Terry asks whether a passionate poet like Taylor Mali performing ‘What Teachers Make’ can

… make a difference, to anyone or anything? I’m inclined to think not, especially for a UK audience, where we tend to understate everything.

That’s just the point. Here in the UK we understate everything including the excellence in our classrooms and schools. That is not something of which we should be proud or a status quo that we should want to maintain. A bloody window into a bit more grassroots passion might just be the transformative antidote to the insipid reputation of teaching among the general population as a whole.

This is not a rant about Terry -far from it – he is one of the good guys

The post just resonates with me because I have spent three years making extensive use of the Taylor Mali poem to try and get teachers to realise how crucial they are to the whole process of transforming education in 21st century.

Mali has made a difference to 160 people so far, inspiring them to teach. I wonder how many of the educational advice or consultancy community can boast that kind of influence? My personal answer to that question is why I am returning to teaching – a place where I feel I really can make a difference.

Peter Rafferty of Green Park School fame sent me a YouTube link to Dave Kirby’s poem ‘A Tale of Two Kensingtons’ that he wanted to include on his class blog. Even as an Everton supporter, I recognise that this is a great resource for getting boys interested in poetry, particularly if you are teaching on Merseyside.

The problem is that if you click through to the video on YouTube, you are forced to read comments that are profane and unsuitable for his Year 1 audience.

At the top of KS2 (10/11 year-olds) I would happily grasp the nettle and discuss the appropriateness of the commenting but not at Year 1. It’s a shame that the software doesn’t allow the link back to YouTube to be disabled while still allowing the video’s level of google juice to increase. Then everyone would be a winner.

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Taylor Mali is one of my creative heroes and his poem ‘What teachers make‘ has served me well at speaking engagements over the last few years. However, it was time to move on and perform some other stuff. What better way to bow out than with a performance (if you can call it that) at the top of the Valluga, at 2,809 m the highest point in the Arlberg mountains in Austria. It was so quiet up there that I felt I just couldn’t rant loudly so just let the performance slip away peacefully.

I always enjoyed a love-hate relationship with the performance of that poem. I love the poem itself but hate how it caused me to ‘corpse‘ on a regular basis. The only time I really ‘nailed’ it to my own satisfaction was at the Communicate.06 Conference last year. The last time I performed it though, I couldn’t even get out of the first lines and had to bail out completely. It was a sign! So – farewell my friend and on to poems new!

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I’ve been busy putting the finishing touches to my first poetry collection, My Friends and other Animals. I wanted to explore and document how ICT might stimulate the creative process and how it might be used to enhance the performance aspect of poetry. Most importantly I wanted to practise what I regularly preach about the role of ICT and educators in the creative process.

For me, the reading of a poem does not represent the totality of a poetic experience. I want to listen to poetry read aloud and I want to have a go a reading it myself. I want to give listeners an insight into why and how I wrote a poem and offer an open invitation for them to cook up their own poetic creation. I want dialogue and two-way flows of creativity and inspiration.

I have personally found that ICT offers wonderful intrinsic motivation to stimulate the senses, to whet the creative appetite and to have a go at writing, publishing, performing, collaborating and communicating with an audience. It is in this spirit that I will launch my collection in the next fortnight. It might not be brilliant poetry and the audience might be small but I’m having a fun time putting it together. It is my poetry.

Hopefully, it is a process that can be replicated in schools, making the technology fade magically into the background, and allowing the enjoyment of writing to take centre stage. I’ll write more about that later – I don’t want to steal my own thunder

Anyway to one of the poems – My Mate Chris – with accompanying audio.

My mate Chris

My mate Chris
performs amazing feats
of dangerous dexterity
and perilous parkour.
He vaults,
somersaults through his spiderman-tastic existence,
enjoying near-celebrity status at the local casualty department.

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