Narrative
Over the last several years, as a teacher of writing, I have struggled with teaching voice. I have told my students numerous times that voice is the uniqueness of the writer that shines through in each piece that the writer creates. I have had my students try to identify voice in many different pieces throughout the year and I eventually had my students try to show their voice in their writing. However, when they began writing their own pieces, they inevitably relied on the safe but bland five-paragraph essay. Their essays were well organized and tended to follow the rules of Standard Written English, but they were voiceless. When I used the term voiceless to define their essays, my students had no idea what I meant. When I tried to explain it, I usually got the deer in the headlights look from the majority of the students in my classes. I explained to them that I ended up reading sixty-five variants of the same exact essay, because they all followed the same five-paragraph outline. As a teacher of writing, I felt that in some ways I was failing my students because I could not get them to break from the security of formulaic writing.
Teaching voice had become a struggle for me, just as writing with voice had become a struggle for my students. By the middle of the school year, my teaching of writing had boiled down to two essential questions: How do I teach voice, and how can I get my students to illuminate their writing with their unique voices?
Following the advice of a colleague, I began to include poetry as part of the writing process in my classroom. I allowed the students to write a formulaic essay as well as a poetic piece about the same topic. I required the students to eventually incorporate parts of the poem into the formulaic essay. The results were quite amazing. My students' essays started to show some uniqueness. The structures of the essays were still very formulaic, but most of the students were attempting to add their own voice. Once I realized that reading and writing poetry helped my students with their school writing assignment, I began incorporating poetry into almost all of my writing units. I stopped teaching poetry as a separate unit from all of my other reading and writing units.
Once I realized that poetry had become an invaluable vessel for voice, I decided to create a unit that focused on voice and poetry. I chose the title "Crime and Poetry" for two reasons. First, I am a firm believer that teenagers need to be taught empathy, and second, it fits into my already established umbrella theme. I have found year after year that my students in particular are completely apathetic toward their fellow man. I see it in class everyday, as I walk down the hallways, and in the cafeteria. In general, my students in the career and vocational High School I teach in truly seem to care less if a classmate is hurt, either physically or emotionally. I know, it seems harsh to make such generalizations, but an air of apathy has permeated my school and continues to get worse year after year. This generalization became even more concrete when our entire faculty and staff requested that our school-wide focus for the upcoming year be centered on student behavior and attitude. Furthermore, the umbrella theme of my tenth grade English curriculum is "The Human Condition." Focusing on the oppressed point of view would certainly fall under the umbrella. This unit will become a part of the umbrella theme and will use poetry to teach voice. I chose to focus on the voice of the victim during the Holocaust and the voice of the African American during the Jim Crow Era because my students would likely be interested in and have some background regarding these two crimes against humanity. I also want my students to face the realities of evil and mortality. This may seem like a dark subject but tenth grade is really a rite of passage for most of my students. They will be receiving their driver's licenses, and most likely taking on part-time jobs. Though these crimes and topics may seem unrelated to driving and working, the fact of the matter is these students need to learn that their perceptions of reality, humanity, and mortality will directly affect their lives. My hope is that from the unit they will develop a deeper understanding of the human condition and maybe, just maybe, think about the way they treat people and possibly think about the risks that they take. I am not foolish enough to think that this unit will change all of my students into caring, empathic people, but I feel I need to expose them to these ideals before they enter the "real world." By folding these ideas into the teaching of literature, I believe I will successfully expose my students to many novel facets of the human condition.
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