Consider Yourself Lucky with Poetry

Poet Geof Hewitt facilitated our session today, bringing an end to the fourth annual Rail City Writing Workshop at BFA in St. Albans. Geof knows how to connect with teenagers in a way that I admire and respect. He had them laughing, crying and performing their poems in a culminating poetry slam at the end of the day. If you get a chance to bring Geof to your school, do it: http://www.discover-writing.com/speakers.html His books are a terrific resource for any language arts teacher, K-12: http://www.amazon.com/Hewitts-Guide-Slam-Poetry-DVD/dp/1931492093 and http://www.ruralpoetry.org/site/c.jkIZLdMPJrE/b.1827301/k.ECD6/Resources.htm

In any of his workshops, Geof gets his students writing and writing fast. He is a believer in the seven-minute free-write, a strategy I use all the time. While this isn't anything new for teachers of writing--many thanks to Peter Elbow--Geof always reminds me about the effectiveness of free-writing. He sometimes gets kids to see it as a competition, to see who can write the longest entry, all in an effort to wave the brain good-bye and just write, crank it out.

One of the three prompts Geof used this morning was "Consider yourself lucky..." It worked well. Another was "Flying over my childhood home..." Some of the writing from these prompts was downright beautiful. What makes a good writing prompt? The one that gets the students to write, obviously. I know there are websites out there with collections of writing prompts, so we can all Google them at any time, but let's talk about prompts that really work. Having said that, we can't always rely on the prompt. We have to make free-writing a habit that kids don't question. We serve them by letting them see that they will throw away more than half of everything they write. Geof maintains that he uses only about five percent of writes in his journals. Let's get those young writers generating text, then we can worry about having them DRAFT THE ESSAY.