ACE Spectrum
ACE Spectrum
Ace Spectrum is about you — the ACE Learning Centers.
It’s a quick sharing of ideas, inspiration, opinions and best practices among our continuing education organizations.
Please join the conversation.
Treat Yourself – And Everyone You Meet – to a Poem in Your Pocket Today
By Riley, ACE Poetry Contest Mascot; and Chupe, ACE Poetry Contest Mascot at San Francisco International High School
I’m listening to my best friend John read me the poem in his pocket. The poem is about the power of girls, like supercool baby Lucy Rose.
This is the most fun day of National Poetry Month – it’s Poem in Your Pocket Day.
Usually I prefer my friends have treats for me in their pockets. Like chewy beef jerky. Or rawhide curls. I’ll even take peanut butter flavored snaps.
But on this day, I’ll take poems.
Chupe has a poem, and a new Poem-Pack. Check it out below.
But first, here’s mine. A real doggerel poem.
The Power of Technology
By Riley
The list of tech
Goes on and on
Designed to help
To assist the learn
To entertain
To test and prove
That we are smart
With futures bloomed
To make us see
What can be done
Not only now
But future come
Tech helps empower
Which is good
Strong girls, strong boys
In mind and sight
But tech’s real power
STEMs from learning
That our true power
Is education
I’m looking sharp with my Poem-Pack bag. Now I have a pocket for my poems too.
Now, here’s Chupe:
Riley – your poem really opened my eyes. I’ve been carrying poems with me for years (well, two years). I’ve mostly been carrying them in my brain, but my sweet students at SFIHS gave me this gear so I can carry even more than I can remember.
For this year’s Poem in Your Pocket Day I’m carrying around this reminder from the Voices of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe that home is where we make it.
Peña’s Son
A friend in Zimbabwe
Called and said
“It’s just like Long Island
Only every once in a while
You look out the window and see
A rhinoceros.”
Great poem, Chupe. Thank you for sharing.
And a shout out to my ACE Poetry Contest Mascot Posse – Chupe, Chronos, Violet and Thor. Hope you get treats today too.
All the ACE Poetry Contest Mascots hope everyone treats themselves and others to a poem today. Arf!
Reminder – Poem In Your Pocket Day is Tomorrow, April 26
By Riley, ACE Poetry Contest Mascot, Alpha Public Schools
Riley here. Contemplating poetry over a cup of java. I prefer beef treats. Just saying…
Hi all you poets out there. Just wanted to remind you that tomorrow is Poem in Your Pocket Day. That’s the day when we have a favorite poem easily available to read to friends, family, everyone waiting at the bus stop and our fellow students in class. Or anyone else we meet.
Fun poems.
Poems that tell big truths. Or little ones.
Poems that touch us. Make us think. Believe. Listen. Give. (Like giving me doggie treats. Preferably beef flavored.)
The Academy of American Poets has a great site to help you find poems if you are having a tough time finding one. But I suspect you all have picked a favorite now. Or written one.
Here’s one of my favorites, mostly because it’s easy to memorize:
The Dinosaur
By Carl S. Junge
The Dinosaur,
A beast of yore,
Doesn’t live here
Any more.
Treat yourself to a poem. Today, and especially tomorrow, Thursday, April 26 – Poem in Your Pocket Day.
(And look out – the Alpha Public Schools are going to announce the winners of their ACE Poetry Contests today. Stay tuned to learn the winners.)
High School Students Learn the Value of Their Voices in KALW Audio Storytelling Class
By Ben Trefny, News Director, KALW Public Radio
Earlier this month, Audio Academy alum Colin Peden (’15) and KALW‘s justice reporter Holly J. McDede spent many days teaching audio storytelling and production to 60 students from Philip and Sala Burton High School in San Francisco. The classes are part of the station’s outreach and training – work that now reaches nearly 150 people of all ages every year!
I asked Holly for some thoughts and Colin for some images from the experience. Check out what they had to share:
The other day, I was talking to Marisol Medina-Cadena, one of KALW’s Audio Academy fellows, about teenagers who don’t realize how important their stories are. I had just begun to co-teach audio engineering and storytelling skills to students at Burton High School. So we talked about young people afraid of their own voices, and awkward adults fumbling around, trying to make some kind of connection, like aliens attempting to reach earth.
Marisol tutors students at an after school program at Galileo High School in San Francisco, and told me about a boy who finally opened up to her about why he was missing class. Turned out, the student DJed with his dad, and often wouldn’t get home until early in the morning. Not only did it make sense why the boy was missing class, but it also became clear he was, to all extents and purposes and definitions, totally cooler than school.
When I began teaching the classes at Burton, a part of me hoped for those kinds of startling revelations. Alongside Colin, our task was to teach students to interview their classmates about songs that mean something to them. They’d take those interviews, and turn them into roughly two minute pieces embedded with music.
I am no psychologist. I do not know if holding a microphone in front of high school students’ mouths causes teenagers to vomit out meaningful words about the world. But when the students interviewed their classmates about their songs, that’s what happened. One student chose You Can’t Have Your Cake and Eat it Too
by Brenda Taylor. “I live in the Bayview,” she said. “I live in poverty, and me and my sisters would ask our dad for things all the time, constantly. So he’d sing, ‘You Can’t Have Your Cake and Eat it Too.’
Another student chose Sideshow
by Traxamillion. It’s a song about sideshows, a kind of illegal automobile exhibition. Police have been cracking down on them in Oakland, but you don’t often get to hear from the people who love them, especially not seventeen year old boys. “It’s a way we get to know each other more,” he said into the microphone. “We do sideshows almost every weekend. Friday. Saturday. Sunday. All of us go crazy when the cars start swinging, nobody stops us from doing our thing. Everybody I know swings.”
The students were shy, and classmates interviewing them had to keep asking questions to get them to keep talking, enough to fill two minutes.
Another student chose Keep Ya Head Up
by Tupac. “Where I live, there’s a lot of single mothers,” she said. She didn’t elaborate, and the person interviewing her just let the statement sit there, and let her say what she wanted to say next. “A lot of songs don’t represent women well,” she said. “My favorite lyric is, ‘And since a man can’t make one / He has no right to tell a woman when and where to create one.'” She went on to describe how the song made her feel important as a woman.
One student chose I-800
by Logic, a song about why it’s important for people to reach out for help when they’re feeling suicidal. “It basically helps people dealing with bad stuff or in a bad mood,” he said. The student interviewing him asked if he had ever felt suicidal. That’s a question I think most reporters would be afraid to ask. He paused, then said, “Well, it’s personal, but I’ll just tell you what’s up.” In simple language, without much detail, he described times in his life where he felt suicidal and said this song brought his hopes up.
After the first day of recording, we were back in class again the next day. A lot of the students came up to us, saying they wanted to try speaking about their songs again on tape and redo the interviews.
The student who talked about suicide ended up re-recorded himself, as though he wasn’t satisfied with what he said the first time. Or maybe he was embarrassed to have talked so openly about depression. Or maybe he thought what he said wasn’t important enough to be on the radio. I hope he knows otherwise. I hope they all do.