Benton and Haughton Curate Student Literary Journal

Laura Benton, English Teacher
Third-Year Bread Loaf Student (funded by the C. E. and S. Foundation)
Woodford County High School
http://www.woodford.kyschools.us/1/Home

Matthew Haughton, English Teacher
Second-Year Bread Loaf Student (funded by the C. E. and S. Foundation)
West Jessamine High School
http://www.jessamine.k12.ky.us/2/Home

BLTN Project website: www.westwoodlitmag.com

What is the Story: Building a Bridge Through Literary Production

In her poem, “Walnut Tree,” high school student Sara Zaccarelli declares, “What a great day it is to live.” Over the course of the 2014-15 school year, Ms. Zaccarelli saw her poem published. By the end of the school year, the poem had been read more times (by a diversity of readers) than any student could hope for. Sara never considered herself a poet. For that matter, she never considered English to be a favorite subject. All the same, one fall day in early October, she was asked to read Emily Dickinson and create something of her own with a similar tone. The poem encouraged the student to consider personification, onomatopoeia, and rhyme scheme. A few weeks later that same poem was juried by peers of her own age from a different high school. Soon after that, her teacher let her know that her poem would feature in the first ever, digital literary magazine of her school. All of a sudden, she was a published poet. When the poem finally appeared on her cellphone, her eyes shined.

In summer 2014, BLTN Kentucky Fellows Laura Benton and Matthew Haughton outlined their plans to launch a collaborative literary journal to bridge their schools’ creative authors. The idea was to allow students to have their work blended together with peers from both communities. They wanted to see their students learn from each other by promoting community awareness through creative writing. While Woodford High had a tradition for promoting creative writing, West Jessamine had never offered a creative writing course or produced a literary journal in its long history. The hope was to use one school’s zeal to encourage the other’s.

After a lot of student-led conceptualization, WestWoodlitmag.com was launched. The magazine was juried, maintained, promoted, and designed by students. Its contents make up the “cream of the crop” of student writing from both schools. For Woodford, many students saw their work go into print after years of developing their literary voices. For Jessamine, many students, often categorized as “gap students,” saw their work taken seriously in a format that honored authentic effort. Through promotion (in both social media and by word of mouth) all the student writers began to get attention for their work.

Teachers within both English departments used the website as a way of encouraging students to evaluate and reflect on creative writing. After reading Sofia Shultz’s poem “Cosmos,” one student stated in his reflective essay: “This poem is extremely unique and amazing. The diction she uses takes my mind and makes it flow along with the poem itself. The descriptions of the starry night sky create many images within my mind. It makes me feel the quiet and calmness . . . this author has created one of the best poems I have read to this day.” Suddenly, students began to use literary terms they learned in English class to express why a poem caught their attention. Perhaps for the first time, these terms became an active part of their vocabulary. They were learning to look for why something is literary.

It quickly became clear that WestWood could do more than just promote fiction and poetry. Almost immediately both schools began to cultivate student artwork, media, and photography. This again expanded the vitality of the website while broadening the readership. Digging into the the theme of “home,” various student artists were allowed to bridge a greater conversation about what home means (be it geographical, metaphorical, or spiritual).

As a way of truly challenging what “just a high school literary journal” can do, it was decided that the website should have a special, spotlight issue featuring the work of international student writers. Ms. Benton and Mr. Haughton worked with fellow Bread Loaf student Chantal Kenol to bring this idea to life. Kenol asked students from her two schools in Haiti (The Bridge Academy and College Classique Feminin) to submit prose, poetry, art, and media that explore the theme “The Many Faces of Home.” Back in Kentucky, students selected and edited the pieces from their international peers, creating the spotlight issue of Westwood. This allowed students to act as both artists and editors throughout the project. In the end, the Kentucky students were shocked at how similar home is, regardless of where you have grown up.

The aftereffect of WestWood has been profound. Next year, Mr. Haughton will instruct two sections of the school’s first ever creative writing course. He hopes to build the program into an educational pathway within the curriculum to bring his students’ work to even greater levels of success. Ms. Benton’s class has been personally congratulated and celebrated by the Woodford County superintendent and central office staff. They have eagerly asked her to continue the WestWood project in her elective class. In April, Kendall Johnson, a senior WestWood editor, writer, and media contributor, won first place at the Student Technology Leadership Conference for her multimedia poem “Home.” Additionally, five senior students have been given credit for an independent study course so they can continue working on WestWood during the next school year.

Most importantly, all of the participating WestWood students have learned so much about writing, editing, art, technology, and the importance of an inclusive worldview. The inspiration for the literary magazine came from the classes and community at Bread Loaf. Without the Bread Loaf Teacher Network, these ideas would not have taken off and given public school students the opportunity to creatively engage with their own literacy. In the next year, Mr. Haughton and Ms. Benton will continue their sponsorship of WestWood. It is their intention to open submissions to additional schools and international exchanges.

Student Video on the creation of WestWood.

Selected Work Samples

• Poetry Piece (West Jessamine Student, Sofia Schultz)
  http://www.westwoodlitmag.com/#!cosmos/c4d5
• Poetry Piece (West Jessamine Student, Sara Zaccarelli)
  http://www.westwoodlitmag.com/#!walnut-tree/c1afv
• Prose Piece (Woodford County student, Duyun Tan)
  http://www.westwoodlitmag.com/#!appalachian-taoism/c805
• Spotlight Issue Poetry Piece (Bridge Academy student, Arielle C)
  http://www.westwoodlitmag.com/#!nightsky/c1i8k
• Spotlight Issue Photography Piece (Bridge Academy student, Arielle C)
  http://www.westwoodlitmag.com/#!/zoom/c4to/image_6p1
• Spotlight Issue Prose Piece (CCF school student, Kenny L)
  http://www.westwoodlitmag.com/#!life/c29z
• Spotlight Issue Media/Video Piece (Daryl Roc, Bridge Academy student)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMkIsdz3veA
• Film/Media Poem Piece (Kendall Johnson, Woodford County student)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vc_6QJpYokU
• Photography Piece (Hanna Carr, Woodford county high school student)
  http://www.westwoodlitmag.com/#!portfolio/zoom/c2i1/i291
• Art Piece (Janet Dake, Woodford County high school student)
  http://www.westwoodlitmag.com/#!IMG_0792.JPG/zoom/c164b/i0ete
• Poster Design (Isabel Brinegar, Woodford County high school student)
  http://www.westwoodlitmag.com/#!posters/zoom/c1f6y/i5yp3

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Crombie Coaches for Teacher Leadership

Kriston Crombie, English Teacher and State (OH) Coach
MA ’15
Eastmoor Academy High School
Columbus, OH
http://eastmoorhs.ccsoh.us/

During the 2014-15 school year, I moved from two years in a district office job to an inner city English classroom (which I love) with 140 freshmen and seniors. I’ve taken office as one of ten state district presidents serving the Ohio Education Association, and I began a three-year commitment as a state coach with the Teacher Leadership Initiative (TLI), a pilot project charged with building teacher leaders that joins the forces of the National Education Association (NEA), the Center for Teaching Quality (CTQ), and the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS).

As a state coach, I am responsible for overseeing a cohort of about 30 Ohio teachers who applied for and were selected to participate in a pilot program designed to increase the leadership capacity of teachers at the building level, the association level, and the policy level. Essentially, the program is designed to help teachers who are already classroom leaders to expand their role as leaders within all areas of the profession from local building to state and national policy.

This past autumn and for the next two, I have helped and will continue to help lead new cohorts of about 30 teachers each (for a total of 90) through a curriculum focusing on instructing teachers about assuming the mantle of teacher-leader, helping them to develop a Capstone Project, and assisting them with the development of their Capstone. Finally, we will help them find the appropriate audience for their Capstone Project where they can present their project and eventually bring about positive change within the profession and take back educational innovation from those who seek to exploit teachers and students for financial gain.

Interestingly, my online collaborations through the years with Bread Loaf have served as a sort of model for the CTQ “Collaboratory” where TLI members post and share their work. In fact, every member of the year one cohort was responsible for leading several online discussions within the collaboratory as well as responding to others’ posts. This type of work comes rather easily since we’ve been doing similar posts and online collaborations since the early 2000s. Likewise, there are similar cohorts around the country, including Hawaii, Las Vegas (a local rather than a state), Mississippi, Wisconsin, Ohio, Massachusetts, etc.

During early autumn, I help lead weekly webinars with the other state and local cohorts where we review the weekly lessons and then share our personal stories with each other as we seek to build and share knowledge. As the webinar progresses, sidebar, online conversations between participants occur that help to foster a sense of online community and will eventually lead to further collaboration regardless of geographic location.

In a similar vein, I also lead smaller breakout sessions with another online meeting tool called Zoom where about ten of the participants who share similar Capstone pathways (either building level, association level, or policy level leadership) work together as they finalize their research and background work of the project. Zoom is a great tool that is free for the first 45 minutes. I just send two links to everyone, and we have a one-and-a-half hour meeting in two 45 minute increments where everyone can see and hear each other via computer camera as we share ideas, etc.

While most of the work is completed online, we have held three face-to-face meetings where the entire cohort met and received additional instructions and continued their forged collaborations using online collaborative tools. I have to say, that as the year one cohort winds down and the Capstone Projects begin to take shape (They are to be submitted for review August 31, 2015.), I am stunned by the depth and breadth of the ideas that this pilot project has yielded. So far, we have had a teacher already complete a section of her Capstone by speaking to the local school board to have three records days added to the contract so that teachers could end each grading period with a workday. When presented to our school board, they agreed, and it was eventually made a part of successful contract negotiations.

Another teacher is working on a plan for an entirely teacher-led school without administrators and has received a workday to visit a similar school in Cincinnati where she learned information that she didn’t even think about until presented with it.

All in all, the project has been a great success, and I look forward to continuing my work over the next two years. I believe that it is imperative that educators take back our profession from the special interest groups and multinational conglomerates that seek to profit from us. Only teachers and other committed educators know what is necessary to bring positive change to our profession without exploiting our students in the process.

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Kramer and Lawler Create Cross-Classroom Drama Contest

Matthew Kramer, English Teacher
Third-Year Bread Loaf Student (funded by the C. E. and S. Foundation)
Tates Creek High School
Lexington, KY
www.tchs.fcps.net

When I found out that I had been admitted to the Oxford campus for the 2014 Bread Loaf summer session, I felt almost obligated to take a course on Shakespeare, but I didn’t want to limit myself to a single playwright (even if he is largely considered the best writer of the English language who ever lived). Dr. Lars Engle’s course Shakespeare & Co. provided me with the perfect outlet for my predicament. In this course, we studied a number of plays by Shakespeare, but we were also introduced to the works of a number of his contemporaries, including Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, and Thomas Middleton.

One of the requirements of the course (unbeknownst to me before I signed up) was to memorize, plan, rehearse, and re-enact a scene from one of the plays that we had to read for the course. Having little to no acting experience, I had no immediate desire to memorize over 100 lines of text, nor did I have the desire to perform in front of my classmates, but, as is the case with nearly every Bread Loaf assignment, it turned out to be one of the most rewarding experiences of my school career.

As I sat down to memorize lines, I began to feel a deeper understanding of the character I was assigned to portray. As we began to plan our scene, I found myself trying to tap into the emotions of the character, determining which lines to emphasize and what hand gestures to make. By the end of the summer, I felt a real connection with the character almost as if we had been through something together, and I had gained a much deeper appreciation for not only the plays that we read but also the actors whose task it was to portray the vast array of characters that we had all grown to love. It was this deeper understanding and appreciation that I wanted to extend to my students. As a result, my collaboration was born.

I began to ask around campus for teachers who had experience with facilitating drama performances in their classroom, and it did not take me long to fine one. Michael Lawler was also a third-year Bread Loaf student, teaching English at St. Sebastian’s School in Needham, Massachusetts. Mike explained to me that each year he asks the students from each of his English classes to memorize, plan, rehearse, and re-enact a scene from one of the plays that they read in class. After we discussed in depth his strategies for implementing this type of activity in a high school classroom, we came up with the idea to try a cross-school drama competition in which students from each school would memorize, plan, rehearse, and re-enact a scene from one of the plays that we read in class. Mike and I both videotaped our students’ performances and sent them to each other, and the deliberation began.

My students expressed that they greatly enjoyed watching the students from St. Sebastian’s perform their scenes. The exchange opened our minds to a variety of plays that we had not read. Mike’s students had similar sentiments. We have decided that we are going to try a similar collaboration next year.

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Whitman Takes Texts to the Stage

Bringing Words Alive: Learning to Inspire Pride, Grace, and Connection through Performance

Nell Whitman
Fourth-Year Bread Loaf Student (funded by the C. E. and S. Foundation)
Henry Clay High School
Lexington, KY
http://blogs.fcps.net/nwhitman/

A few years ago, when a vivacious student, Adrienne, asked if we could please get up and perform the last scene from Importance of Being Earnest, I was flooded with remorse. Though an admirer of the theater, I was only comfortable when the fourth wall firmly divided me from those brazen thespians. But my personal inhibitions were making me Holden Caulfield’s worst kind of phony when it came to teaching dramatic literature. I realized with horror that I had been holding words—not to mention my students—hostage in the very seats of my classroom. I imagined the ghost of Oscar Wilde sweeping past me dismissively in his purple cape, quivering with indignation. It was time to set his words and my students free.

The BLTN gave me the tools to begin. During my first exchange with Bread Loafer Kate Lembo, she and I asked our students to respond to each other’s blog posts on humor, followed by a classroom reading of The Importance of Being Earnest. I found that my students, accustomed to satirical news and parody, fell in love with Oscar Wilde’s humor quickly. Taking it from the page to the stage, however, was another challenge entirely. Live performances cannot be deleted or revised, unlike the personal dramas we create on SnapChat and Twitter. With playbook in hand and a single prop, our students mustered the courage to perform and film scenes from Earnest to send to our exchange partners.

Following that experiment, my study of a dozen live performances in Page to Stage to Page with Michael Cadden at Bread Loaf Oxford vastly increased my knowledge, my courage, and my expectations. I moved my AP Lit syllabus around to include a Shakespeare play that we could see performed live. After reading in small groups and creating tableaux vivants, my students were engaged in and appreciative of the production of Macbeth. To encourage them to engage in the world of language arts outside the classroom, I asked each student to attend another play or poetry slam each semester and write a performance review, weighing in on the techniques the performers used to bring words to center stage. When the time came to teach Earnest this spring, I upped the ante and asked my students to memorize and perform a brief scene under the stage lights of our theater. For many of my high achieving seniors, it was their first time on stage since primary school.

One of my most reserved students surprised us by breaking out a spot on British accent. Another group had us in stitches when the butler called for the dogcart, and they wheeled in a small wagon whose passenger was a well-loved, stuffed dog. After the performance, many read aloud their blog posts on Earnest and contemporary comedy. They linked and described hilarious parodies and their world of online humor, learning to articulate what makes them laugh (See sample work at http://2014aplit3rd.blogspot.com and http://2014aplit4th.blogspot.com). What could be a more vital life skill? We followed up performance day with a tea party. From the boxes in the basement, I pulled three enormous, lacy tablecloths, and I invited all 33 performers for tea, scones, and the much coveted cucumber sandwiches around the communal tea table. One of my students brought his favorite tea from his home in Iran and brewed it to perfection. Another student held his tea cup delicately, swearing that it was the fanciest party he had ever attended. Our celebration even earned a full-page spread in the yearbook.

Gaining confidence and conviction from these modest successes, I decided to improve my freshmen’s engagement with Romeo and Juliet. As they, too, had seen Macbeth in the fall, all my freshmen had a common experience of live theater. Forming acting companies during our study of Romeo and Juliet, my students created director’s notebooks based on those I saw in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London last summer. The students were invited to choose an interpretation for their production, spurring the fight scene between the Montagues and the Capulets in the style of the greasers and the socs from The Outsiders, a scene between Juliet and Nurse with Twenties era music and costumes, and even a zombie scene complete with tombstones. After I suggested that we invite parents to the evening production, for a few days, I feared mutiny. We struggled to memorize the complex language through gesture and to incorporate some staging. When the evening of the performance came, I was so nervous about the outcome that I decided to conduct a choral reading of the prologue with the audience, lest I forget my lines.

My students stepped up and offered performances that were at times wobbly, at times astounding, and always courageous. The following day, they wrote about what they had learned. “That memorizing lines is harder than you think.” “I learned about projection and movement.” “I know so much more about Shakespeare’s culture and language.” “I learned how to bring words alive.” And most delightfully, “I learned that Emmanuel looks pretty good in plaid and khakis.” What were they proud of? “I’m proud of my group’s teamwork and hard work, and I’m proud that we all had fun.” “I grew as a person by being able to stand in front of a live audience and speak.” “I went out with pride and performed gracefully.” A few days later, the students voted on and awarded “Henries” (after Henry Clay for whom our school is named). Though they recognized the most successful performances, I think it’s safe to say that we all won the prize of prizes. By participating in the performance cycle, we carved from our huge school a respectful, compassionate classroom community in which we could take risks and grow.

In honor of the current revival of The King and I, I will admit that I personally last risked an official stage performance in sixth grade, when I played one of the king’s wives—a lack of stage experience I may need to set right in my final summer at Bread Loaf. In the meantime, I am studying a book written by Kurt Wootton and Bread Loafer Eileen Landay, A Reason to Read: Linking Literacy and the Arts. Based on 20 years of working with the performance cycle, Landay’s methods invite students to respond in writing to a text studied in community with the end of creating a communal performance. Rather than asking students to write and respond to literature out of thin air, the authors share strategies teachers can use to create “thick air” that nurtures genuine responses to literature (73). Next year I intend to try some of the suggested strategies—such as turning a line, call and response (132-3), and character journeys—to build community early on. Ultimately, I hope to incorporate our scene performances into a performance written and designed by students. Who knows, they might even persuade me to perform with them!

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Kénol Desmornes Takes Bread Loaf Back to Port au Prince

Chantal Kénol Desmornes
Collège Classique Féminin/Bridge Academy
Port au Prince, Haiti
MA ’15

This summer I took Professor Nash’s Reading America class and Professor Shoulson’s Reading Poetry class. The Reading America course was an eye-opener for me. We read diverse voices, most of whom were writers of color, recounting the experiences of displaced or marginalized people in America. I learned that stories can help heal the wounds of history. I learned that voicing our silence is a very powerful tool and, as a Haitian writer, I feel more and more inclined to write about and for the many who can’t. I also learned how to facilitate discussions about a text, how to raise the difficult, yet necessary questions about difference, prejudice, and inequality for meaningful conversation to occur within and beyond the classroom.

In the Reading Poetry course, besides being moved by the powerful and diverse works of poetry we read throughout the summer, I was astonished by the range of methods and strategies my fellow students used to teach a poem as part as the course assignments. They used drawing, tableaus, acting, sensory experiences, and many other tools to help us access the meaning, tone, and theme of the poems we read. I will be sure to use as many of those tools as I can in my classroom.

One of the most important things I learned in both of those courses is how to make any material relevant to my students. In the Reading America course, conversations about prejudice, silence, oppression, and discrimination would readily arise after reading the texts. In Reading Poetry, I came across a poem entitled “Parsley” by Rita Dove, an African-American poet, about the 1937 massacre of Haitian migrant workers in the Dominican Republic. I chose to write my final essay on that poem, and I intend to read it and discuss it with my students in the fall. I feel that it could be a very effective way to start a critical discussion with them about the current immigration issue between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. For too long now, school and life have been kept separate. The time has come for me as an educator to try to bridge that gap, help students make sense of the world they live in, and hopefully enable them to inform their reality and shape their future.

This summer, even though I graduated from the Bread Loaf School of English, I have made a commitment to be part of an action-research project on water. I like this project because of its potential to engage many subjects of the Haitian school curriculum while addressing a crucial issue of our milieu. I already see the project lending itself readily to topics in social studies, natural science, physics and chemistry, literature and writing, and many more. We discussed that our findings should be shared not only in English but in as many languages as are spoken by the participating students.

I plan to invite students from grades 10 to 13 as well as their teachers in related topics. The most difficult thing I anticipate will be for teachers to understand that students should be at the center of the project and that the teachers should only serve as guides. I’ll spend part of my teacher-development session at the beginning of the school year explaining the rationale and nuts and bolts of the project. The end product will be ideally a comprehensive document that will present the results of student-conducted research to the private or state institutions that will have been targeted. Haitian students will also be active participants in the online conversations that are sure to occur on the digital platform that will have been set up for the project; students will share their findings with and respond to input by other participants from around the world. Students will receive academic credit for participating in this project.

On our end, the project will be launched with the reading of the most famous Haitian “water story,” Gouverneurs de la Rosée. In case other participants are interested in reading that novel as well, this book is available online in English translation under the title Masters of the Dew. The first Langston Hughes/Mercer Cook translation can be downloaded for free at https://www.educavision.com/downloads/csp8490sample.pdf

A more recent—and better translation—by Mercer Cook can be purchased online at the following link.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/99052.Masters_of_the_Dew

I would also like to try doing food literacy for the same reason that it involves many subject areas and can bring together topics that are often separated. It also lends itself very smoothly to reflection, research, and action. This path is a risky one for me since my students are likely to call me out, as a school administrator, on what we have been serving at the school’s cafeteria. More seriously, though, it may very well change the way that we all view the things that we eat, and that is sure to have an impact in both the school and the households. Brent Peters has proposed to set up a blog for our respective students to exchange on food-related topics and experiences.

My biggest challenges in making these projects possible during the school year are technology access and sustainability. This is going to be a challenge for me insofar as I can’t be the one planning the projects from beginning to end. I just have to make sure students continue to be stimulated and encouraged to formulate their questions, that they are given the necessary guidance to seek their answers so they can inform their minds and opinions about the economics and politics regarding water, food, and other societal issues in our country and elsewhere in the world.

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Lynch Reflects on Bread Loaf Magic

Eloise Lynch, AP Language and Composition and American Literature Teacher
George Rogers Clark High School
Winchester, KY
Bread Loaf Summers 2013, 2014 (funded by the C. E. and S. Foundation)

My first semester of Bread Loaf—its courses, its community, and . . . yes, it cannot be avoided . . . its magic—helped me find the words needed to articulate a question central to my developing teacher soul: How do I navigate the “tension between what we must teach (what is core and necessarily tested and sometimes what our districts demand, pink slip in hand) and what we must teach (what we undeniably know is important to the social and emotional development and preparation of young people, though it may not yet be fully appreciated by wider school communities)?” Finding this question, alone, was transformative, for it gave me the means to unpack, analyze, and understand a challenging first year of teaching populated by both successes and failures (guess which I felt most strongly) and complicated by competing desires—to teach literature, to help students feel the human experience more deeply, to equip them with essential skills . . . to please the administration, to improve test scores, to stick around. The question wove for me a protective summer chrysalis within which I could reflect quietly and honestly and earnestly about how to do more good as a teacher.

And Bread Loaf— its courses, its community, and . . . yes, it cannot be avoided . . . its magic—also helped me emerge from this chrysalis transformed—at least somewhat more beautiful. Because when I found this question, I started to ask it out loud (of myself, of my instructors, of my peers), and I started to receive and develop real answers. You can satisfy district and humanitarian demands; you can stick to the script and tell the story a brand new way ; growth goal data and student enjoyment can correlate. All you need is innovative courses that will challenge you to approach English Language Arts differently; all you need is a community of colleagues and mentors who support and inspire ambitious ideas—who counter your “this is insane, but what if we . . . ?” with “think bigger . . . how about we . . .” ; all you need is a little Bread Loaf magic.

Here’s what one summer’s worth of magic did in my classroom:

• I’ve asked students to use vine videos, memes, and social media to access ELA concepts. For example, when exploring rhetorical appeals and persuasion, student groups created campaign videos relying on the appeals and used “likes” to vote for the most convincing. Students used twitter to make connections between a very familiar, multimodal way of sharing emotions and ideas in digital networks and the (less comprehensible) literary allusion.
• I created screen capture videos to flip ACT instruction.
• Courses in general and specific assignments featured far more teacher and student technology use (thank you, Digital Literacy).

• 
• As part of my collaboration with fellow BLTNer Chris McCurry, I asked my AP Language students to create ThingLink digital posters as a means of teaching his senior AP Literature students how to use the rhetorical analysis tool SOAPSTone that we use in our own class to better understand and analyze poetry.

 

• To bring essential rhetorical and compositional skills back into focus in the last week of school, I challenged my AP Language students to create a fundraiser that addressed a real school need and to gather support for it through the development of a website, various social media pages, vine videos, posters, and more formally composed letters to teachers and community members/leaders.
• Courses in general and specific assignments emphasized the human experience, inviting students to form close ties that foster a supportive classroom community willing to take risks, communicate openly, and collaborate closely (thank you, Theater in the English Classroom)
  • Poetry Out Loud comes to mind here (I coordinate our school’s participation in the national poetry recitation competition and ask my classes to complete the program), as POL both gives a larger context to instruction and asks a level of commitment/buy-in/risk-taking that is extreme to the vast majority of teenagers. To meld students into supportive and confident members in an inquisitive community—such communities are necessary not only for the success of such adventurous programs as POL, but also learning in general—I’ve incorporated frequent activities and projects that ask students to share their experiences with one another, including one pulled directly from an activity contributed by my Bread Loaf theater classmates . . .
    • Before considering Native American folk tales, I asked students to share a story (ideally one unique to their family) that made a big impression on them when they were little, pin the story on a clothes line, and rotate around the room to sample each other’s experiences.
    • Routinely, we approach a subject or skill or assignment through personal connections.

These activities have helped my students care more about the concepts we’ve covered and have also helped my classes grow very intimate over weeks and months. This positively impacted this year’s POL program. Students committed more to feeling and communicating the emotions of their poems, aware that they belong to a supportive community. Our school champion won second place in the state competition this year!

My Bread Loaf courses and wider experiences wrought huge changes in my pedagogy and instruction, and the result has been hugely beneficial; it has already helped me do more good as a teacher. So of course we return each summer to the chrysalis, to emerge more beautiful each closing day. Of course we return to Bread Loaf— its courses, its community, and . . . yes, it cannot be avoided . . . its magic.