Response to week 8: Rachel D. Jones' Pedagogy Forum, week 8

I'm glad to see that colleagues are having success at with poetry activities in the classroom. It's interesting how sometimes the ideas you develop on-the-fly become the most engaging for students. The art of poetry lends itself to creativity and it only makes sense that when you are creative in developing an activity, the students can sense it. A lack of thinking through every aspect of an activity causes the teacher to know less about what to expect, and often what happens is a pleasant surprise. I believe that the open-ended nature of your questions made the activity more fun. I think students naturally like poetry; it's when we bog it down with too many terms and technicalities, that we end up with disenchanted students.