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Only 13 days left?!??!

We're nearing the end of the semester. This means I have dozens of students asking for missing assignment reports, extra credit and desperately trying to find a book to read. Less than a 3rd of my students have accumulated enough Accelerate Reader points needed to keep their grades as is... those just barely passing will fail without those points. Now that we have 13 days left, this message is finally getting across. Of course, this also means the litany of complaints, begging, and whining... so passé. Oddly, I never got this reaction with the AR speech back in October.

I think the poetry unit is going well. We've started working on nature poetry - I'm going with themes rather than genre. It seems easier for them to grasp. Now if I could just get them to write more poetry, without massive complaints.

Today we were going through using natural metaphors and how they are used. I put up the metaphor "jewel-box of water" and asked the students to tell me what they thought it was a metaphor for... in all 5 sections at least one person suggested "clam" and "treasure chest." This provided an interesting teaching moment because when I was putting the lesson together, I never thought "clam." I had already explained that nature figures in a lot of poetry because we all experience it in some form - now we had a great example of shared local culture/experience. There are a lot of clams around here. There's a window for digging them once a month usually, and it's something they're very familiar with... but people from a non-ocean oriented area probably wouldn't have thought of the large razor clam shell and equated it with a box. Myself, I immediately of a glacial lake... but then I'm from inland areas where glacial lakes are more common that razor clams.

Poems used today -

Moon Tiger, Denise Levertov. It's an extended metaphor that is pretty easy for students to understand.

The Road Not Taken, Robert Frost. Apparently this is memorized in middle school, but surprisingly, they still had to really look at it to interpret the author's tone, theme or meaning. I had a hard time convincing several of the freshman that the regret expressed isn't wholly negative.

I wish I could teach a class on poetry.

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