How I Got Here...

A lot of young students think poetry is boring, or it all sounds the same. At least I did. I always thought poetry never made sense, I never knew what the poet was trying to say. Yeah, trees are all beautiful with branches and twigs and leaves. So what? It wasn't until taking a poetry workshop during my first year of college that I finally got it.

I had a professor who had the spitting image of a hippie sitting in the grass along UCSB's lagoon, no shoes, writing on a small pad of paper about the bird that just landed next to him. He took us there, places I hadn't been along the lagoon, places that used to be paths but are barely in use now. As a class, we walked in silence. We just followed, listening to the chirping of every different bird hiding in the trees and stopping at every flower or plant that caught our eye. He called it a field trip, so it was acceptable to ditch the classroom we were supposed to be found in and go on an adventure. We finally made our way to the very end of the lagoon, next to UCSB's Marine Operations Facility, where they apparently have sea wildlife in tanks that you can touch. I have yet to go. Instead, we sat in a small grass field across from it, shaded with magnolia trees in bloom, and took out our notepads.

As a student here at UC Santa Barbara's beautiful campus right along the beach, I don't think I would have gone out of my way to find an isolated spot in the deep of nature to write poetry. But then I started to, all the time. I walk to the water's edge just around our campuses lagoon, in between classes just to sit and write something. Sometimes it wasn't a whole poem, but I wouldn't have gotten that small spark of inspiration otherwise, from sitting inside a building somewhere on campus surrounded by laptops and phones. Lying in the grass or sand became my new motivation to write.

You know something special has happened when being in a class or having a certain professor can change your lifestyle and even the way you look at life. Not soon after I decided to join the Writing and Literature major, I realized that poetry should be something everyone should write, or at least read. And not soon after that, I promised myself that I would share the art form to the ones I knew turned up their nose to it the most. Kids. Elementary school, junior highers, high schoolers. For me, it was probably the last thing I wanted to read when I was 13, and there was no confidence in my mind that I would be able to write one on my own. But I've learned that everyone is capable, you just have to open your mind a little.

Another poetry professor I took about a year later, introduced me to the exact thing I wanted to accomplish. Sharing the beauty of poetry to kids. This professor ended up being my advisor and mentor, which I was allowed to pick for myself. It was an easy choice. His classes not only pushed his students to write their own poetry, but we were obligated to lead poetry workshops in middle school classrooms. I have taken four courses (going on five) with him; four of them having the component of volunteering at the schools.

It got easier over time but let me tell ya', I used to be deathly afraid of speaking in front of a class. Especially in front of middle schoolers. At first, I thought the students being younger than me would make it easy; I have authority, and I'm in charge. Wrong. When I read our first poem we brought aloud, my voice wouldn't stop shaking, and I felt so silly. I had a partner by my side, as I always did, so I guess it could've been worse. I prayed almost every time we stepped into the classroom that my partner would lead most of it because my heart was beating too fast. Now by the third classroom I've been in, I've never felt so comfortable in my life.

---

My most recent partner, Alejandra, was great to work with. Based on just the first day in the 8th-grade classroom, I knew we worked together really well to make things happen with those kids. Sometimes it's tough to get the age group I've been working with to participate to their fullest, and even harder to get them to share their work. It's the age of changes-- puberty, emotions, fitting in, and overall searching for who they really are as people. It's a complicated time, I remember. But I see it as a little obstacle you can get past no problem with a bit of creativity and human interest. I've learned this age group only likes to participate if you're very personal with them, making certain that they know we understand. We understand their interests, we know what they want to talk about and what they don't want to talk about, and we sort of push those boundaries to make it interesting. If they don't want to share, we'll find a way to make them share. If they have little motivation to even write a line of a poem, you best believe we'll find a way to make them interested in creating at least something we can read. Many times I've gotten a word at the top of the page and a small doodle of what they were thinking about while brainstorming, but never got to the point of writing a poem. And I think that's great. They gave me something to look at and translate into what they might've wanted to say in a poem, and it gives me a goal for next time to guide them in that direction.

Alejandra and I's first day in the 8th-grade classroom we chose, mostly based on how our schedules looked for the academic quarter and which time slot worked best, went all as planned. We were asked to send the teacher our lesson plan a day in advance so she could look it over and make sure it was appropriate, and most the time they were perfect. Our first lesson plan though was more than perfect. We were given the advice to use a rap song, from the teacher, for the students to see poetry as a form of a rap, rather than their normal perspective of what a poem is. Alejandra threw out the idea of using the song "Glory" by John Legend ft. Common, a song featured in the movie "Selma." We decided it was a great idea because it had a rapping component and the message through the song was very uplifting and pressed on a crucial issue, being discrimination and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Martin Luther King Jr. Day had passed about a week before, and without knowing it, the classes lesson plan for that past week was touching on all of these issues and the history behind the holiday. The teacher was thrilled that our lesson plans were very closely matching up.

On our first day, we spent about 15 minutes introducing ourselves and explaining what our goal was with these poetry workshops. We told our majors and what types of classes we take and more specifically how poetry changed our lives for the better and how it opened new gateways into our own creativity. Like any other middle school classroom, you're never sure if they're actually paying attention or if they're having secret conversations with their friends at their table, but you hope they got at least something from your speech.

Most of the students said they hadn't seen the movie "Selma," so we gave them a brief summary of what it was about and proceeded to play the music video. I think it actually made them more interested in watching since they hadn't seen it, versus them getting bored and paying little attention to it. Alejandra and I chose a few stanzas from the rap part of the song and had it printed for every student. After the video was over, we read the stanzas as more of a poem, showing the students that even music has a poetic quality that they might not have seen. We asked for volunteers to read it themselves, but that never seems to have any brave souls.

We then used the teacher's strategy that she uses for every other thing they read together in the classroom. She calls it "MATS" (Maybe the Author is Trying to Say...), and they finish the phrase with their own representation of what they think the piece is saying. After giving them a few minutes to think, we asked around the room and mostly got the response, "Discrimination is bad" or "Treat everyone the same."

Our prompt for that day was "Hope." Our goal was to keep it easy for the first workshop; very open-ended so they weren't overwhelmed that they didn't know how to write a real poem. So we didn't push them to write a poem about hope in the same way the song did, because not everyone can completely relate to the overall issue it was presenting. We gave them examples of what type of hope they could write about. What do you hope to do after school? What do you hope for yourself or your friends or family? What do you hope for tomorrow? Keeping the prompt personal, I think, was more productive rather than them writing something very general or bland. We wanted to hear stories and opinions and feelings. And that's what we got!

But before they started putting pencil to paper, we still got some confused stares after giving the prompt. And we prepared for that. We assumed that most of the kids wouldn't know where to even start when writing their own poem. Students tend to wander to the example, "Roses are red, violets are blue..." and that included even me when I was younger. I mean, what much more was there? So we started off with our first tip: IT DOESN'T NEED TO RHYME. Or better yet, don't make it rhyme. It creates too many boundaries, especially for students who don't even know what to write in the first place. Our second tip was that they don't need fancy, sophisticated words to make the poem sound good. I know from experience that using words you wouldn't regularly use doesn't make it sound better, it might even just make it sound silly.

Thirdly, we suggested they write their poem about them. It makes it a lot easier to tell a story when you were the one to experience it, and who doesn't want to talk about themselves? Everyone has a unique story they can call their own, and we let them know that we want to hear them all! We started small, asking for only five lines of a poem, but many still couldn't think of even that many. But we made sure they knew writing a good poem takes time; all we wanted was a carefree, no boundary poem that they didn't need to spend too much time thinking about. I think the student's main problem was that they were thinking too hard, they didn't allow their pencil to write down whatever came to their head. But we continuously worked on this throughout our workshops.

Overall our first poetry workshop went great. The teacher urged us to call on every student afterward and have them read their favorite line they had written. They all hated the pressure, but we thought it was so fun. At the end, we collected all the poems so we could provide them with feedback on their work by the next week. Nothing critical, just motivating words and encouragement that their first attempt at writing a poem was beyond our expectations.