Reluctant poets find a groove
KARNS CITY — For freshman Nate Ealy, poetry was something to dread. He'd much rather play football or lift weights.
He said he wasn't looking forward to his assignment in Sharon Miller's college prep English class to create a poetry mobile, but he's surprised at how well the stanzas sound — his poem is about football, after all.
The rhyming lines talk about breaking from a huddle, taking the offensive line and completing a running play. And it hangs above his head in class, taped to a field goal post.
Miller's five ninth-grade English classes, both general and college prep, made the 90 poems that hang from the ceiling in her Karns City High School room.
She taught them a writing process that included reading and analyzing published poetry and brainstorming ideas for their own poem by using word gathering, a type of word association.
From those ideas, the students picked a theme and wrote four to six stanzas. They weren't required to use rhyme, but Miller said most of the students did.
After the students wrote the rough draft, they met with Miller. She then had them let two other people read the poem and write comments about it.
"It was a real process going from 'I hate this' to 'I understand this,'" she said.
The assignment took about 2Z\x weeks.
Half the students in one class wrote mostly about summer and the fun they have on the Allegheny River.
Tatum Mourer's poem, "Fun Dip andCherry Coke," is a narrative about one summer day spent on the river.
Bria Gillott wrote about many different days that combine into a summer.
"The river is where I spend my summer," Gillott said. "I have a lot of memories there."
Another class, Miller said, focused on more serious subjects like saying goodbye to an older sister after graduation or the death of a sick grandparent.
Still, others like Ealy remained light-heartened.
Ealy said he's still not a huge fan of poetry and doesn't plan to write more, but he promised he learned something.
