Judith J. Katz
At nearly the end of a year of teaching creative writing to 10th graders I came upon a great idea. It was at a moment of teacherly desperation/inspiration, which is often when the best ideas come to me. We were writing Villanelles: complex poems that are almost mathematical in their structure. A student asked me, as my students often do, "Ms. Katz. Why we gotta' do this?"
The screen in my head cleared and I saw the words "because I'm the teacher and I want you to." But I waited until those words were replaced by perhaps more useful words to this effect. "The thing is (a very teacherly opening) we are writers or at least for the two hours a day we are in this room, we are writers. We have to communicate something. It's our job. It's a hard job. How do we learn to do it?
I believe that all effective communication is delivered in a container. The container for the communication we are having right now is a conversation perhaps leading to a discussion. Containers have recognizable standards and rules they follow. It's easy to tell the difference between a conversation and a speech. At minimum the first requires communication between 2 people and the second requires delivery of a message from one to one, or more, others. They are different kinds of containers that have different rules for us to follow as we use them.
Words are the content and we choose them carefully because we are trying to make a point. The reason for the communication, the overriding idea that influences the choice of container and content is the concept.
So in this case the concept is that you asked a question and I am answering the question. Hopefully that will lead to more questions, answers, insights and thoughts that we can share. The container we are using to deliver our communication is conversation. The conversation may develop into a discussion that will include the rest of the people in the room. That would be yet another kind of container which is a little bigger (broader) than our two-way conversation.
The words and phrases we choose (content) for a conversation are words that make up common language and are easy to understand. They are explanatory, searching, and descriptive in nature. Slang is often part of the content of conversation in a way that it wouldn't be in a speech.
Here's an example: of yet another kind of container. Musicians communicate to us through their song (container) using music (content) and generally that song is part of a particular conceptual context (concept) like rap, jazz, or opera. The three ideas of container, content and concept combine in an art to create communication.
How does a musician learn to communicate through music you might ask? Go ahead. Ask. He or she practices scales (content) and then practices the concepts and containers that have been utilized by successful musicians before them.
How do we learn to do our job as student/writers? We do it the same way. We practice our version of scales. We practice using combinations of words. We use the dictionary and thesaurus to learn more words so that we have more content to work with. We practice the concepts and containers that have been utilized by successful writers before us.
And that's why we're trying to write Villanelles."
At which point another one of my students said, "Yo, Ms. Katz, this container is getting on my last nerve." Which made us all laugh.
And that is how I knew that I was on to something. My students had begun to use my invented vocabulary to communicate back to me. It was a radical improvement over where the conversation began. They were learning.
Meanwhile back at the beginning of my story…I realized during the conversation that the idea of container, content and concept might be a great way to introduce the idea of poetic form. The creative possibilities that these three ideas opened up in me were so attractive that I felt saddened that I had come to them at the end of the year.
I decided to create a poetry-writing curriculum that would combine these three ideas (container, content, and concept) with the simplest poetic form I know: Haiku. Since I often begin teaching poetic form with the Haiku, I became excited by the idea of simplifying the method of teaching that form even further.
What follows is the way in which I intend to approach teaching Haiku through the ideas of container, content, and concept.
