A Man and His Mouse

"These kids are getting bored of us," I thought in my head as I tapped my fingers over my laptop keys, patiently waiting for an idea to hit me like a ton of bricks. Alejandra and I were getting the same lines of poetry as the week before from the students, at least that's what it seemed like. Prompts like "write a poem on what you're grateful for" and "write a poem on hope" gave the students a chance to not try very hard with their creative minds. Poems came out of them will the least amount of effort. Most of them went like, "I am grateful for..." and continued with a list. Writing down enough lines so we assumed they were finished. We needed to challenge them; make them really think and be creative and different. I could see it in their eyes that the last thing they wanted to do was write a poem, but having two college students run the class is better than what they usually do in class, right?

Ahhh YouTube, my favorite pastime for when I'm dodging the tasks that need to be done. Pointless videos numbing my brain for a half hour before I close the browser and decide to open my Word doc just to stare at it some more. But wait. Music videos are cool and all, with Nicki Minaj bouncing all over the screen, but what about something that keeps you invested in a story. Something you can expand off of and maybe get inspired by. Short films. I love short films.

I started my brainstorming for this lesson plan wanting to incorporate animals and maybe thinking like animals mostly because I was getting bored reading poems about people. They all sounded the same because we weren't giving them the opportunity to create a story or use their imagination. So I started looking through short films on YouTube... with animals. There was a lot of them but I was specifically looking for one that showed love for someone or something else. I wanted the students to express love as someone else through poetry.

I started watching a French short film about a mouse and it was perfect. An old man watched as a small mouse climbed up his counter for a small piece of cheese he had left. Grabbing the cheese allowed the cardboard box trap to fall over him, making the old man dance in excitement. But after hearing the mouse cry in the dark box surrounding him, the man had a change of heart. He brought the mouse down to his basement where he poked holes in the box for him to breath, and started to offer him a crumb. The mouse was mad however, because he was still not over the man trapping him in a box. But by the end of the story, the mouse climbs up on the man's shoulder while he's asleep and takes a crumb off of his shirt. The man, who was pretending to sleep, smiles to himself because of his new found friend.

This short film gave me a great opportunity for a unique prompt which was to write a poem about realizing you love something, in the perspective of an animal. The 8th grader's first reaction was confusion. For some reason they couldn't grasp onto the concept of talking as if you were an animal. Many of their poems started off by describing an animal, but I quickly tried to explain more. It took giving them examples for them to finally understand, but once they understood they didn't know where to start.

I tried to make them picture in their head a dog, maybe sitting outside on a shaded porch. Maybe you could start the poem by describing how the dog feels in the shade, while pretending it's you. "My tail wagging with the breeze," I tried to explain. I didn't expect the students to have such a hard time with this concept, but it made me realize that these are just the obstacles you'll have to go through sometimes to get to the creative part of their minds. Activities like this seem sparse in schools and it's a shame. I've realized that even giving, let's say, a middle school classroom a fun writing activity to do, they still treat it like a chore that needs to get done by the end of the class time. A goal I had for this class was to make them realize the hour we spend together should be enjoyed. I didn't want the poetry prompts to seem like a chore or a homework assignment, I wanted them to have freedom and explore the unique art that they all can create.

Eighth graders love Fortnite. It didn't occur to me that 13-year-olds have the same interests as 23-year-olds until I realized just like college dudes, middle schooler's lives revolve around getting that dub (AKA "W" or "win"). While brainstorming for our poems, almost every class session leads to one of the boys yelling out, "Can I write about Fortnite?!" And of course I say yes, but for poetry sake kid, make it poetic and meaningful. Talking in the perspective of an animal made one of the boys in the class automatically think of the only animal in the game of Fortnite, a Loot Llama. Me, only observing this multiplayer survival game on a PS4, asked to clarify what this was resulting in the boy laughing in my face because I obviously wasn't past level 40.

Initially, a Loot Llama is an animal you can come across in the game that can give you a bunch of "loot" (AKA weapons and survival tools), and are apparently pretty rare. This definitely wasn't what I was expecting when I asked the students to write a poem in the perspective of an animal, but they were finally enjoying themselves and creating their own story. The Loot Llama boy for the first time was actually excited for me to pick up his paper to see what he came up with. And to make things more fun I advised everyone to draw their animal in their poem when they were finished, so I could imagine it with them.

"Hey I am a loot llama, I give heals, mats, explosives, and transportation. I am rare to find, only 4 in the game. They break for materials but it's fine, 'cause I'm hurt anyway, that's life. I am a loot llama."

Of course most of the poems weren't about Fortnite; earlier in my lesson I gave them several examples of what they could potentially use as an animal or scenario. Alejandra and I realized we may have dropped too many things on the students at once. First with writing a poem about realizing you love something, like what was shown in the short film, and then switching it up by doing it in the perspective of an animal. This got confusing so many of the students only focused on talking like an animal instead of sticking to the theme of the prompt. In the end it didn't matter, because they had so much fun trying to imagine being inside an animal's mind while making it sort of funny along the way.

While reflecting on the problem of the prompt getting lost in translation, I realized it would've been helpful to lead the students in a poem that could be related to what they should've been thinking about. Alejandra and I got so caught up in finding some sort of media to keep the students engaged like music or a short movie, that we overlooked the fact that we should've been showing the students what true beautiful poetry looks like. If I were to go back to this prompt with this same classroom, I would recite Shirley Geok-lin Lim's poem, "Learning to love America."

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Learning to love America

By: Shirley Geok-lin Lim

because it has no pure products

because the Pacific Ocean sweeps along the coastline

because the water of the ocean is cold

and because land is better than ocean

because I say we rather than they

because I live in California

I have eaten fresh artichokes

and jacaranda bloom in April and May

because my sense have caught up with my body

my breath with the air it swallows

my hunger with my mouth

because I walk barefoot in my house

because I have nursed my son at my breast

because he is a strong American boy

because I have seen his eyes redden when he is asked who he is

because he answers I don't know

because to have a son is to have a country

because my son will bury me here

because countries are in our blood and we bleed them

because it is late and too late to change my mind

because it is time.

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To sum up, the students really enjoyed this prompt but with much thinking I have a lot I would've done differently. Maybe I would've done this prompt in two parts, with an introduction poem to get the feel for writing in the perspective of something or someone else, and then for the second part, diving into a more in depth idea like creating a story or a certain feeling for this character. The main mistake was not providing the students with a more concrete example, whether it be a poem somewhat related to our prompt or a poem that I put together. Either way, the students wrote some great poems and I enjoyed reading every single one of them. Now here's a poem to take us home; one that stood out to me and made me feel proud of what I'm bringing out of these students.

"I am a spoon billed sandpiper. I migrate every summer from Southeast Asia to the Arctic. On my way, I take resting stops at mudflats where thousands of other shorebirds also stop. When I have ate enough, I continue my migration North to the Arctic."