Monday, March 1

Rose #1: My freshmen students are still studying poetry, and will be until the end of the school year. As you can imagine, this really excites them........and me. However, I have discovered the key to making poetry fun: The Twilight Zone. Apparently, my students love it, and luckily for me, The Twilight Zone producers chose to make many episodes that relate to poetry. We watched "Come Wander With Me" yesterday because we were learning about ballads. That was the reward for doing the hard work of graphing the syllables in a few stanzas of "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." Graphing the syllables caught on very, very well with one of my classes of freshmen last week, but the class I had today did not understand. This afternoon, I was pleased to have the opportunity to sit down with several students one-on-one to do these graphs. One of my students, and I guess this is the real "rose" of the day, was looking at what I was writing on the board and had suddenly LEARNED something. I had a ballad stanza written on the board, and for those who don't know, the lines have 8 syllables, then 6 syllables, then 8 syllables, then 6 syllables, so they are lines of 4, 3, 4, 3 feet. The student said, "Ms. Oxley, I just realized that if there are 8 syllables and 4 feet, when you divide it, that's two!" And I said, "Yes, that's because in poetry, a foot is two syllables." It was one of those moments where I knew I could tell students over and over how many syllables are in a foot, but until it clicks in their minds, it doesn't mean anything.

I hope you stopped to smell the roses today!