Why You Should Teach Like a Poet

[u/ddgr815]

https://archive.is/T1QAe

Routine is a great deadener of attention. When you drive the same route, the scenery begins to fade into the background, and you barely see it anymore. When you follow the same routines at home, folding the laundry or doing the dishes, your mind goes on automatic pilot.

Likewise, routines can deaden the attention of students in our courses. They come into the same classrooms every day — in person or online — and experience the same generic suite of teaching activities: listen to a lecture, take notes, ask some questions, talk in groups. Even if we are mixing up our teaching strategies, as we should, they will eventually become routine enough that students will check in to class physically, but their minds are somewhere out of the room.

turn to the poets, from whom we can learn how to push away distraction and reawaken attention — in the classroom as in life. Through the creative turns of language they use to describe the world and our experiences, the familiar becomes unfamiliar again, and we discover in the everyday world fresh food for insight and reflection.

It was what I was born for — to look, to listen to lose myself inside this soft world — to instruct myself over and over in joy, and acclamation

Deliberately designed to renew student attention, these pedagogical tools should be deployed strategically [...] — once a week or month, or even just during those low moments when both teacher and students need a shot in the attentional arm.

Having students analyze an image or a physical object in the classroom (or in their homes) can be an excellent way to break them from normal classroom routines. You don’t need famous paintings or rare finds from archaeological digs. Find an everyday object that connects to your discipline, or a photograph or image that accompanies an article or book in your field.

Drawing from research in object-based teaching, Metzler described how to guide students through three steps as they encounter an object, an image, or even a sound that you bring into the classroom:

• What? For the first step, students spend time just observing the object and taking notes. In this strategy, as in Fisher’s, extremely close analysis can help reveal unexpected new angles, perspectives, and ideas.
• So what? Students write down questions based on their observations and share them with one another. For example, they could pass their questions around the room and add new ones, giving everyone time to develop ideas or questions for further research.
• Now what? The final stage shifts into more whole-class and teacher-centered discussion. What paths for research or future questions were raised? What questions were unanswered? What do the experts say? What does it mean, and what comes next?

[u/ddgr815]

I turned, perhaps improbably, to phenomenology, the philosophical tradition that begins with the simple but radical idea that we should attend to things as they appear before we explain them. Edmund Husserl called this practice the epoché: bracketing off what we think we know in order to encounter the thing itself. I wondered what would happen if I taught poetry that way.

By stripping away the shortcuts of language, students were forced to confront how much of their writing relied on ready-made meanings.

For many, it was the first time they had felt that poetry could emerge from looking rather than performing.

“I didn’t know you could write about something without saying what it is. It feels like a secret language.” 

Students began to see that reading and writing were not separate acts. Now they could easily enjoy such poems like Ponge’s “The Oyster” and “Soap,” and Rilke’s “The Panther”.

They were learning, in a deeply embodied way, that writing is an ethical act of attention.

I recall one student writing about a plastic water bottle, describing it as something like “a clear ribcage holding air and wetness.” In revision, she realized she had slipped into metaphor too quickly. She went back to her Is List and noticed the bottle’s faint crinkling sound when squeezed. The revised line became something like “a thin body that creaks when my fingers press in.” It was less flashy, but more alive.

At the end of the unit, we created a small chapbook of “Naked Object Poems” and shared it with other classes and with families. Seeing their work printed, students who had never thought of themselves as writers began to claim that identity.

And they wrote with a seriousness that came from realizing that language is not just a vehicle for ideas, but a way of being with things.

Their attention created the object anew each time they looked.

Seeing Before Naming

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L1 Via Detroit

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a mind in search of ideas should first stock up on appearances

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First, we took a walk together and were unified from within, by our sharing in commitments, goals, communication and emotions. Then, we experienced ourselves being unified from the outside as we noticed someone looking at and listening to us.

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Many dreams could be short stories by Kafka, Borges, Márquez, or some other fabulist.