Word: koch
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What caused my immediate skepticism, why did the whole thing turn out so differently from what Koch's book says or suggests about teaching children poetry? I think that Koch works under certain assumptions about poetry, education, and perhaps even children that ignore many of the problems one encounters every day in schools of all kinds--problems that keep his book from being very useful...
...Koch's most convincing arguments is that he didn't teach in some exclusive private school, where most children go home every day to an environment of encouragement, where literate, college-educated parents could react to poems, and where children could benefit from "acquired tastes." Instead, Koch taught at P.S.61 on Manhattan's lower East Side, where more than half the kids are black or Puerto Rican. And his results--at least those that were published--are impressive. For example, Koch asked a fourth grader to translate one sense into another and she wrote...
...course the students didn't start out writing poems as evocative as this right away. Koch began with collaborative poems, all beginning with the idea, "I wish..." He de-emphasized spelling, grammar and punctuation because he saw them as barriers. He emphasized poem-ideas that were easy and natural for children to use, and that encouraged immediate responses. Often the children would make rules for the poem (i.e. it must include a color and a comic-strip character, or a city and a country, with "I wish" at the beginning). After the group poems his students went on to describing...
...Koch found an interesting approach to the metaphor poems. He taught several different grades ranging from first through sixth. At first he inspired the kids by reading an adult poem--including D.H. Lawrence, Theodore Roethke, John Ashberry, and Dyland Thomas--but as his collection of kids' poems increased he would read in one class poems written in another. He noticed that P.S.61 was establishing its own literary tradition--an institutional salon of sorts. Thus a misspelled word triggered Koch's introduction to a metaphor. A child wrote "A swam of bees," instead of a "swarm." A first grader's poem...
...Koch's theories of teaching seem sound enough. He believes in taking children seriously as poets, yet removing some of the aura of difficulty and remoteness surrounding poetry. He wants the atmosphere to be fun, would never assign 'homework.' From his experience at PS 61 he concluded that children enjoy writing poetry "because it provides welcome relief from required subjects." Because it is a group-activity it "belies self-consciousness or self-doubt." And he believes it to be "competitive in a mild and exhilarating way." Koch thinks that a teacher can overcome a child's fear of writing...