Mentor Text: Things to do Around Winnipeg when you’re Black by Michael Fraser
Techniques:
- Titling Pieces
- Using theme to make a statement
Background –
I’m drafting this at the end of the second day of the second semester. That means I’ve survived the madness of the end of the first semester, exam week, marking everything and getting the report cards done.
And, I’ll be honest, this post is a direct result of my planning for the first week of this semester, and a reflection on some elements of last semester.
As I planned this week, I was prepping a great poetry analysis strategy inspired by former Moving Writers contributor Karla Hilliard, the poetry letter. Students get a letter from me with three poems attached, and at the end of the month, they write me a letter where they write about one of those poems. Today, they got the letter, and we took a look at all of the poems, a first glance to see if there was one that we were drawn to upon first reading.
Then, as the month progresses, we’ll take time to annotate and discuss these poems together. This time around, we’re going to look at a poem a week, and spending time with this poem in two classes today, I realized there are elements of it that make it a nice mentor text.
How we might use this text:
Titling Pieces – If your writers are anything like mine, then at this point in the year, you’ve been subjected to a mind-numbing tsunami of pieces that have bland titles, often no different than the title you gave the assignment. Oh, how I make an effort to push them to play with titles!
When you read this poem, you realize exactly how much lifting this title does. If you haven’t already, read the poem. Here’s what happens…
You read the title, and you assume that there is going to follow some sort of profound statement on racism in the city of Winnipeg. (Probably an easier assumption to make in my classroom, a little less than an hour from there.) You read the poem, braced for that, and… you don’t really find that. It’s honestly kind of reads, aside from the one line that connects the troubled histories of Black and Indigenous people, like someone hired a poet to write some tourism copy. So you go back to the title to make sure you remember being set up for what you expected.
But here’s the thing. In setting our expectations for the poem with the title, and then delivering something else, Fraser subverts our expectations, making us reflect on the assumptions that the title gave us, thereby making the title even more powerful.
I know that’s a lofty goal for some of our writers, but having them take a swing at that move sure beats the hell out of getting something called “Poem About Racism in Winnipeg” doesn’t it?
Using Theme to Make a Statement – So, above, I referred to our provincial assessment. It’s a four day exam that shows up in a box from the Department of Education. The assessment has a theme, and after a 3 hour session of responding to text questions on day one, students craft a writing piece that communicates an idea about the theme.
Fraser does that so well here. As we discussed this poem in class today, we commented that really, anyone should be able to experience Winnipeg the way that Fraser lays it out. (If you haven’t been, he does offer a really nice plan.) The reality is, however, that racism might impact that. As we discussed the line featuring the phrase “…as small as a name,” we discussed how a diverse group of folks with the same name might not have the same experience, highlighting one of the things in this poem that drive home the impact of racism.
Again, Fraser’s poem does a wonderful job of making this statement, but it is incumbent upon us to use mentor texts to show our writers how this might be done.
I’m not going to lie, the busy nature of the last couple of weeks, professionally and personally, had me very close to maybe sitting out this column this time around. Instead, I found something to share within the work that I had already done. That right there could be the important lesson that you take away from this Mentor Text Wednesday for your own work – the fact that the mentor text you need to achieve something in your classroom may already be in your files.
What are your best lessons and strategies around crafting titles? What other mentor texts do you have that get your writers to creatively express their thinking around big issues?
Leave a comment below or find me on Twitter @doodlinmunkyboy!
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