Today’s post is by guest author Valerie A. Person. In her 25th year at Currituck County High School, Valerie teaches honors and academic English II as well as AP Literature and Composition. She agrees passionately with Virginia Woolf’s “teaching without zest is a crime,” striving to find engaging and meaningful ways for her students to learn.
One of the tenets of AP Literature and Composition is helping students recognize, understand and explain complexity in literature. Students often hear me instruct them to “peel that onion, baby. Peel it.” With poetry playing a prominent role on the AP exam, I’ve found myself revising my lessons for sophomores, scaffolding for them to do more work with abstraction, particularly as it features in poetry. Get comfortable in the gray, folks. In this journey to guide students to move from the unknown to the known, I find using concrete, hands-on lessons to illustrate that gray provides tremendous benefits for students.
Exploring complexity, students track tone shifts in poetry and pull from their tone vocabulary to name the tones and justify them with textual evidence.
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When I was in high school, I distinctly remember reading and learning poetry–and I hated it. This may surprise my students today because I talk about poetry with such love and passion, but it wasn’t always like that. It was evident that my students typically felt similarly about poetry: it was old, it was boring, it was confusing, not relatable. And when we look at the poets that mainstream curriculum or the canon really values, it’s not surprising why. The famous Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, W.B. Yeats, William Shakespeare, Percy Bysshe Shelley and the other poets that dominate our textbooks are overwhelmingly white, male, straight, and for lack of a more graceful word, dead. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying we shouldn’t teach these poets, I personally 
February is always the time of the year that my students’ energy starts to fade. There is something about the long winters, when the sun goes down early that tends to take a toll on all of us slogging through another school year. I usually save this activity for just these times, because it has been a sure fire way to not only increase my students’ morale and give them some seeds for writing, but it’s also is a great way to continue building a community of learners. This year, I added two spoken word poems by Phil Kaye to add another layer to this lesson, and I was really happy with the way it worked out.
In an effort to provide my Creative Writing students with a culminating project for our poetry unit that gave students choice and voice, I had them create poetry zines.