Frequently Asked Questions
How do you know this exercise will do any good, especially without a trained educator to guide the students?
I don’t, yet, but hope to get an inkling before this academic year is over. My first priority is to find a few schools willing to host trials of the exercise, then see how it affects the standardized test scores of the participants.
Will teachers be willing to devote classroom time to test an idea that might not do any good?
I won’t be asking them to. I see the exercise being done in after school sessions supervised by parent volunteers.
How will you get the students to buy into the idea?
I do expect it to be difficult to find enough students for the trials. However, if I can get past that phase of the project and the idea proves beneficial, a different dynamic will obtain. Because the cost of implementing this exercise will be so low — no materials to purchase, no effort to find good texts, no training required to administer it — there will be little need to secure wide participation before the program can be considered a “success” by any school. As long as the parent volunteers are content to sit with however few students might sign up for the sessions, and as long as those students benefit from them, it’ll all be good.
Aren’t exercises like this one already being used by many teachers?
Yes, and I hope it’s working well for them, because my hope is precisely to expand its use.
Won’t the exercise be less effective without a teacher to guide the students and run the sessions?
Undoubtedly. However, remember that it’s not an either-or situation. Implementing an after school program using the exercise doesn’t mean that the teachers of a school can’t also use it in their classrooms. Even if the exercise is only one fifth as effective when administered by a parent volunteer, that’s a practically free 20% added to what’s being done by the teachers.
Beyond that simple calculation, there is the possibility of much more good coming from this stripped down version of the exercise due to its scalability. This is a key aspect of the concept. Because the cost of adoption will be so low, there is the potential many more students to spend many more hours each year working at it and gaining its benefits.
Why will you be measuring the efficacy of the exercise through its effect on standardized test scores?
The low cost of entry mentioned throughout this faq is what will enable widespread adoption of the exercise. Its ability to raise standardized test scores (assuming that can be proven) is what will drive widespread adoption.
I agree with every teacher friend I have that the mania around standardized testing in the schools has been a tragic waste of effort and focus. In an ideal world, we’d devote the classroom time we currently spend preparing for these tests to more useful activities, like this modeling exercise. Unfortunately, that world is a long way off. (And growing more distant by the year, according to my teacher friends.) We can and should bemoan and fight to improve this sad state of affairs, but mightn’t we also try to leverage it?
What if your trials show that the exercise doesn’t raise standardized test scores?
I’ll continue to seek out good poems and make them available to anyone who wants to use them – in the classroom or out. I have no doubt that the exercise will be beneficial under any conditions, though it may be in ways not measurable by multiple choice tests. However, I’ll no longer work or hope for any widespread adoption of the exercise. Without the lure of raising test scores, there’s no way it could happen.
All this emphasis on the low cost of adoption is disturbing. Is there really such a thing as a free lunch?
I’ve emphasized the low cost to schools adopting the exercise, but in reality, an immeasurable effort has gone into making this exercise possible: the imaginative work of the poets whose poems will be used. We already tap this precious resource in the classroom. Over the course of a year, a typical high school student might read and analyze half a dozen poems, entering into a kind of conversation with the great poets who wrote them. In a two-day-a-week after school program that offers two poems to imitate per session, that student will read another 120.
