learning from experience
“Oh, yes, that one,” my Supervising Teacher (ST) stage-whispers to me, “Yes, she is hopeless. Disruptive, Willful. One of the worst. And sneaky too. Can’t write anything of worth. Can’t spell or anything.” I look at the student in question. Could it be possible that her terminal sentence may somehow be connected to the fact that she is the sole African ESL student in a sea of middle class Euro/Anglo “my-parents-are-rather-well-off-and-have-a-lovely-view-of-Williamstown-Bay” students? I determined from the outset to get to know this student (I’ll call her Shewitt*) better. In the course of studying the poetry Shewitt was confused by much of the metaphor and imagery presented. In reading the poem  ‘Snow poem’ : Shewitt asked, “So what do they mean the posts wear ‘marshmallow hats’?” Personification is a difficult enough concept for many students to manage. How much more difficult does it become when we must not only negotiate terminologies that label our words, but also ‘reframe’ global realities for our students? As Sawyer so succinctly puts it, “We see the reading/responding mind in action as it attempts to make sense of the text (Sawyer 2005). In this equation, the personal approach- between student and teacher- becomes the deciding factor in how a student approaches the writing task.
*All names have been changed
Shewitt and I dialogued about the poem. We spoke about the hats first. “I don’t get how posts can wear hats.” After a few moments it clicked for me. Coming from Sudan to Western Melbourne, Shewitt had never seen snow, let alone the way it clings to the top of trees or gates, so she had no way to understand the personification. Eventually I ended up acting out some of the imagery for her, and the light that came on in her eyes as she volunteered, “So the bushes are kind of like people when they go to church and pray?” Yes! “Oh, I get it now, yeah, like when people wear those puffy hats, that’s what the fences looks like.” She is on a roll. I encourage her "You’ve got it, now." write it down! Write your own version of a personification poemShewitt rose to the task admirably. Her poem not only met the outcomes required (for example, meeting the Level 5.9 and 5.10 Outcomes for Writing in the CSF II) but reflected a personal synthesis and application of a concept ; her own vision of a landscape hitherto unseen.
Methodology of feedback and writing poetry:
 Methodology of teaching poetry and more poetry
A visionary should not be constrained by lexical and grammatical considerations. If someone had said to William Blake, “That’s not the way you spell ‘Tiger’, and by the way, ‘eye’ and ‘symmetry’ do NOT rhyme, even in Olde English!”, would he have left that poem as part of his literary legacy? The Tyger Given that Shewitt had only been in an English classroom for 2 years, and that this was the first English poetry she had written, it was not my intent to crush this creativity by commenting on her terrible spelling and grammar. In much the same way that STELLA talks about ‘reading being a purposeful activity’ for teachers (AATE, ALEA, DE&T Vic & EdDept WA 2002), we must approach writing the same way; that is, with a purpose in mind. When the purpose is for the student to creatively write, how am I to respond when there are grammatical and spelling errors?
My ST showed me the way. After she directed me to correct the poems, I pulled out a pencil and made my own marks and notes on the poems, and on the rubric I had created Poetry assessment rubric for Yr 7 students which was to assess the purpose of the writing exercise- to write poetry. I had given the rubric to the students so that they were informed as to my criteria for the exercise, for, like Dixon and Stratta, I think this is very important to help the students ‘stage the levels of their production’ (in Sawyer 2005). ST leans over my shoulder, “No, no, no, no! You’ve got to use a red pen, here… use mine.” Red means death ! Betrayal ! I feel like a traitor as I gently underline spelling and grammatical errors and annote the corrected versions at the end. I think that for the purposes of assessing creative writing, that offering ‘descriptions’- that is, to show what the students have done well, so that it can be ‘repeated’ and “developed in the future’ is far more productive that a narrow criticism of the mechanics of writing (Sawyer 2005). Encouraging students to develop and extend their writing is the most constructive part of the teacher-student writing relationship. The fine tuning can come later. The intent of the writer, and the intent of the teacher in directing the writing, is at the crux of the matter.
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