Living Within Words: One Teacher's Approach to Poetry

I just finished reading "Within Words", an essay written by Michael Bazzett, a teacher in Minnesota. Bazzett's essay was the 2008 winner of the Bechtel Prize, a competition Teachers and Writers magazine holds each year to honor an extraordinary essay on teaching or writing.

Bazzett writes about his AP English class in an old ivy-covered school. In his classroom, he makes the most of a strange ceiling, beginning to cover the upper walls with words. Not just words though-- quotes. Quotes found in books, in readings the students complete. Words become places to rest your eyes and ideas to get lost in.

Throughout the essay, Bazzett tells us of three lessons he taught in his classroom-- all about poetry. One lesson deals with how poems are constructed, another with line breaks, and the third with Shakespeare's iambic pentameter. In each lesson, Bazzett breaks it down in a way that another teacher can easily recreate, but more important, he recounts these classes with joy allowing readers to see the true magic of the words. In his essay, the words come alive. One can only imagine how this firsthand learning must have affected his students.

For anyone who teaches, or anyone who writes, read this. It will change the way you think about teaching poetry.