Last week, I introduced a contest held by Scholastic to my students. They are required to write a haiku answering the question “What adventures does your future hold?” and submit it online by November 18th. I thought that surely the type of students I had this year would turn away from such an endeavor immediately especially since it was a poetry contest. Luckily, more than a handful of them surprised me and requested information. Today, when I handed out photocopies of the poster I presented them, my co-teacher had to run across the hall to the workroom to print off some more.
Now, motivating the students could have been the Alienware M11x Laptop that is first prize. Or the Inspiron duo Tablet PC and Dell Streak 7 Android Tablet that are second and third prize, respectively. However, I’d like to think that some of the freshmen were genuinely interested in the challenge of composing a thought-provoking response to the prompt using the traditional Japanese format. A few students that took the information were the last that I ever thought would be interested in writing poetry. I had envisioned the skeptical, critical and derogatory expressions on their faces as they turned away from my enthusiastic relay of the contest so vividly that I almost didn’t mention it at all. Now, I am glad that I did especially since I am giving some of them an opportunity to win hardware they might not have ever seen in real life.
Third period had an extra ten minutes since they got through the material quickly. I had them write a haiku on the spot and threw some ideas their way. Not a few wrote about how boring school was for them. They probably expected an insulted reaction, and though that does hurt a bit, I looked at the quality of writing and not what they were passive-agressively suggesting about my class. Several tossed together seriously excellent haikus for ten minutes’ time, though, and I know it gave some of them the time to write something for the contest that they might not have had outside my class with their busy teenage-0verscheduling.
I used an original haiku of my own as an example:
trudging down the road i see a bend in the path my feet — they quickenGoing back to traditional forms reminds me that within the confines of tradition, there is freedom to still become what you need to become. It’s a foundation to spring off of and just because there are rules and regulations doesn’t mean that your voice has to be silenced.
Click HERE to go to Scholastic’s Haiku Contest!
