leaving the dwarf orchard

also... it's not all about me

Today is the last day of my first year in second grade.  It brought some surprises, and then other surprises came from without and within. Small tumults.

Tonight it's storming; the sky dogs are baying.

Now summer drifts up like a watermelon boat, a banana hammock hung from broccoli trees, and I will get in.

After Reading Tu Fu, I Go Outside to the Dwarf Orchard || Charles Wright

East of me, west of me, full summer.

How deeper than elsewhere the dusk is in your own yard.

Birds fly back and forth across the lawn

                                                                                           looking for home

As night drifts up like a little boat.

Day after day, I become of less use to myself.

Like this mockingbird,

                                                     I flit from one thing to the next.

What do I have to look forward to at fifty-four?

Tomorrow is dark.

                                           Day-after-tomorrow is darker still.

The sky dogs are whimpering.

Fireflies are dragging the hush of evening

                                                                                              up from the damp grass.

Into the world’s tumult, into the chaos of every day,

Go quietly, quietly.

 
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It's good to be back among you.  I read miles and miles of poetry last night to find this one, and it was like eating again after a long fast.  Thanks to Carol for hosting over at Carol's Corner, and I'm looking forward to a summer of reading and writing with this Poetry Friday community!

the last half day

Due to a curious solution to the problem of too many snow days, our school year ended at 12:30 on Monday.  We finished everything important on Friday, and I had hoped just a little that maybe no one would come on Monday--but they did, and we found lots of nice ways to fill that last few hours (including giving everyone one last chance to count to 100, an assessment I had forgotten to squeeze in--just as well they all came!).

And then they were gone.


Sometimes a meager harvest

The last half day--
walls stripped, treasure bags packed,
Jim Joe jumped one last time;
gifts given and received,
farewell hugs ceremoniously
hugged, fast and earnest,
because we'd run out of time again
one last time.

Now the room  is hollow, dead--
nothing living but the teacher and
a single valiant sugar snap vine,
three feet high and climbing
a string up the Weather Window.
On the one vine, at the top, hangs
a single beautifully formed,
pleasingly plump green pod.

Teacher steps out of her sandals
onto a low chair and up onto
the radiator, plucks the fat pod
full of peas she forgot to share
and eats it, all by herself--
one last sweet crunchy mouthful
swallowed alone in the classroom
on the last half day.

HM 2015
all rights reserved

***********************
Mary Lee herself is rounding up remotely at A Year of Reading today.  Go get yourself some farmyard fun and lots of poetry goodness from around the Kidlitosphere!

first day feast

This amazing and delicious school-supply buffet by Jamie from Setting the Mood.  Suddenly I'm starving...

It's that time again.  In large part because of a course I took which required me to log 100 hours of "Preparing Effective Curriculum,"  I've been thinking about school all summer, and I knew because of the pattern of our family activities that this summer would feel particularly short.  But here we are on the morning of my first day back (yes, one ahead of the general schedule for special staff development) and I could say:  my summer's over.

As Daisy reminded me, Summer itself is not over, not by a long shot, but it's hard to remember that in the perennially pleasurable flurry of newness.  I participated in the exit interview for that course yesterday and sat with three other teachers who appreciate, as I do, the chance to Begin Anew each year, to rethink and improve and correct and refresh and embark and attempt.  We also appreciate the break that allows us to do this each summer.  I don't have to tell most of you that teachers have summer breaks because they NEED them to recover and regroup--ours is one of the most continuously intense kinds of work there is. 

[I believe in this annual New Beginning even though I also believe that we here in the US need to rethink our whole school schedule and move to the European one of just-about year-round school.*  It's the only thing that makes sense in our modern culture, and it's better for children and working families as well as teachers.]

So here's a Begin Anew poem.

First Day Feast

"Fresh" is a word I hear about food,
like "crisp" and "juicy" and "ripe."
But things feel fresh on the first day of school:
my new clothes are crisp,
my markers are juicy,
my brain feels ready and ripe.
All the stuff I learned last year
has sunk in deep and wet,
like feet in the sand and me in the pool.
Now I'm hungry!  Now I'm set
for a feast of the first-day type!

HM 2013
draft

The round-up today is over at steps and staircases on tumblr, with our new host Lisa.  I hope I'm doing the right thing to post my link...

*In England, where I taught for 5 years, there are three terms of 12 weeks.  Each term is broken into two 6-week chunks by an entire week of half-term break, and there are 2-week breaks between terms.  School thus finishes around Wimbledon time each year, mid-July, and the summer break is "only" 6 weeks or so, but since teachers have not been driven sniveling into the ground by endless weeks of school punctuated only by the occasional Monday off, they don't need quite so much time to recover and regroup--that process is more ongoing.

autumn summer pumpkin butterfly

What's your favorite season? It's an important question; in my family we seem to review our preferences, with revisions, on a regular basis (just like we keep having to come back to the food question: "If you could have only one carbohydrate for the rest of your life, what would you choose? only one fruit? only one vegetable?").

I find it very easy indeed to pick summer, but this early fall time is a close second because of piquant overlaps like the one I tried to capture in the opening poem of last year's Pumpkin Butterfly (Boyds Mills/Wordsong). My school is full of painted lady and monarch butterflies because of the second-grade science curriculum, and the pumpkins are already on their way in, all under the mellow October sunshine. Don't forget to watch for ghosts.


Ghosts


we haul our wagon to a patch of hilly earth
weighed down with deep orange
with bigbellied, cumbersome pumpkins

“This is the one”
“And this one”
we say

we cut the tough vines and turn to load them up

behind our backs
a gust of butterflies rises and tumbles
on hot October air

yellowgreen tinged with orange
wings as weightless and angular
as the pumpkins are heavy and round:

the ghosts of our pumpkins untethered from earth

~ Heidi Mordhorst 2009

another way to pose the question

Who Am I?

The trees ask me,
And the sky,
And the sea asks me
Who am I?

The grass asks me,
And the sand,
And the rocks ask me
Who I am.

The wind tells me
At nightfall,
And the rain tells me
Someone small.

Someone small
Someone small
But a piece
of
it
all.

~ Felice Holman

finally!

This is rather a good little poem and is even more fun as a song--and it's certainly the right way to begin [ahem-TWO!] new reading classes full of children with first names from Farhan to Manuel, from Dayrin to Bronx, from Fumiya to Jaisa.

How nostalgic it made us, singing it blearily before dawn with my freshly-minted middle-schooler, for the days of nursery school and Dragon Tales...

The Hello Song
from PBS "Dragon Tales"

Get up on your feet
And to everyone you meet
Say hello, hello, hello, hello

When you meet somebody new
The first thing you should do
Is say hello, hello, hello, hello

Say it high
Say it low
Say it fast
Say it slow

Get up on your feet
And to everyone you meet
Say hello, hello, hello, hello

Cause when you wanna make a new friend
Give a great big smile
And say "Hi, hello, my name is
[Zak! Wheezie! Ord! Cassie!]"

And before you know it
You'll have a brand new pal
True-blue, till the end
A brand new friend, say it again

Say it high
Say it low
Say it fast
Say it slow

Get up on your feet
And to everyone you meet
Say hello, hello, hello, hello

Say it high
Say it low
Say it fast
Say it slow

Get up on your feet
And to everyone you meet
Say hello, hello, hello, hello

Hellllllo!

Check out all the goodies at the Poetry Friday round-up, hosted today at Susan Writes by (funnily enough) Susan!

question for the first day of school

"Who are you?"

I've spent time sitting through the "Students at a Glance" meeting and talking with other teachers about the children who are coming my way this year, but the fact that there are brand-new ones coming in always reminds me that even those we think we know are brand-new to each new year, new teacher, new class.

And yes, I want to know when their birthdays are, and their favorite colors and their pets' names, but even more I want to listen to who they tell me they are OFF the "All About Me" sheet.

Here's a poem to remind all of us teachers that part of the essential beauty of our students is in what they
don't say.


The Hand
by Mary Ruefle


The teacher asks a question.
You know the answer, you suspect
you are the only one in the classroom
who knows the answer, because the person
in question is yourself, and on that
you are the greatest living authority,
but you don’t raise your hand.
You raise the top of your desk
and take out an apple.
You look out the window.
You don’t raise your hand and there is
some essential beauty in your fingers,
which aren’t even drumming, but lie
flat and peaceful.
The teacher repeats the question.
Outside the window, on an overhanging branch,
a robin is ruffling its feathers
and spring is in the air.


I would have liked that to say "fall is in the air," but it is as it is and it's a perfect way to wish all you teachers a Happy First Day of School!

Poetry Friday is at Book Aunt today with Kate Coombs and a marvelous selection of poetry for and by teens.

can't help myself

Those of us who thrive in the classroom environment have now been out of school long enough to be thinking of "next year." (Actually we were probably scheming about how do everything Better, Stronger, Slower before school was over, or that might just be me.)

So I woke up this morning (too early; bad cat!) thinking about the sense (or not) in a class mission statement, which led to a picture of me and my new reading class of 2nd graders making our silent and stealthy way ("Your mission, should you choose to accept it...") through the halls of our new school building, occupying and exploring our new room, and in the background was playing the theme from Mission Impossible (click to get the effect), which vision only works if you participated in Pallotta TeamWorks AIDS rides of the 90's, the motto for which was (and here finally is today's poem, a brilliant one-word piece of punctuation genius)--


I'mpossible.


I think my second-graders just became the I-Team. Poetry Friday is at Irene's Live. Love. Explore! blog today.

if you find a rock

Today Poetry Friday is hosted by Susan Taylor Brown--thanks!

In our county, first graders spend the fall on a science unit about Rocks, Soil and Worms, and in my class the initial reading assessment requirements are nearly fulfilled so I'm looking forward to Rocktober.

You know how some books reach in and grab you by the heart? If You Find a Rock by Peggy Christian is one of those for me. It's not marketed as a volume of poetry, but it works that way, and the "colortoned" photos by Barbara Hirsch Lember picture, in a slightly surreal way, real children doing real things with real rocks. They fill the simple, measured text with even more gravity. The message is that playing with rocks is serious business. Here's a sample.

If you find a rock--
a big rock--
by the edge of the water,
then you have found
a splashing rock.
When it hits the surface,
the water jumps
out of the way,
raining back down
on your outstretched hands.
The bigger the rock,
the wetter you get.

The other thing I love about this book is its element of magical realism--there's science content here, physics and biology and paleontology, but it's all mixed in with aesthetics and emotion and even the possibility of wishes granted. Just like real life.

And now, to spoil the mood, I must just announce again that THURSDAY IS THE DAY! Pumpkin Butterfly: Poems from the Other Side of Nature has its official release this week! Become PB's fan on facebook!

a big little beginning

Poetry Friday is hosted today at Crossover by Kelly Herold.

Today will be my fourth day with a rather phenomenal group of 1st graders. They've all arrived in my RLA classroom reading like 3rd-graders, and on the first day, when we began by reading Chrysanthemum (need I add 'by Kevin Henkes'?) and talking about names, they could all count the vowels, consonants and syllables in their own names. They could fill in a blank to describe their names as short, long, cute, Spanish, "un-comen" and "pawrfl" words.

But in general they write like kindergarteners, and they are only 6, and therein lies my delicious challenge: to lead them into rich, juicy literacy projects that call on their established skills (and not inconsiderable smarts) while respecting their 6-year-old hearts. Where better to start than with Ruth Krauss?

Beginning on Paper

on paper
I write it
on rain

I write it
on stones
on my boots

on trees
I write it
on the air

on the city
how pretty
I write my name

~Ruth Krauss, from the anthology Sing a Song of Popcorn

We started on Tuesday; by Wednesday they'd done their first choral reading, exchanging the "on" lines and the "I" lines, and yesterday we turned our backs on the chart and said it by heart. C'est parti, mes amis! (which is a prettier way to say, "And they're off!)

back-to-school thoughts, just for a moment

I have an exciting new teaching job starting in a month (yesterday I had my first official meeting with the Reading Specialist), and in my role as charter school founder I've been having some deep "academic design" thoughts. So this wicked poem that I rediscovered in a book called Poetry Slam: The Competitive Art of Performance Poetry (ed. Gary Mex Glazner, 2000) has been wandering the halls of my inner school...

Backwards Day

Sometimes at school we have a special day

We call it backwards day

Everyone wears their clothes backwards

Or wears colors that clash

I have a modest proposal

Forget your silly backwards hats and tee shirts

Forget this stripes and checks together puppypoop

Let's get serious

Let's really shake school up

In math class, for homework

Describe the associative, distributive, and

commutative properties

In dance

Choregraph it, dance it, show your work

Points off for clumsiness

In Social Studies, for homework

Prepare two Civil War marching songs, one North one South

Sing in four part harmony, show your emotion

Points off for flat notes

In English, for homework

Carve a sculpture that expresses Hester Prynne's solitary courage

The cowardice of her lover

The beauty and strangeness of her child

In Science, for homework,

Bring in a broken toaster, doorknob, or wind-up toy

Fix it

You get extra credit for using the leftover parts to make something new

Points off for reading the directions

On the S.A.T.

Every one of the questions

Will be in haiku

You get two scores

One in whistling, and one in Legos

No calculators

Let's take a stroll down the hall

Let's see who is in the learning disabilities classroom now

Will you look at all those guys with pocket protectors

Sweating, slouching, and acting out

Hey, no care that you can divide fractions backwards in

your head buddy

You will stay right here and practice interpretive dance steps till

you get it right

Will you look at all those perfect spellers with bad attitutdes

Look at those grammar wizards with rhythm deficit disorder

What good is spelling gonna do you

If you can't carry a tune

Toss a lariat

Or juggle?

You are going to stay right here and do the things that you can't

Over and over, and again, and again

Until you get them right,

Or until you give up

Quit school

And get a job

As a spell checker

At the A&P

~Daniel Ferri

P.S. Does anyone know how to make blogger obey my WYSIWYG commands? Grrrrrr.

...and now it's sprung

is hosted today by Maya Ganesan at allegro.

I spent two mornings this week playing poetry with kindergarteners in a Title I school in Arlington, VA. Here's what one class had to say, with a little orchestration from me, about the view out of their window right now:

dogwood

grow green, soft sprout
(drop splash puddle)
four white-pink petals
on juicy-sour stems reaching out
exquisite puddle of petals

Can you guess which word was the teacher's contribution?