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By Mary

I love it! I do the Beat Poets with my sixth graders. I tell them it's because I HATE Wordsworth and Emerson and all the poets we usually teach. I tell them they'll get all that pounded down their throats in the years
to come, but there is nobody but me who will introduce them to the Beat Poets. And now there's you!
I start off before that time, in the Harlem Renaissance, and we study the poetry and the music of that time and place. I do that because the Beat Generation took a lot of their attitude from the Harlem Renaissance. Then we start talking about the time of the Beatniks, and who the Beatniks

were, and what they stood for, and what society was like at that time, and then I introduce them to VERY CAREFULLY SELECTED Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg. As I'm sure you know, much of their work is not appropriate for young kids, so pick and choose, cut and paste.

Then we go further and talk about the hippies and the Vietnam War (they are extremely interested in this) and we listen to the music of the Beatles and Bob Dylan. I tell them these were the poets of my generation (Simon and Garfunkle, too). Then we finish up with the rap and hip-hop lyrics of today, because as I tell them, these guys are YOUR poets, you guys. What they say is important and it really is the voice of a generation (whether old fogies like me like it or not). I use, again, VERY CAREFULLY SELECTED hip-hop lyrics. Eminem is good for teaching metaphor, and trust me, you'll get their attention. They adore it, and they appreciate an adult who isn't complaining about their music.

Well, you probably are wondering why I went through all that, but I think that history and society and all of that is just this timeline, this continuum, and I like to always put things on a timeline of sorts for them and let them see what it preceded, and what preceded it.

Best of luck to you with your poetry unit.