The letdown

School began and I tried to treat it as a completely normal day of school. I wanted to get on with the final large assignment of the semester — the true Literary Analysis paper. (More on that, and my plans for this year here.)

I’m having the students read a few poems and make a choice about which they’d like to analyze and which terms they’d like to use in this analysis. The poems are short, but full of those things we Language Arts teachers search for in the things we read: figurative language, repetition, mood, tone, author style, specific structure, and so on.

Here’s the poetry part:

• The students will analyze one of two poems: Fear, by Gabriela Mistral, and Identity, by Julio Noboa.

• Fear shows a mother struggling with the idea that her child will one day grow up and leave her; she worries that she may lose a part of herself when her daughter becomes an individual.
• The narrator of Identity is much like the daughter’s voice from the previous poem — he/she talks about individuality as a sort of enlightenment; that in order to be an individual, one must do practice and embrace that individuality

And the coolest part, for me, was the fact that each of these poems was originally written in Spanish. I thought it would be cool to talk about structure without having even read the poem, and to do this I needed a student who could speak and read Spanish. Each class gave me a volunteer (or two, or three, or more) who had a great time showing off his/her language by whipping through the poems with energy and excitement.

The studsent readers read through “Fear,” by Gabriela Mistral, and as they did I had the rest of the class listening to the sounds they heard, to see if anything stood out. Whether you understand Spanish or not, a reading of this poem makes very clear the repeated phrase: Yo no quiero.

Six times this phrase is used in the poem. Six times, you hear the narrator utter Yo no quiero, and it’s fun to see the students pick up on this because it leads directly to the students talking about structure and tone and how they create meaning within a poem titled “Fear.”

Seriously, the students didn’t have any other nowledge but the title and the Spanish version read aloud and they brought out the true essence of fear and how Gabriela Mistral helped show the meaning of fear through structure and word choice — some serious analysis with very little information.

But I was had by one student who decided it would be better to replace a good number of words in the poem with his own choice words as he read through it. his friends also found it funny.

I thought his reading sounded odd, and I wasn’t quite sure until another student pointed out that “What he’s saying doesn’t make any sense at all.” When I walked to read over his shoulder, I found that he was not reading from the page, but introducing his own words where he felt appropriate, and it killed me.

It killed me that he would make a joke out of something so simple. It killed me that he’d take his own language and use it to get one over on others. It killed me that he’d make a joke out of me. It kills me more that he’d make a joke of himself, but it’s only me who sees it that way.

Who knows, though. I’d have probably done the same (when I was a kid) if I had the chance.