"The Average Fourth Grader Is A Better Poet Than You, (And Me Too)," Hannah Gamble
While in graduate school at the University of Houston, I supplemented my income by working as a writer in residence for Writers in the Schools (WITS). I was with WITS for three years, during which I visited third, fourth, and fifth grade classrooms, and worked with groups of students visiting the Menil museum of art, the Houston Historical Society, and the Houston Arboretum.
When first hired by WITS, I expected that working to explain some of my favorite poems to fourth graders would result in me becoming a better teacher of poetry. What I wasnât expecting was that (thanks to having my brain blown apart on a weekly basis as I browsed my studentsâ folders of barely legible poems) I would become a better poet.
Here are some lines written by students in grades 3rd-6th:
âThe life of my heart is crimson.â
[Writing about a family memberâs recent death:]
âMy brother went down/ to the river
and put dirt on.â
 âPeace be a song,
silver pool of sadnessâ
âAway went a dull winter wind
that rocked harshly, and bent you said,
âFather, fatherâ.â
Â
[Writing about a terminal illness:]
âI am feeling burdened
and I taste milkâŠâŠ
I mumble, âPlease,
please run away.â
But it lives where I live.â
âThe owls of midnight hoot like me
shutting the door to nothing.â
[Writing about life as a movie:]
âThe choir enters, and the director screams
âSing with more terror!!!ââ
Â
âI have provisions. Binary muffins.
Itâs an in/out/in/out kind of universe.
We cannot help you,
this is a universe factory.
A sound of rolling symbols.
Disappearing rocks, screams of lizards.
Sanity must prevail. Save vs. Do Not.â
âI, the star god,
take bones from the
underworlds of past times
to create mankind.â
These young writers are addressing subjects that still obsess poets fifty years older: sadness, death, love, responsibility, aging, family, loneliness, and refugeâŠand they are addressing these subjects in language that is new, and thus has the power to emotionally effect a well-seasoned (/jaded) reader. The average fourth grader is able to do this because she hasnât been alive long enough to know how to do it (and by âitâ I mean talk about the world) any other way.
Story time: When I was a child I believed that one day I might be allowed to cross into an alternate dimension by walking through a quilt hanging on my living room wall. As I got older I stopped believing that this was a possibilityânot because I grew to believe that the universe was not an extremely strange place where incomprehensible things could happen on a daily basis, but because I passed year after year after year not being able to enter the spirit realm through a wallhanging.
Anecdote that I hope youâll find relevant: When Jean Piaget began studying the intellectual processes of children, he was not doing so because he had any special interest in children. Piaget was interested, rather, in the intellectual processes of (adult) humans and was seeking a control group. [His first thought was that the best control group would be comprised of martians but, as he did not have access to martians, he decided to use children since children possessed what is farthest from human consciousness.]
So letâs look at what happens to our young writers as they age [I took these lines from poems written by middle-school/ high school students (Italics, mine)]:
 Snacking on this and that
my friends and I keep the party going
even when it is overâ
Â
âWhispers of a
secret crush being unraveledâ
âIâm trapped in this hole that
I canât break throughâ
âBarack Obama in the White House.
I can feel the inspiration
Can you feel it?â
âNow I feel secure with my head held high.
Sad times. By middle school/high school, the average student has learned how normal people talk. The resulting language is underwhelming and predictableâthe safe regurgitations of a thoroughly socialized consciousness.
While the average older studentâs poems are heavy with allegiance to a limited view of reality, the average younger writerâs vision of the world is nimble and surprisingâbazaar, yet true.
Last year I spent every Saturday tutoring an extremely undersocialized kid in vocab. When I taught her the word blandishments (âto flatter, coax, sweet-talk, appeal toâ) she wrote this sentence: âThe blandishments of the sugar flowers made the cake so much more inviting.â
The sentence is interesting because the student understood that a blandishment is something that attracts favorable attention without fully realizing that people almost always use the word to refer to a human action.
The poetâs job is to forget how people do it.
stormborns
theartofmadeline
germansingergirl
dailybridgerton
kaledo-art
andulkaphoto
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