Author: #TeachLivingPoets
TeachLivingPoets Distance Learning Project
Today’s distance learning project post is by Brian Hannon, who teaches AP Language and Composition, AP Literature and Composition, and English 11 at Hayfield Secondary School in Alexandria, Virginia. Outside of school, Brian currently serves as the Youth and Education Development Fellow at the Washington D.C. non-profit poetry organization, Split This Rock. He also works part-time for the Ultimate Fighting Championship and as a Muay Thai instructor. In 2018, Brian was a finalist for Fairfax County Public Schools Teacher of the Year and was his conference’s Coach of the Year for Hayfield’s Varsity Tennis Team.
Since we’re stuck at home and have been directed to create lessons that students can complete remotely, I’m sure that many of you feel a bit of pressure to come up with engaging, meaningful lessons that don’t require TOO much oversight from yourselves. I, too, am in that boat, so I just wanted to share an assignment that worked well for me and my students, one that they were able to complete independently. In retrospect, I wish I had assigned this lesson AFTER the closure of school, but I don’t think anybody was prescient enough to predict the pandemic that we now find ourselves in! Continue reading
Distance Learning Podcast Unit
I love making podcasts with my students, so I modified my podcast unit to distance learning needs. Using this hyperdoc, students are walked through a step-by-step process that ends in the final product of creating their own podcast episode.
What the unit includes:
A fully functional hyperdoc you can share with your students and have them complete independently from home (a device and internet connection is needed). Just make a copy and change the due dates to suit your needs.
Mentor text podcast episodes with guiding questions for students to consider Continue reading
Snapshots of the Past with Natasha Trethewey
This is the seventh installment in a series at #TeachLivingPoets. The Poet Laureate Project features a different U.S. Poet Laureate each month during the 2019-2020 school year. Guest author Ann Cox highlights one or two of their poems, suggests activities to use these pieces in the classroom, and touches upon their contributions to the promotion of poetry in America. Ann Cox has over 20 years of experience teaching high school English, including AP Lit, Creative Writing, and Speech. She also spent several years as a teacher consultant for the Illinois State Writing Project.
This month’s featured poet is Natasha Trethewey, who served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 2012-2014. Her honors include a Pulitzer Prize, fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, and inductions into the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the Georgia Writers Hall of Fame.
Trethewey focuses on both the personal and the historical in her work. Academy of American Poets Chancellor Marilyn Nelson said, “Natasha Trethewey’s poems plumb personal and national history to meditate on the conundrum of American racial identities…Trethewey encourages us to reflect [and] learn….” I’ve chosen her poem “History Lesson” to showcase how artfully she blends the personal with the historical. Continue reading
#TeachLivingPoets Slow Chat 2/25
Connect your students with other classes nationwide to learn together and discuss a poem by former US Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera. Here’s what you need to know to make it happen:
When: Tuesday, Feb. 25
Start time: 8am EST / 7am CST
Moderator: @MelAlterSmith Continue reading
A Declaration in Poetry with Tracy K. Smith
This is the sixth installment in a series at #TeachLivingPoets. The Poet Laureate Project features a different U.S. Poet Laureate each month during the 2019-2020 school year. Guest author Ann Cox highlights one or two of their poems, suggests activities to use these pieces in the classroom, and touches upon their contributions to the promotion of poetry in America. Ann Cox has over 20 years of experience teaching high school English, including AP Lit, Creative Writing, and Speech. She also spent several years as a teacher consultant for the Illinois State Writing Project.
This month’s featured poet is Pulitzer-Prize winner Tracy K. Smith, who served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 2017-2019. She is the director of the Creative Writing program at Princeton University and the host of American Public Media’s daily radio program and podcast The Slowdown. Continue reading
Celebrate Black Poets
To celebrate Black History Month, I start class off everyday with a poem by a Black poet. Here’s my Playlist if you want to use it in your classroom. Sometimes we talk about the poem afterwards, sometimes we free-write or journal, sometimes we just let the poem be. It depends on the poem and our agenda for the day. This list is nowhere near complete, and I encourage you to discover and share more Black artists who will resonate with your students. If you aren’t doing anything yet to honor Black History Month in your class, you should be, and it’s not too late to start.
Crossing Borders with Juan Felipe Herrera
This is the fifth installment in a series at #TeachLivingPoets. The Poet Laureate Project features a different U.S. Poet Laureate each month during the 2019-2020 school year. Guest author Ann Cox highlights one or two of their poems, suggests activities to use these pieces in the classroom, and touches upon their contributions to the promotion of poetry in 
America. Ann Cox has over 20 years of experience teaching high school English, including AP Lit, Creative Writing, and Speech. She also spent several years as a teacher consultant for the Illinois State Writing Project.
This month’s featured poet is Juan Felipe Herrera, who served as Poet Laureate from 2015-2016 and was the first Latino to hold this position. In addition to poetry, Herrera has also written children’s literature and young adult novels. He has won numerous awards for his work. Continue reading
Burning the Old Year
Today’s post is by guest author Jessica Salfia. Jessica is the Co-Director of WVCTE and a teacher, writer, and activist. Her writing has appeared in the Charleston-Gazette Mail, West Virginia Living Magazine’s Blog, the WVCTE Best Practices Blog, and multiple volumes of the Anthology of Appalachian Writers. She was the winner of 2016 and 2019 West Virginia Fiction Competition and recently had her poem, Rootbound, selected for the 2018-2019 Woman of Appalachia Project. She is the co-editor of the book 55 Strong: Inside the West Virginia Teachers’ Strike out now from Belt Publishing. Jessica currently is a teacher at Spring Mills High School in Martinsburg, West Virginia where she teaches AP Language and Creative Writing and advises the Multicultural Club and the Literary and Art magazine. When she’s not teaching, writing, or advocating for West Virginia and public education, you’ll find her in the woods with her three kids or paddling down a creek somewhere.
For many of us, the New Year is a chance to start over and begin again—a fresh slate, an empty notebook of pages yet unwritten. For our students it is no different. They return to our classrooms after winter break looking forward to new classes and a fresh start.
In my Creative Writing class at Spring Mills High School in Martinsburg, West Virginia we begin the New Year by “burning” the old one using Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem, Burning the Old Year, as a mentor text for thinking and writing. Continue reading
Louise Glück: Making the Ancient New Again
This is the fourth installment in a series at #TeachLivingPoets. The Poet Laureate Project features a different U.S. Poet Laureate each month during the 2019-2020 school year. Guest author Ann Cox highlights one or two of their poems, suggests activities to use these pieces in the classroom, and touches upon their contributions to the promotion of poetry in America. Ann Cox has over 20 years of experience teaching high school English, including AP Lit, Creative Writing, and Speech. She also spent several years as a teacher consultant for the Illinois State Writing Project.
This month’s featured Poet Laureate is Louise Glück, who served as Poet Laureate from 2003-2004. Some of her many honors include a National Book Award, a Pulitzer Prize, and a Gold Medal for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
