Friends,
I am proud to announce the grade-level winners and their poems from our annual Poetry Out Loud competition:
- 7th Grade: Kamau Muse Morris “Invictus”
- 8th Grade: Sophia Alai “After Working Sixty Hours Again for What Reason”
- 9th Grade: Malaika Pedzayi-Ferguson “Personal”
- 10th Grade: Nyla Long “Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday”
- 11th Grade: Elysse Price “I’m a Fool to Love You”
- 12th Grade: Kayla Sullivan “The Layers”
Congratulations to these students and to the following students who won their class competitions: Ellie Hughes, Zoe Venable, Nya Steward, Macy Bluestein, Grace Bradley, Amadi Muse Morris, Zahra Abdalhasan, Rebecca Jaffee, Zoey Fleisher, Eliana Grimm, Joe Foesterling, Cliff Hardin, Alex Wagner, and Ivan Boyers.
Please join us this Friday at 9:50am during Community time to hear the six students above recite their poems. We will choose a school-level winner from these six at this time.
During the interview for my first teaching job, the superintendent leaned across his desk, pointed to a picture, and asked me if I knew the poem to which it referred. I did, and I recited it quickly. That was a handy use for a memorized poem (although I’d like to think I got the job based on my merit and not on my remembering a poem). I hope that our students retain the poems they memorized for better reasons, for reasons that connect to the joy of language and the experience of memorizing and sharing some of the best of what our language has to offer.
With great expectations,
Jason