Twelve Great Poems: Childhood

SUMMARY

The Twelve Great Poems series continues for free use at home and in the classroom. The author muses on the theme of childhood in teaching in general and poetry in particular.

Cleaning the Storage Room

This weekend I began to reorganize our storage room. In the process, I rediscovered children's treasures—Lego, doll's clothes, jigsaws, blocks, and craft creations. Before I culled for Goodwill or a garage sale, I got to thinking about childhood as a blog topic.

Twelve Great Poems: Childhood

First, this led to the next collection in my Twelve Great Poems series. I have gathered poetic favourites and new discoveries on the theme of childhood. You can find these poems as usual in my Pages section in the growing collection there or as a classroom-ready pdf. at lcommons.org in the group "Integrating the Learning Commons."

Since all these poems are written by adults, it is useful to consider the importance of voice and tone in teaching poetry. They are often the most difficult concepts for students to articulate, until they determine the narrator's identity (not the same please as the poet's) and the perspective that the narrator takes to the matter of the poem. However, poems about childhood are a good place to examine voice and tone, since the narrator's response to childhood is usually clarified by retrospection and time. Without specifying your response to this week's twelve poems, consider their complex range of perspectives on childhood: delight, nostalgia, regret, sorrow, even anger.

Childhood as a Prelude to Teaching

A further question arises when connecting these poems with a blog for teachers:  How do our concepts and experiences of learning as children inform how we teach as adults? Do we carry over particular traumas (e.g., being bullied or put down, adjusting to criticism with defensive strategies) from our childhood into the classroom? Do we emphasize a particular style of teaching (e.g., lecturing, dramatizing,  seat work) because of the habits of our own teachers? Do we treasure the childhood of our students by encouraging both their innocence and experience?

Decisions

I decided one thing in that storage room: I won't be culling anything until my teens make the choice for themselves about the fate of their childhood treasures. And where is that baseball card of Sandy Koufax my brother once proudly owned?