(Sometimes) Easy (Not Always) Cheesy Poetry for Simple Students

The other day I had my students write phone number poems. Phone number poems are relatively simple to explain, but they are harder for students to execute. Any topic is valid. The only parameters are 1) the poem be written in free verse, 2) the number of syllables per line equals the numeral in the phone number. In other words, there are seven lines (ten if you include the area code). If a digit happens to be a zero, you must break your stanza. For this assignment, if students had more than one zero, they had to change one of them to a different digit, one that they decided on ahead of time.

I modeled a few examples for the students with phone numbers and topics they provided.

This first one is the school's phone number as suggested by my 7th period:

798-4075

every day students are served

pepperoni abomination:

plastic cheese slopped over burnt crust,

grease-soaked veggies

indigestion’s supreme, so

someone, pass the Tums

 This second one is a random number generated by 2nd period. The topic should be obvious:

420-1255

eight tentacles

wriggling—

wait!

they might

catch you unaware;

washed up, they still sting!

Now, you try it. Use your phone number, or your friend's, or your ex-girlfriend's, or any random number. The challenge comes from setting the syllabication before you start.

Brevity and Conventions (Part 1...I Think)

So, here I am endeavoring to write for at least fifteen minutes today. Unfortunately, I’m not sure what I should write about. A myriad of topics floats through my cranium, but nothing is sticking. It must be this multi-tasking world we live in. It seems that most writing these days is just done in blurts and splurts and hiccups: a text, a Facebook status update, a Tweet. Perhaps we eke out a blog post if we’re waxing verbose, but that’s only on a good day, right? Is that symbolic of how fragmented our lives have become? I wonder.
It’s been pretty hard to get my 7th graders to string together complete thoughts this year. Forget paragraphs right now; we’re working with capitalization + (subject+verb) + punctuation = complete sentence. Hopefully soon there will be some progress. Don’t get me wrong, the ideas are there, and they’re pretty dang spiffy if you ask me; I don’t think I’ve had such a unique (to be read “random”) group when it comes to generating ideas. But the conventionality distracts even the best readers from coherent meanings.
I did an activity today where I took their “final” drafts, which had supposedly been revised and perfected, and orally exposed their flaws to the entire class. My tongue and lips tied themselves into knots worthy of eleven-year-old scouts. And they couldn’t even see the egregious errors in homophones, which we had supposedly just covered! I’d post some examples, but no one should suffer as I did today.
The point? I think they caught how they need to be courteous to their readers, how revision (especially oral) really does make a difference, especially if they have an audience.
My new goal this year is for my students to put several related thoughts together and convey them meaningfully to a given audience. Oh wait! That’s what it already was. I guess I have my work cut out for me this year. Gotta break the textspeakers! LOL ;P