February 26, 2020

Welcome back to the High School Corner!

If you happened to walk by the High School’s classroom on Tuesday afternoon, you would’ve heard smooth jazz music and seen eleven young adults and two guides sipping on coffee, sitting on the floor with blankets and surrounded by fairy lights, and munching on banana bread and cookies. While it may have seemed like our high school was settling down to have a nap, we were actually getting ready to hold a private poetry reading in our classroom! 

For the past few months, we have been learning as much as we can about the wonderful world of poetry in our Writer’s Workshop class. Over Christmas break, we were each tasked with finding a poem we enjoyed and wanted to further analyze. We chose poems from a variety of authors including C.P. Cavafy, Maya Angelou, Margaret Atwood, Robert Frost, and Walt Whitman. After choosing our poems, we analyzed their structure, rhyme scheme and meter, syntax, word choice, figurative language, and any other characteristics of interest. After gaining a deep understanding of our poems, we wrote an analytical essay about them that also touched on their connection to our personal lives. Then, we wrote our own original poems or songs that somehow responded to or expanded on the famous work we'd selected. 

As the final culmination of this work, we used Tuesday’s Writer’s Workshop class period to share our poem and song creations with each other. We were extremely excited to spend a cozy afternoon together nerding out over poetry; it was the perfect way to showcase our work.  

Thank you for reading; we hope you’ll be back to read more next week!

Jacob Blackman and Sophia Devereux