish when I was growing up I was more able to analyze more contemporary work. Using songs side by side with certain themes or lessons could have worked beautifully in the classroom. Blanco even mentioned using reverse chronological order to teach poetry, comparing more modern, living poets with classics like Shakespeare and finding that general messages and themes have repeated for centuries. In class, we always talk about engaging our students, and using modern, fun approaches to poetry will motivate students to analyze and create.

On Thursday, we talked about the Comprehensive Reading Inventory, and our assignments for placement. I had my first field placement the day after, and asked my co-op if she had a student in mind for me to work with. She mentioned she'd get back to me, and I started to plan my assessments for the following week. My goals with my student for the first day of CRI administration are to do:
- the interest and reading attitude surveys, as well as 
- the alphabetics exam for phonemic awareness,
- letter-naming, and 
- graded sentences. 
I chose these items of the CRI because they seem to be the least time-consuming and based on my teacher's classroom, I do not think I will accomplish the whole battery of tests within one period of sitting down, no matter who I get. My teacher has poor classroom management and it is difficult to manage her class when they do the Daily 5 and she only sits down with small groups for directed reading and writing instruction. I am interested to see which student she will assign me, since I know one of the students who also has ADHD was already assigned to another student for placement.