In the second semester, it’s not uncommon for seniors and post graduate students to start feeling the “senior slid.” For the record, I think the senior slide is entirely induced by the seniors themselves (not that they would ever admit to it).
Either way, my seniors are sliding in Chutes and Ladders fashion (you know, after working so hard to climb up all the ladders, you land on the chute and down you go…all the way back to where you started).
In an effort to combat the slide, I teamed up with our dance teacher to get my students off their feet. Our brilliant idea was to have the students choreograph a dance to a recorded poem.
I know it sounds a bit crazy, but bear with me. Both dance and poetry revolve around emotion; my goal was to get my students to express the emotions of a poem through the movement of their bodies.
We started with the poem “Death, be not proud” by John Donne – a bit of a doosie, perhaps, but full of nuanced emotion. For your reading pleasure, here’s the poem:
After a close reading of the poem, students felt good about the message and emotion of it…time to dance!
Our session started with a demonstration by an advanced dance student. With the same music, she showed us two different danced. Based only on her movements, my students were quickly able to see that one dance expressed hope and the other expressed despair.
Now, it was their turn. Using this recording of Emma Thompson reading the poem, students began. I have to say, the end product was pretty awesome.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, when students got to move, they stopped sliding…they climbed the ladder back up to the top.
My job now is to sustain that energy. While every day can’t be a dancing day (it is a writing class, after all), I have to continue to find unusual ways for my student writers to express themselves.
Until next time,
-Mama Murph
https://www.instagram.com/p/BCyUmQSu_WIfgDEFh5Mt7UJFyggU4JKy-z1QDI0/?taken-by=shell_murphy
Make way for Murphlings 