Chapter 11 in Inside Out

Chapter 11 Response

The major points of Chapter 11 is that we ought to write our own poetry our students and teach poetry. They stress not to worry about formal poetry until later. They believe that playing with words and language is beneficial to writing, which arguably it is. They present many fun ways to get kids writing poetry—and I mean fun, so fun, in fact, that I wonder if I can do it in my AP classes. But since poetry does appear on the Lit. test, I guess I better teach some poetry. The authors really stress that the teacher write poetry along with the kids and share it with the students. They also maintain that form is not as important as honest writing. In fact, they say “Good writing is honest writing,” and often when kids are writing poetry, it comes from the heart, so teachers must be sensitive to that also and not cut the student down, but always look for what is good.


Personal Connection: I have not studied poetry in depth, with exception of Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, so I always face the teaching of poetry with some trepidation. I used to write some poetry years ago and was kind of embarrassed about it—I think I have really only written one good poem in my life, so when the authors suggest writing our own poetry and sharing it with the students—aargh! I really can’t even imagine it.
In the regular classes I taught last year, each class had about 2/3 boys and 1/3 girls, so when the topic of poetry came up, the boys rolled their eyes, and were generally disinterested which I blame on my ineptitude of teaching poetry and not on the boys. So this chapter provided some inspiration for me to teach this with some excellent hands on activities.

Questions: What are your feelings on teaching poetry. Do you have any good books you recommend? Or any poems that juniors particularly enjoy? How could I use this in an AP class?