the mystery of the kitchen shears

My syllabus tells me that I have to post a reflection on my field experience teaching, so here it goes:

I taught last Wednesday for the last time at Springfield Catholic. The class recently started a unit on modernism and on Monday, she introduced them to the idea of imagism in poetry. Their culminating activity for this portion of the unit was to write a poem about a concrete object using imagery. So immediately my mind went to the think-aloud that we did as a class using "The Kitchen Shears Speak" poem.

So on Wednesday, I conducted a think-aloud with the class. I set up a powerpoint that fed in two lines at a time and asked them to evaluate it at each point. Sometimes they talked as a class, sometimes they talked with a partner, sometimes they wrote their thoughts and sometimes they just sat there and thought about it.

I remember our class coming up with some insanely far-fetched ideas about what this poem meant and high schoolers are no different. They had thoughts of an atom bomb, an abortion doctor, a slave, a hitman, etc. About two-thirds of the way through, someone suggested that maybe this wasn't about a person and so their scope of thought expanded greatly. There was a moment when a student suggested kitchen scissors but he didn't hold fast to it and abandoned the idea after a few more lines.

It was a lot of fun watching them explore the options as they were fed more and more lines. As soon as they thought they had figured it out, the next two lines didn't support it and they had to start all over. By the end, they said they were having fun with it but wanted to know the "dang title." They had some great discussions, they struggled over parts of the poem that didn't fit with their idea and they felt freedom to think out loud, even if they knew it wasn't correct - it was actually a lot more fun than I anticipated it being.

The one thing that I would do differently is a better wrap-up discussion. We talked about the poem in light of the title, with the given imagery and then I connected it to their assignment and transitioned them into a time to work on it. However, I should have conducted a better discussion about what they learned about analyzing poetry and thinking critically and supporting their opinions, etc. They all said they had a lot of fun, but a discussion like this might have helped them learn some literary techniques a little more solidly.

Overall, it was a great experience and definitely something that I would want to repeat in the future.