Prior to teaching my 6th graders about Japanese haiku, we had heard a talk by Dr. Dahlia Wasfi, an Iraqi-American, who conveyed to kids some of the realities on the ground in Iraq. I was inspired by Bob Peterson's article "The War in Iraq and Daily Classroom Life" [Vol. 21, No. 3] to initiate a deeper dialogue around the war, and I shared with my students some of the war poetry from Peterson's 5th graders. I then encouraged my students to select a theme for their haiku poems. Many struggled with the 5-7-5-syllable structure of haiku, not to mention the challenging "turn of phrase" in the last line, and I was becoming discouraged reading some of the pieces until I read this one by 11-year-old Luis:
Army men are strong
and their guns are really big
but they are home sick.
The poignancy of this poem just stunned me. Luis's haiku was a surprise, not because of its craftsmanship, although the double meaning in "home sick" and the overall sad truth and irony of the poem are really moving, but the fact that the kids really do absorb some of the humanity that can be presented in the curriculum. (Or, so I would like to believe — maybe Luis was already there.) I am slowly coming to the realization that if you leave the teaching to the mainstream American culture — or, in other words, if you do not stand up to our very shallow culture — then a lot of our students will naturally gravitate toward its regressive and unhealthy nature.
But sometimes it is true, too, your students are who they are. Here is Stephanie's beautiful haiku, marching to her own drummer:
Mother horse watches
her baby drink from a stream
soon she will leave her.