Gawd I want to teach poetry

Whoever said that teachers don’t work in the summer, doesn’t get it.

Summer is when I reflect and wallow in the shortcomings of the work that I’ve done

and if I reached my intended goals with students.

This year

I was blessed with

a glorious creative writing class

that was entirely online

and yet

….my students strolled in lazily to my online class time half-awake and questioning the world in their maddening way endlessly consumed with the minutiae of their social media accounts and the crisis in the world outside and….

NOT poetry.

I really wanted to teach them poetry.

And they asked the same questions over and over of me:

What’s right and what’s wrong?

How do I know when it’s good?
How do I know if I’m good?

And most infuriating of all:

How do I get an A?

They balked against my airy fairy answers
(Why has no one ever asked them what they think before?)

They railed against my permission to let themselves breathe

And they stewed in their own despair about how to create meaning.

So I made them this: