Like many teachers, I like to begin the new school year with an icebreaker, but I don’t like to ask “so, what did you do this summer?” I am interested in everyone’s adventures, but I worry that at a school with a lot of financially privileged families, the less wealthy students will feel awkward from day one.
Moreover, the students in my senior-level honors class already know each other quite well. My goal is less of a “get-to-know- your-neighbors” and more of a “right, this is what can happen in an English classroom” moment.
So this year, I began by giving each student a list of 13 swanky words and asking them to work in pairs (we did have a few teams of three and a few lone wolves) to write a poem in 10 minutes, using all of those words. here’s the list, in case you want to play along:
- tessellation
- crystalline
- meld
- chrome
- constellation
- gargoyle
- defenestration
- opaque
- chronology
- osmosis
- warp and weft
- recursive
- obsidian
They could add as many words as they liked, alter the form of the words, turn nouns into verbs, etc. Then I asked them to select the words from the swanky list that became most significant in their poem, use that word as the title, and find an image online to illustrated the poem (this moment marked the end of technology in our classroom–from here on, we embrace the analog world).
In seconds, they were poring over dictionaries, writing original lines of poetry, twisting those lines back on themselves, (sometimes) trying to rhyme, (mostly) trying to create a tone or sound experience. Fantabulosity erupted!
“Defenestration” provoked the most startling images, from defenestrated souls to slowly defenestrated chrome-tipped gargoyles. One student even created a spoken word poem, which may show up in this blog later in the year. Here’s just one example of a full poem:
Liminal Creativity 