English 8 Strategies students (first and fifth periods) worked on a final Schaffer model paragraph. We will begin using them in our general writing next week.

Fourth and sixth period students (English I Honors) reviewed the steps we had yesterday as well as the poem we worked on yesterday before attempting in groups the same thing today, looking at Billy Collins’s poem “Introduction to Poetry.”

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

We’ll finish up the work tomorrow.

Creative writing, not having computer lab access today, looked at organizational models for creative nonfiction.

Homework

• English I Honors: re-read Collins’s poem and determine what advice each of the stanzas is offering for understanding and appreciating poetry.