A Classroom Activity Outside the Classroom

Senioritis is real. I have seen it (and am currently still dealing with it – for five more days). When teaching a writing course that requires students to invest time, thought, energy and effort into producing written work, senioritis is not something that one typically willing invites into the room. Nevertheless, like dust bunnies, it is there and must be dealt with.

Second semester seniors tend to regress academically and socially to assume their former lives as elementary school students. The descent is slow at first, as if they don’t even realize it is happening. But as May unfolds and the countdown of days moves closer to single digits, their intellectual decline picks up speed assuming the velocity of a runaway roller coaster. Some apologize for fear that I might think less of them. Others embrace it unabashedly and devise elaborate schemes for pranks, engage in mindless games of “Senior Tag”, involving water guns and nakedness, or simply stare blankly out of the window. To combat this phenomenon, I devised a plan to appeal to their playfulness while trying to retain some shred of academic dignity. They were forced to engage in found poetry.

Most students scoff at the notion of studying poetry let alone the idea of creating their own poetic work. Rather than have these seniors start with a blank canvas, I gave them the chance to leave their seats, stretch their legs and search for a palette of language. Armed with a pencil and a pad, these students were given the charge of wandering the halls of Lincoln High in search of language useful for the construction of poetry. Any and every word that they encountered was free game. They could write it down to be later agonized over and fit into a line that served as another piece to a very frustrating puzzle. So off they went to gather the tools that are quite necessary for creating verse.

Signs announcing club meetings, record boards for athletic teams, alumni hall of fame photographs and biographies, display cases holding 100 years of history, discarded candy wrappers, lost homework assignments, menus for the cafeteria, directional signs, mission statements. All of these images contained words that the students collected on their 45 minute odyssey through the halls of Lincoln High School. They returned to the room to gaze down in awe at the number of words they were able to collect. With this prewriting complete, their task was to create an original poetic work using only the words residing on the pad in front of them. Nothing more, nothing less.

Frustration has set in. The final draft is not due until Friday. Yet, silence has fallen across the classroom as each person continues to search for that elusive utterance that is meant to express the raw and vivid emotion that is swirling around in his brain. Some students are bound by convention and tirelessly try to conform to regular meter and rhyme. Others have embraced Whitman’s legacy and feel comfortable rambling on freely. One thing has remained true, in spite of all their self-professed laziness and their incessant claims of the pointlessness of the waning moments of their high school careers, these students are full of passion, purpose, emotion and life that can only be understood by someone who is approaching the end of one road and the beginning of another.

Their words express the events that mark the trials and tribulations of adolescence. Their ideas express the emotions associated with this experience. Maybe they are right. They have known it all along. And now I know it too.

High school is pointless for them – they are ready for college.