Tag: teaching
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Howl For the Quiet Classroom
(With inspiration from, and apologies to, Allen Ginsberg…) I saw the best minds of my generationtrying to get thirty teenagersto care about a metaphorat nine‑thirty on a Tuesday,holy fools of fluorescent corridorsdragging whiteboard pens like relics,summoning meaning from photocopiesthat still smell of warm toner. I walked the tiled floors of the learning cathedral,the budget‑cut basilica,the…
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Poetry is Taught Wrong
They teach us metrics like a checklist,syllables counted like coins, rhythm weighed and filed away.We learn to admire the beast from a glass box: dissected, annotated, politely dead.They hand us diagrams of feeling and expect tidy answers. We are asked to tame metaphors into essays, to translate thunder into bullet points.We paste sticky notes over…
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Salt, Stone, Signal
We wear the weather like a cardigan here;salt on the collar, wind in the seams, Caithness sky stretched like an exam paper you can’t quite fold right.The bus leaves before the light finishes waking; I tuck my keys into the same pocket that remembers first-day nerves.My classroom is a cottage of cushions and careful rules,…