When Is It Too Soon to Tell the Truth?

Quraysh and I presented at the Urban Word NY annual Preemptive Education Conference last week. During our workshop, there were several moments in which the questions and conversation took us a bit off the agenda to support the teachable moment. Teaching is a performance art and the teachable moment is always the element that one must examine in the instant, assess, and respond quickly. Do we veer from the lesson plan for the engaged and pertinent discussion? And how do we get back to the focus?

This is always the case in authentic education. The teachable moment is that opportunity to maximize the engagement of the students and to fill out the lesson plan with vital responses to the learning as it happens. But if you have goals and need to fulfill the expectation for that unit of study, there is a dance of balance and truth.

In this instance at the conference, we were discussing the poem I love to teach to any age group, Nikki Giovanni's "Knoxville, Tennessee." 

As we discussed Ms. Giovanni's word choices, there were some fascinating comments. For instance, as the poem celebrates the luxury of going barefoot in summer, one participant who teaches in L.A. said that his students would not see that as a positive. He further explained that going barefoot would not only be unsafe and no child would do so willingly but if they were barefooted, it would be due to poverty and probably subject them to ridicule. It would be an embarrassment rather than a delight. This gave me another opportunity to see how geography alone will affect inference but also how poetry may provide alternative reflections on experience.

At the point that we were discussing the word "okra" from the early part of the poem, I shared a slightly truncated version of my narrative of the journey of okra through the Middle Passage to the North American continent. This story itself was initiated through a teachable moment 2 years ago, when a class of 6th grade students and I were discussing the poem and I was informing them about the vegetable. One student asked where it came from and the teacher started to research it from her computer as we worked. This is when we discovered the West African origins and my imagination took the reins. Since that cold January day, I have woven the tale and personalized the experience in a narrative that starts us out as members of a village on an ordinary day 400 years ago, and presupposes some brave person who was kidnapped from the garden chores with a pod of okra in hand. It is tender and horrible at the same time. But it is a tale of courage and fortitude that I believe must be imagined.

Often when I have the technology, I also have slides of okra, from plant to images of dishes that include okra (gumbo, jambalaya, fried okra, etc.). I also show images of the diagrams of the ships loaded with humans side by side, pictures of the slave castles of Ghana, the Door of No Return. I have since learned that there was a Door of No Return on the East African coast where enslaved humans were shipped to the Mideast for servitude as well. We often know only a portion of our global history.

There were two key questions during the conference workshop after the story: 1) what is the youngest age that this story may be shared, and 2) is it permissible for someone not of African descent to even do so?

My belief is that there is no age too early in the school setting to tell the story, but that it is important to tailor the story to the level of understanding and sensitivity. Telling the story to a 3rd grader demands a different tone than telling the story to a high schooler. But the rote understanding of the slave trade that is shrink wrapped for each February unit of study of Black History does little to drive home the horror of the Transatlantic Slave Trade or of the notion of slavery itself, particularly in view of the fact that slavery does still exist on the planet. I recently read a statistic that there is still an African slave trade that numbers 30,000+ annually. There are slaves in Asia, there are slaves in the U.S., and there are sex slaves in Dubai as well as worldwide. Women, in particular, understand that slavery is far from extinct.

So we have to be sensitive in the delivery but we must inform if we are to be true educators, especially if we keep a mission of social justice. I do not think we can withhold the truth and still be honest. But we can be honest in sharing the truth in ways that builds understanding and empathy; in this, we chip away at the divisive nature of racism and isolation.

The second question is a harder one to address. I have had a similar conversation with the poet Martha Collins regarding her book, Blue Front, which addresses lynchings in America is a stunning and stark manner. Her quandary (and even the objections of others at times) was did she have the agency as a White woman to address this topic, one that is so rooted in the African American experiences of racism and terrorism that results?

The person asking the question of me said that she did not feel she would have the right to tell the story, particularly not to turn it into a first person narrative, because she is White. I started the story out in second person plural, with a creative visualization prompt of "imagine we are all African, in our village on a warm sunny morning..." At some point, well into the journey, already on the plantation, for some unknown reason in the moment, I switched the pronoun to "I" when it came time to plan the okra seeds that had been clung to throughout the horrid transfer from one continent to another, during which each of us had lost our status and identities as human.

I don't know if I have done this before but I did last Saturday. It was about one person taking action to plant those small seeds that would provide the taste and sustenance of home, and remind us of and root us in a time when we were fully human, rather than diminished to chattel. A food that keeps the truth within our hearts.

But my points are these:

1) we have to remember that this history of slavery is not just for Black America, it is the history we all carry one way or another as a nation so we must be familiar with it, own it, take responsibility to change the course, especially now;

2) the only way to resolve the issues of racism is to create an understanding, an empathy in all people so that the actions that result from racism are no longer tolerable.

We must be able to internalize the horror to combat it. And it takes each of us to do so. If my taking the character to heart and sharing it means that the 6th grade blonde girl in Watkins Glen, NY, cries from the realization of the truth, then so be it. I have the agency to do so. And so it did happen one morning last January. That child may find it very difficult to tolerate racism much less commit acts that harken it in the future because she was able to picture herself within the shackles herself. I would do the same in sharing the horror of the Holocaust of Nazi Germany, had Anne Frank not done so already.

There may be some who do not agree, and I would not take a story that another has developed to use as my own, particularly of a cultural heritage outside of my own. You will not ever catch me attempting to do "Signifying Monkey," though I relish every moment I hear a storyteller or griot launch into it. But the story of okra is also a part of me, that descendent of North Carolinian farmers who did not own slaves but who discovered the delicate taste of a vegetable rooted in the Motherland of all humanity. So I will tell it and I will remember what courage is, a courage that I have not had to draw upon but I admire greatly. 

And I will continue to ask children to picture themselves in a West African village on a sunny day, feet warmed by the hot dust beneath them, that moment when everything was intact and serene, before the kidnappers...before we were forced to overstand brutality.

Finding the Middle Ground for Students

This week and next, I am working with twelve 3rd-grade classes, several of which are self-contained special ed. rooms, at least one bi-lingual class of Spanish-speaking students with various levels of English language proficiency, and all a host of kids who definitely have cabin fever after a long winter in the Northeast. Teachers too...

In the years that I have been practicing my skills in K-12 education, I have developed an ever-growing base of resources for poems that have a multicultural foundation so I can present students and teachers with poems that reflect the cultural experiences they know. In the world of poetry according to the dead white guys, this has been a valuable endeavor and many teachers have appreciated the resources. Students enjoy seeing their own image in the poems, recognizing their own language at times, feeling that they can relate to the message and experience in the work.

This is vitally important, I believe, in middle and high school, where the conversations can take on levels of critical thinking and empathy that are very profound.

However, in elementary schools, I find that I am searching for a different kind of poem to teach. I strive to find the poem that is so universal that every child, no matter what their heritage, lineage, socio-economic class, or geographical location, can relate to the words and draw a conclusion, develop an image to reflect back in their own words or drawings. I am also always looking for poems that have a little bit of ambiguity to debate and that are not based on rhyming couplets.

This is not an easy endeavor. I teach a wide demographic throughout the school year. I stand before very diverse classrooms. I am not always in front of a class that is predominantly White or Black. I may be teaching a class with as many as 10 nationalities and ethnicities represented. I am not alone with this. So where are the poems that are not too simplistic but not over the heads of my students, that employ language that invites the students to stretch and ponder, that either base a rhyme scheme in a more complex form or that do not rhyme at all?


I have a few that I rely upon: my beloved "Knoxville, Tennessee" by Nikki Giovanni is probably number one. In fact, after teaching this poem for nearly 4 years, only a handful of students have come to the conclusion that the poem was written by an African American poet (no matter where I am teaching or what the skin tone of my classes). Kay Ryan's "Bear Song" is probably second on the list for all the reasons I outlined above. William Carlos Williams' "To an Poor Old Woman" is a wonderful opportunity for conversation.

This week I added another poem to my list of favorite tried-and-trues, discovered in Poetry Speaks to Children. The poem is called "Skating in the Wind," by Kristin O'Connell George. This poem is so clear and concise yet it permits many perspectives, all valid. It is perfect for illustrating that we can have many interpretations of a poem and it mirrors experiences that most children can relate to either by their own actual experience or experiences they have witnessed. And still we can discuss the poem for 3 days and not be bored, we can discover answers to the mystery.

If you know of other examples of poems with universal themes and fascinating language and image, I would appreciate the recommendations. I will certainly have more kids to share the magic of poetry with and more reason to read.

Learning on the Fly: The Fine Art of Revising the Lesson Plan In the Moment

Today is the last day of a 5-day middle school residency that has been a total delight. I have been with two 7th grade Literacy classes, two 8th grade English classes, and two self-contained classes with students with Autism and other special needs (these two classes had widely varied skills between the two groups and even among the students). The teachers who invite me into their classes put their curriculum on hold for the week so I can bring something different to their students. For this reason, I attempt to tie my lessons and my week's scope and sequence to enforce what the teachers are responsible to impart on their young people in order to meet the needs of the grade level and, yes, the assessments.

These last two days we are working on reading poems and staging them as performance in a collaborative effort. I began yesterday with the activity that I learned from Quraysh Ali Lansana from his days in the mid-90s when he toured with Poetry Alive! and worked with Asheville poet and educator, Allan Wolf. This exercise involves a small group performance of Ms. Gwendolyn Brooks' "We Real Cool," a poem just a pertinent today as it was when she first wrote it in the early 1950s. Quraysh has shared this experience in both of the professional development workshops we have presented together in the past month and two of the teachers I am working with this week were participants in one of those sessions so now they are teaching the same activity as well as seeing me model it once again.

After yesterday's classes when we worked at making the poem real and alive, today I selected four poems of similar length: "I, Too, Sing America" by Langston Hughes, "To a Poor Old Woman" by William Carlos Williams, Nikki Giovanni's gem "Knoxville, Tennessee," and an ekphrastic poem by my friend and colleague Phil Memmer called "Seven a.m.," written to Edward Hopper's mysterious painting of the same name.

The students are asked to count off to create three or four work groups, then a copy of the poem has been distributed to each group to share, listen to, read, discuss, and then stage for the rest of the class. After the performances, the audience is to offer what Ryfkah Horwitz, my dear friend, sister poet, and supreme classroom teacher has taught me as sandwich critique (a positive statment, a suggestion for improvement, and another positive statement).

So the first period I discovered that I need multiple copies for each group, as they took too much time passing the poem around and then they wrote on the poem in the blocking and staging process (although they were kind enough to use pencil so I could erase notes until where it was in the building that the additional copies printed to when I had a chance to run them!).

Some of the groups decided to create props and that was great. It was also an assessment of engagement for both me and the teachers. The students were making plums and corncobs; some students were blocking entrances from the hallway to illustrate Langston's "...when company comes," and some were developing southern or more formal accents to share their poems. Some students were assigning specific lines or stanzas. Other groups worked on choral recitations and discovered elegance and eloquence in the process.

I figured out the second go-through that it would be advantageous to have the poem projected on the Smartboard for both the performers and the audience. Revision #2 on the fly.

I also used the activity to point out some elements of poetry, such as the importance of the title. The title is the welcome mat to the poem and, as with the WCW poem, it can serve as the first line so the poem is a bit out of context without inclusion in the overall recitation. We looked at the line ends and what happens if you pause at the end when it is not the end of the sentence but also how the end words gain extra capital in the split second that it takes the eye to move from the end of one line to the start of another.

Revision #3...sometimes when you have students count out 1...2..3..4...all the class clowns wind up in the same group! Rely on the teacher to determine if there is a rough mix!

There were other moments of tweaking that my host teachers and I each added to our lessons thus far. There will be more tweaking I will do over the weekend so I may continue to use this as another building block of my practice. And I will think of 10 young men, all students with Autism, sharing the lovely list of the best parts of a southern summer day, articulately, enthusiastically, and with profound collaboration.

Another wonderful week and after two more class periods, I get to drive through this tease of spring to my home, where rumor has it the oppressive snowbanks in my back yard are melting, where I presume the blades of iris leaves and primroses are trying to reach through to the warm sun, and to sleep in my own bed for 2 whole weeks before I hit the road again. If it is clear, I may even be treated with the spectacle of the Northern Lights since this week was honored with a major solar flare. I can only hope. It is the perfect allegory of my life.

Little Miracles Every Day

My busy season has started. I am blessed with bookings from January through mid-April and perhaps more will unfold. I lost a couple of weeks that were in the plan due to a school rethinking its budget but I will still be ok. I also have gotten a handful of smaller opportunities that replace a portion of that income so all will work out, I am sure.

This is the way I live now, independent and with trust that all is well and the highest good for all involved will unfold. The pace of my life is still busy often but not frantic as it was and I have more time for life in its fullest. I am learning how to pace my income and outgo to get me through the times with no work and it is remarkable that it has worked.

Tomorrow I finish my current residency with 6th graders and a teacher I love working with so I can spend 2 nights in my home and head out of town again to another school in a different part of the state. I have to say goodbye to about 75 students who have given me their trust and respect. They have also truly engaged in the creative process that I have invited them to share with me. This has been a great experience for us all.

I have seen children who never apply themselves in class produce poems they are proud of, stay focused, and complete tasks. I have seen a student offer to partner with a student with seeming cognitive challenges during a peer review session and not receive input herself, just to be a good classmate. I have witnessed young men who rarely share their emotions write of the death of their beloved grandparents, their favorite pets, the challenge of their own chemotherapy in facing cancer. I have watched as young ladies who have been witnesses to domestic violence speak openly in verse and somehow strengthen themselves in the process.

These students have been patiently investigating a single poem by Nikki Giovanni with me for 3 days, unfolding meaning for themselves and learning new skills. They have learned how the brain will interpret language in a completely different way just because a series of line breaks have shifted a sentence into smaller phrases, making way for breath.

And they have laughed with me as well as at me, which was always the appropriate response. I will leave them tomorrow and we will all be sad for the parting. But I trust that I leave behind something of value and they have all given me treasures I will hoard for those days when I think I haven't accomplished a thing. Thanks to my host teacher for the amazing educator she is and for inviting me to gain so much from her students. I am honored, grateful, and blessed beyond all comprehension. This is my life and livelihood. Imagine that!