A Poetry Competition to Best March Madness

Notes from the Classroom

A poetry bracket, from P.S. 32

My March Madness bracket came close this year–it would’ve been so sweet if my alma mater had managed to take the championship and win me some local bragging rights, but alas.  

But you know how it is when you come so close–you feel like magic slipped through your fingers. Maybe that’s why I have such high hopes that my sleeper pick poem “Big Grab,” by Tony Hoagland, has the chops to beat out tourney-favorite Billy Collins with his signature poem “The Lanyard.”

Yep. Poetry Madness. It’s a thing now.

We found it on Twitter (you can find lots of stuff on Twitter, like this, this, and this) and now three of my colleagues and a few hundred juniors in our classes can’t stop cheering for verse.

Poetry Madness has swept our high school’s juniors like a joywave, washing away the sweaty melancholy of SAT testing week.

The best part is how easy it was to assemble a bracket and get our classes engaged.

The concept is simple:

  • Find yourself an empty bracket–preferable an Excel document that will make voting easy.
  • Grab yourself three or more colleagues and tell them to brush the dust off their favorite poetry collections (or scour YouTube for their favorite slam poets performing).
  • Select enough poems to fill up a bracket with head-to-head matchups (we went with a field of 32 because 64 poems would have spilled us well into the following month, but be as ambitious as your time allows!).
  • Try to match up the poems in interesting ways–maybe one corner of the bracket is haiku and another is slam; or maybe “the classics” are always pitted against modern works in the first round.
  • Never EVER tell the kids who chose what poems: My students are having as much fun trying to guess which poems sound like the stuff I’d like as they are with voting on the poems themselves.

Another reason not to tell them? This is a great entryway into discussing the styles of various poets casually: When the kids do beg me to tell who chose a given poem they loved (or loathed), it’s fascinating to hear what they see in the poem and why they see it reflected in one or another of the teachers from our department. It also gives some of your poetry holdouts a different reason to buy into the competition–they’ll come around to the poetry eventually. In the meantime, they’ll be intrigued by the idea that you’ll be the teacher-poetry picking champion if they vote well.

The last step is to crown a champion.

We were still in the first round in our tournament, but there was already talk of a little party at the end, where all the classes that participated could get together to celebrate the winning poem–and the teacher who picked that poem. Submit your winning teacher to the “honor” of doing a dramatic performance of their poem. The kids will eat it up and get one more dose of a piece of art they collectively crowned the best of the bunch.

Make sure you make the tournament about celebration and art for art’s sake. You should absolutely ask the kids what they think of each piece, but resist the urge to iamb their pentameters or rhyme their couplets. See what happens when you just let them absorb a whole bunch of poetry about which they know only this: One of their teachers loves this piece of art.

About a week into our “tournament,” I could already feel the change in energy for our students. Kids who know me but don’t have me for a teacher were asking me about the brackets. Kids were picking friendly fights with each other about close matchups between two closely matched poems. My colleagues were talking trash every time they saw me in the halls, claiming (inaccurately) that one of THEIR poems was sure to be crowned champion when clearly one of my poems was bound to win.

March Madness basketball teams and works of art probably don’t have a lot in common. Except maybe this: Sometimes we only care about one for a fleeting moment, but when that moment is buzzing with the right kind of energy, it doesn’t really need to last much longer.

Michael ZieglerMichael Ziegler (@ZigThinks) is a Content Area Leader and teacher at Novi High School.  This is his 15th year in the classroom. He teaches 11th Grade English and IB Theory of Knowledge. He also coaches JV Girls Soccer and has spent time as a Creative Writing Club sponsor, Poetry Slam team coach, AdvancEd Chair, and Boys JV Soccer Coach. He did his undergraduate work at the University of Michigan, majoring in English, and earned his Masters in Administration from Michigan State University.  

Some Favorites from 2018’s Youth Media Awards

Book Reviews Notes from the Classroom

I’ll let you in on a secret. My favorite holiday is not on any national calendars. It doesn’t coincide with a school break. And only a few people I know celebrate it too.

It’s the Youth Media Awards ceremony, which takes place during the American Library Association’s Midwinter conference each year.

The leaders of ALA’s youth and teen divisions host a live webcast as they announce the year’s finalists and winners in Youth Media Award categories like the Printz, Morris, and YALSA Excellence in Nonfiction Awards. Like many other librarians, the announcement of the YMAs sends me into a frenzy–locating, reading, and purchasing these lauded titles for my students. I have been making my way through as many of them as possible over the past six weeks and have discovered some gems for my staff and students.

We Are Okay, by Nina LaCour (Printz Award winner)

The Michael L. Printz Award is given for excellence in literature written for young adults. It’s the big, all-encompassing award. I wanted to check out We Are Okay immediately because I think it came as a bit of surprise to many people.

The book follows the character Marin, as she prepares to spend her first winter break of her college career alone in her New York City dorm. Her grandfather, with whom she has always lived, has recently passed away, an event shrouded in sadness and a distinct sense of mystery. She is expecting her best friend, Mabel, to arrive to spend a few days, but the anticipation of this visit is also heavy with tension and complicated history.

The novel’s mood is soft, subtle, and often somber. Yet LaCour artfully builds suspense in her characters’ experiences, creating a novel about those parts of ourselves we share openly–and those that we keep hidden.

The Hate U Give, by Angie Thomas (Morris Award Winner, Coretta Scott King Author Finalist, Printz Finalist, and Odyssey Award Winner)

One of the books that received copious buzz in the YA book world this year, The Hate U Give follows 16-year-old Starr as she tries to find a balance between her modest home life, in a neighborhood full of other African American people from similar backgrounds, and her fancy suburban prep school, where she is always a racial minority and frequently subject to racist and tokenizing prejudices.

When Starr sees her childhood best friend, Khalil, shot by a police officer under the auspices of public safety, she finds herself in an entirely new internal battle. Does she remain quiet, knowing that what she witnessed was a horrible crime deserving of punishment? Or does she speak out publicly, putting herself in the spotlight for scrutiny and the always-disappointing public opinion?

No one in the book universe was surprised to see this title on so many lists. It’s a gripping, gritty statement about police brutality that our young people need to read.

Saints and Misfits, by S.K. Ali (Morris Finalist)

An equally welcome voice in the Morris race (the award for debut YA authors) is found in the character Janna, the Muslim Indian-American hijabi teenager at the center of Saints and Misfits. The sheer lack of representation of Muslim experiences in YA literature would make this book a necessary addition to the pool, but Janna’s voice is what caught my attention. She finds nuance while describing her strict adherence to a conservative religious lifestyle, while maintaining a teenage girl’s life.

Saints and Misfits is an honest, contemplative story with a surprising amount of humor–and tremendous heart.

The 57 Bus, by Dashka Slater (Stonewall Award, YALSA Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Finalist)

You might have seen my colleague Megan Kortlandt’s post about giving this book away. She bumped it onto my radar, but when it popped up on two awards’ lists, it became a priority read. Totally worth it!

The 57 Bus is the story of two teens, one of whom set the other on fire while riding the bus across Oakland, California. It’s a story that captures people’s attention quickly because of the sheer horror of the event. My students want to read this book immediately after hearing the premise.

What makes this book incredible is the way that Slater writes about each kid with such detail and care. She delicately delves into two complicated worlds–those of non-binary gender identity and of violence-riddled life in a troubled neighborhood—allowing us to see the people who live in them.

Nonfiction can be challenging for many students, but this is an accessible piece in which everyone can find pieces of themselves or someone they know.

Have you read any of this year’s award-winners or finalists? I’d love to hear from you about your favorites!

pic of meBethany Bratney (@nhslibrarylady) is a National Board Certified School Librarian at Novi High School and was the recipient of the 2015 Michigan School Librarian of the Year Award.  She reviews YA materials for School Library Connection magazine and for the LIBRES review group.  She is an active member of the Oakland Schools Library Media Leadership Consortium as well as the Michigan Association of Media in Education.  She received her BA in English from Michigan State University and her Masters of Library & Information Science from Wayne State University.  Bethany is strangely fond of zombies in almost all forms of media, a fact which tends to surprise the people that know her.  She has two children below age five, and is grateful at the end of any day that involves the use of fewer than four baby wipes.

Podcast Power: Boosting Listening Skills, part 1

Common Core Consultants' Corner Literacy & Technology

podcastDuring the twelve hour drive from Michigan to North Carolina and back over the holidays, I listened to a lot of podcasts. I admit it: I’m a podcast addict. Any time I have to drive for an hour or longer, I listen to a podcast–This American Life, The Moth, Ted Talks Radio Hour, Radio LabSnap Judgment… All that listening and driving got me thinking about using podcasts in the classroom and why it’s a relevant medium.

Connection to Standards

The Common Core Standards prioritize speaking and listening skills in a fairly rigorous way.  ELA teachers have always valued speaking and listening skills and given students the opportunity to develop them in their classrooms.  But with the adoption of the Standards, these skills are now clearly defined and progress in complexity from year to year, meaning teachers and departments have to think about how they’ll address speaking and listening in a comprehensive way. Often when we think of the speaking and listening standards, our minds immediately go to discussion–how to get students to engage in rich and complex discourse.  But in this post I want to focus on the podcast medium as a fairly exciting way for teachers and students to explore close listening together.  Listening to podcasts as nonfiction texts (a great way to infuse your curriculum with more nonfiction!) directly addresses these two standards:

Speaking & Listening Standard 2: Integrate and evaluate information presented in diverse media and formats, including visually, quantitatively, and orally.
Speaking & Listening Standard 3: Evaluate a speaker’s point of view, reasoning, and use of evidence and rhetoric.

Why Is Podcasting an Important Medium?

484812177I remember talking to a colleague a few years ago who proclaimed that podcasting was not new media.  She said it was just recorded radio and that podcasting was over.  But podcasting is so not over and it’s a lot more than recorded radio.  Sometimes podcasts never appear first on the radio at all.  So why is this an important and popular media form?

  • Podcasts are available on demand via our mobile devices, thanks to iTunes and the websites of popular podcasts. So we can listen anytime, anywhere.
  • There is a growing library of free, high-quality podcasts on a wide range of subjects.
  • They run the gamut of nonfiction genres: storytelling, informational, and argument-focused podcasts ranging in purposes from entertainment to news to self-help (exercise, nutrition, spirituality, emotional health).
  • We can multi-task while we listen–drive, make dinner, walk the dog, exercise at the gym.
  • As with other digital texts, the general public (students!) can create and publish podcasts–and they are in fairly high numbers.

Start with Serial

serial-social-logoIn October, I was over the moon when Serial, a This American Life spin off that follows a single story for twelve episodes came out.  From episode one, I was hooked.  So rather than talk about strategies for integrating this medium in your classroom (that will be my next post), I’m going to make a pitch for using this new podcast.  I would suggest that for high school classes, especially juniors and seniors, Serial is a great place to start.  (I’m not alone.  A California high school teacher has replaced the study of Hamlet with Serial.)  Why?  Well, here’s the context for the start of this story…

It’s Baltimore, 1999. Hae Min Lee, a popular high-school senior, disappears after school one day. Six weeks later detectives arrest her classmate and ex-boyfriend, Adnan Syed, for her murder. He says he’s innocent – though he can’t exactly remember what he was doing on that January afternoon. 

Serial website

Adnan, a popular student with strong ties to the Muslim community, is later found guilty and sentenced to life in prison.  He was 18.  And as the very first episode of Serial unravels for its listeners, the evidence was contradictory and, in some instances, spotty.

Other compelling reasons to use Serial in the classroom:

  • serialcollageIt’s great storytelling and relevant to your students.  The cast of characters is almost entirely high school students (or they were at the time of the murder) living through the things your students experience–juggling school and extracurriculars, navigating cultural differences between home life and school life, experiencing young love, making their way through the simmering stew of high school social life. This will seriously engage your students.
  • Serial has changed the face of podcasting.  It’s like the True Detective of radio (with a lot less violence).  People could not wait for each new episode of Serial to be released on Thursdays and there was no telling which direction the story would turn and if the producers would decide to declare Adnan innocent or guilty.  It has been downloaded more than any other podcast–more than 5 million times.  And unlike many mainstream podcasts, it was not orignially broadcast on the radio.  To read more about Serial’s popularity and possible reasons for it, check out this Salon article.
  • It has caused a stir on the internet.  People are blogging about it, arguing about it, and commenting non-stop.  There have been many articles published as the story has unfolded week to week.  The number of Serial-related threads on Reddit alone are a clear indicator of how this podcast has captured people’s imaginations.  And there’s a new two-part interview with the star witness whose testimony led to Adnan’s conviction and life sentence.
  • The Serial website contains all kinds of really cool visual artifacts related to each episode.  Using these in conjunction with the episodes means students can analyze across media–a Common Core dream!
  • Serial provides endless ways to study central idea/claim, argument and evidence, theme, bias, character development and text structure.

If you don’t want to commit to all twelve episodes of Serial, consider using only the first episode.  That 60 minute audio text alone will make for some very interesting and creative teaching and learning. In my next post, I’ll talk about developing close listening and annotation skills and other ways of using podcasts in the classroom.  I’ll also suggest specific episodes from other podcasts you might use.

Do you have any podcasts you love? Please share in the comments section.  And if you’re already using podcasts in your classroom, please share your ideas!

Reading Podcast Power: Listening Skills & Curriculum, part 2

Delia DeCourcyDelia DeCourcy joined Oakland Schools in 2013 after a stint as an independent education consultant in North Carolina where her focus was on ed tech integration and literacy instruction.  During that time, she was also a lead writer for the Common Core-aligned ELA writing units. Prior to that, she was a writing instructor at the University of Michigan where she taught first-year, new media, and creative writing and was awarded the Moscow Prize for Excellence in Teaching Composition. In her role as secondary literacy consultant, Delia brings all her writing, curriculum design, administration, and teaching skills to bear, supporting districts in their implementation of the Common Core via onsite workshops and consultations, as well as workshops at Oakland Schools.  She is currently spearheading the development of literacy-focused online professional learning modules as well as the building of a virtual portal where Michigan educators can learn and collaborate.