Introduction
The following is an excerpt from a poem that I wrote after I heard that someone's opinion of me was that I was just a teacher. I had never felt so insulted. Almost without thinking, I began to write these words:
He is just a teacher.
Just a teacher.
Just.
Un hombre who gives his vida for the students who fight him.
He runs into fights con punos de amor y kindness.
Writing and reciting it to some friends was very therapeutic. I no longer felt anger and was proud, not just of my poem but of being a teacher. I didn't realize what I was doing with the poem and the words before I participated in Playing with Poems with the Yale National Initiative. I was playing with the word "just." It was used to describe my profession in a derogatory way, yet I took the same word and made it into something positive. The poem took away the power from someone else and gave it back to me. Poetry, and particularly for the sake of this unit, Spoken Word does this frequently.
In today's society, teachers are always under scrutiny. Changing standards and goals, a widening education gap, and issues of teacher salary, have saturated many conversations and have led certain people to not have positive views on teachers in general, especially teachers in an urban setting. In writing the poem I vindicated myself and no longer needed to defend myself or my profession to this person or anyone else. On tough days in the classroom I tend to refer back to my poem to recharge myself.
I was never much into poetry. Most poems I studied in High School just didn't speak to me. Sonnets, haikus, and iambic pentameter never seemed too interesting to me. Last year, I came a across a video called "Til This Day" by Shane Koyczan. It's a poem that he wrote and made a video for about his childhood and how he was bullied in school. It was very touching and I loved the way it sounded. The way Mr. Koyczan read the poem made it come to life. 1}He sped up and slowed down and changed his inflection, bringing out more meaning from the words than I would have gotten from reading them on the page.
I did some searching and found more of his poems and loved them all. As I continued reading and searching, I fell upon some Spoken Word videos. As soon as I saw the first one, I began thinking of the students from my school, if only because many popular Spoken Word Poets are African American while Mr. Koyczan is white. The general theme of most poems involved the struggles of urban living, race, and sexuality. These themes are the exact things that so many of my students struggle with. They don't get many opportunities to talk about them and express them in a positive and healthy way. "I wish I could spend some time doing this kind of stuff with my Spanish students," I thought to myself. The Spanish curriculum in New Haven is very structured and does not allow for much variation. Moreover the content and vocabulary in Spoken Word poetry are always complex, too complex to do in Spanish for Spanish learners. So, in order to incorporate Spoken Word poetry in my classroom, I realized I would have to make some adjustments.
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