On Jan. 29-30, Kjersten Johnson’s freshman English classes filmed a poetry project entitled “I Dream a World.” The assignment may have been a bit embarrassing to some, but it had a valuable meaning.
“Poetry is something that not a lot of students like,” Johnson (staff) said. Johnson is an English teacher and also in charge of the newspaper and yearbook classes. “Doing this project that is more multimedia and more visual is to show them that poetry does still have a place in 2024.”
Johnson got the idea for the project after hearing an NPR (National Public Radio) community poem on the radio while driving to work one day. The community poem was made up of different lines from thousands of people of what their dream world would be.
“I changed my lesson plans that day,” Johnson said. Students read and annotated the “I Dream a World” poem by Langston Hughes, listened to the NPR poem and then created their own four-line quatrain inspired by Hughes’ prompt.
“I was in my poetry unit and I knew that it was something that we could do that was really cool,” Johnson said. “Really cool” is definitely correct for one student in particular.
Eliam Boyer (09) was one of the students who did this project. Boyer is a poetry lover and even writes poetry on his own time. “I loved this project. I’m really happy when we get to write some more poetry … I feel like you can really put a lot of emotion into something without really having to fully describe it,” Boyer said. “There’s a different feeling in what you get reading a poem rather than reading a book.”
While working on the “I Dream a World” project, students also prepared for their Poetry Out Loud class performances. Alyssa Kintz (09) said memorizing her chosen poem for Poetry Out Loud was a unique challenge. Her favorite part was “getting to analyze the poem more, getting to know what the author meant it as,” Kintz said.
To finalize their assignment, Johnson filmed each student reading their quatrain. At the end, all of their lines would be pieced together in a unique order to create one poem.
“Sometimes it rhymes, sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes it gets really repetitive, but regardless, it is showing the snapshot of where they are in their lives right now and what is important to them,” Johnson said.
