Why I care about poetry

No, they do not ask your students to write poems on the end of course test. But writing poetry can do so much more for you than writing about integrity in a 5 paragraph essay. When you use poetry in your classroom, students get to play with language. They get to feel the shape of the word, hold onto the meaning for a while, weighing whether it is really what they mean to say. The sub genres of poetry are endless. Villanelles, sonnets, free verse, and our students' favorite, haiku's. Poetry writers tell stories, paint pictures, explain situations. With shape poetry they get to mold the form of the poem, perhaps into a house or a flower or a spiral. They get to listen to the sounds of words for staccato, vibrato, innuendo. Writing poetry allows them to push themselves into places they can't go in the essay.
I hope that the future teachers of writing I work with will see poetry as not just something to consume, dissect, and critique, but also as something to create, finesse, and read aloud. Teach students to write poetry, then when the time comes for them to write that sterile essay on the end of course test, maybe they'll remember some of the lessons of language learned in writing poems.

Lesuco in a nutshell

What is English Education?

Maybe because I learned another language at a young age and also taught that language--because I lived in another country--I've always found the connections among ELL, ENGL, and TAL, (Teaching Additional Languages). I read and write with people from more of a broad-based "literacies" background.

When disciplinary boundaries are drawn, often it is academics marking their territory, but I also think that it gets down to contextualization. Teachers are facing particular issues when teaching certain kinds of students. Until recently, we had a segregated system within our schools (and still do in some places through practices like tracking or language grouping), inclusion models, economic shifts, continued urban and suburbanization, and immigration patterns place content area teachers facing the complex issues that teachers of English to speakers of other languages have faced when working with students in isolated classrooms; similarly, those working in schools where students identified with learning disabilities who would have traditionally been taught in separate classrooms are now being taught in classrooms with students are not labeled. Combining pedagogies to reach all students in classrooms that are often the size of small lecture hall, filled with students, is a daunting task.

Add the challenge of being the English Language Arts teacher and relying for the majority of your content being predicated on the fact that your students can read and write age-appropriately. As you can imagine, the study of what the concept of English Education entails grows exponentially.