Discovering Self-Expression by Kate Engelkes

As a believer in the power of text, I seek to find ways to make the written word come alive for students.  My daughter Kate is a high school English teacher who believes strongly in the ability of the written word to encourage teens to deepen their self-expression.  She authored the following article which answers the question - Why poetry?   It deserves a read by those who seek to take ELA instruction to a deeper level.  

"We sit at home on our computers measuring self-worth

by numbers of

followers and likes

Ignoring those who actually love us

It seems we'd rather write

An angry post than talk to someone who might acutally hug us"

(Prince Es, "Can We Autocorrect Humanity?")

Teenagers spend so much time trying to express themselves to the public in an effort to impress and
gain followers and likes—a shell of true self-expression.  I watch from the sidelines as my students carefully craft a caption for a photo to mirror some pop culture reference. A caption designed to reveal just how “with it” that student is.

As adults, we often judge this disconnect from humanity. We think if only teenagers would just spend time with others instead of always being on their phones. In my class, I want to help students communicate and share their thoughts and ideas with the world. Poetry offers the perfect medium for self-expression, but mentioning poetry to the average group of high school students will be met with the most earth-shattering chorus of groans. At least, that was my experience when I mentioned to my juniors we would be spending time reading poetry.

I made it a personal goal to help students, if not love poetry, at least develop an appreciation of poetry as a way to express shared emotions. But with so much hatred stacked up against poetry, what could I do? I decided to start simple and see how we could use already existing poetry to start conversations. This meant rather than focus on classics and pieces I’ve learned to love, students had to break into poetry in language they understood. Each class, I started with a modern poem. I read the poem aloud to students, and then I asked, “So what do you think?” Then, I shut my mouth. So much good can happen in our classes if we just get out of the way of our students.

Each day, we discussed poems by contemporary poets such as Billy Collins and Naomi ShihabNye. I found poems written by teens and twenty-somethings. We discussed love, relationships, death, and education. We read rhyming poems, free verse, and even some language poetry (or Lang Po from the likes of Ron Padgett) to really freak them out. If a poem didn’t incite conversation, we moved on with our lesson for the day—I followed the students’ lead and only kept going for as long as they wanted to discuss the poem. This made poetry less threatening and turned the typical conversation of poetic devices and making meaning (the things that made them hate poetry) into meaningful conversations about what they believe or what they value in life. This moment of each class, by far, was the most powerful lesson of each day. It didn’t matter what we did after this point; conversation came naturally, and we delved into deep and meaningful discussion each day.

One conversation stuck with me. To connect students with poetry, I shared a spoken word piece I knew was popular on Facebook. Prince Ea is a prominent YouTube spoken word artist, and he has a particularly powerful piece titled, “Can we Autocorrect Humanity?” The poem explores the need for humans to put down cell phones, laptops, and iPads and connect face-to-face. What better audience for this message than a classroom of teenagers? In one part of the poem, he states:

"Take control or be controlled, Make a decision

Me?

No longer do I want to spoil a precious moment by recording it with a phone

I'm just gonna keep them"

My fifth period connected deeply to the sentiments in this poem. One girl spoke up and said, “This is totally right. When I’m with my friends, I want to be talking with them and interacting with them. Right now, we just are on our phones together.” We talked about the need for human connection, and how we all want to experience love and attention.

Students voiced concerns about families who didn’t eat dinner together. One girl said, “I feel so bad for the next generation. They get phones so young; they’ll never have a childhood.” They talked about the sadness of having to say goodbye to friends when they go off to college. They discussed the desire to sit and just spend time with friends and family rather than mindlessly scrolling through Vine after Vine.

But they also talked about the power of social media. How they feel more connected to different ideas and cultures than older generations.

“Adults think we are only on our phones or laptops all of the time and don’t care about anything, but that’s not true at all. We’re connecting with people in other ways they may not understand.”

“Exactly, but there are some times we don’t want to be on our devices. We still
want to spend time with people.”

To hear these students wrestling with the complexity of human connection and their voiced desires to put down phones and have that face-to-face contact was humbling and awe-inspiring.  As adults, we often underestimate teenagers or dismiss them because they’re always “plugged in” to their devices, but as my students corrected me, this isn’t something they want to do 100% of the time. We also need to understand that their way of connecting with the world looks different from what we understand, but that doesn’t mean it’s less valuable.

Teenagers care about this world. They care about connecting and understanding the human experience as much as everyone else. The apathy adults perceive from teens is so often a front. We just need to see past their facades to the care and desires underneath and help them discover methods of positive self-expression, such as poetry, and allow them to adapt those methods to ever changing social mediums.