Okay, I admit I spent this summer watching a ballroom dancing reality show, but it had many metaphorical and educational applications to my life and my work as a teaching poet. Really. For instance, if a short-term artist’s residency is like a quick-step dance—all light and grace to the casual observer, all manic footwork to the artist—then a long-term residency is a tango—soulful, involved, and necessitating many reversals. In the dawning of arts-in-education, it was decided that five would be the magical number of days a guest should spend in the classroom, and so the artistic quick-step was born. Now, supported mostly by Empire State Partnerships (ESP), artists are encouraged to spend 20, 30, or more days with the same students during teaching residencies. There are charms and challenges to both short and long-term residencies, but I prefer the tango.

Sherry Robbins with a 4th grade student at Wyoming Central; Wyoming, NY

In a short-term residency, there are five days (sometimes fewer) to: engage students and their teachers, break down clichéd notions and fears about poetry, pass on a few tools with which students can create or understand a poem, get a handful of poems from each student, and have a culminating celebration of their accomplishment in the form of a reading or class anthology. If I don’t dance as fast as I can while exuding an aura of fun, I don’t get asked back. The process may sound a bit frantic but, as all good teaching artists know, if you love your art and you love young people, then chances are you really are having fun and can generate excitement in the short time allotted.

The way to engage students (and the challenge of short-term residencies) is to get to know each one individually. In order to do that, I spend their writing time going around the room, looking over shoulders, and having short, quiet conversations with each student. I save class time at the end of each period for poems to be read, either by the poets or anonymously, by me. I usually then take the poems home and go over them again. Hearing the poems once in class, reading them again at home, and then handing them back the next day helps me to match a name with faces and writing styles. It is vital in these short residencies to make each student feel that their work has been seen and their voice heard. My goal is not to acquaint them with arcane poem forms, but to get them to trust their own voice and to read aloud, or at least acknowledge a piece as being theirs when it is read.

The best short-term residencies are those that occur annually. The fifth graders may be new each year (though not necessarily), but the teachers, administrators, and staff are usually the same. Last year’s students may see you in the hall and, while not remembering your name, yell out, “Hey, Poetry Lady!” Older siblings and friends let the younger ones know they are in for a treat. Best of all, the teachers become friends and the planning process becomes a truly collaborative effort. In the classroom, the teacher is a real partner, writing along with the students, filling me in on which ones might need special attention and which might need to be left alone. Familiar with each other, we can roll with the surprises built into every school day.

Travis Rogers 10th grade student work (2005)

In a fourth grade class at Wyoming Central, I had to wait while Trooper Paul and his D.A.R.E. program ran over their allotted time. As he was packing up, I asked him, almost as a “dare,” if he had a favorite poem. He then stood up in full State Trooper uniform, recited a Shakespearean sonnet (“Let me not to the marriage of true minds/ Admit impediments”), and told the story of the wedding that prompted his feat of memorization. The teacher, not a big poetry fan herself, but passionate about the annual residency and the effect it had on her students, organized the students into pairs and had them work together to memorize lines of the sonnet. On Trooper Paul’s next visit, the class surprised him with a recitation of the poem that meant so much to him. My plan for the day may have flown out the window, but the value of having Trooper Paul break into poetry was, as they say, priceless.

These are the kinds of spontaneous learning experiences that come naturally to partners familiar with each other’s working styles, and so are common to long-term residencies. I have been fortunate enough to be a part of several long-term ESP residencies, and have seen clearly the value of familiarity. It may breed contempt in families sentenced to cross-country car trips, but in the schools it encourages a deepening of trust and of content.

At Buffalo’s Native American magnet school, I worked with grades 2-4 for several years. I was literally able to follow students through their first attempts at forming letters to their sure knowledge of most poetic devices and their confident and original creative expressions. When you become a part of a school and its culture, you are not the five-day wonder brought in as a diversion from the mid-winter blahs; you are there as an involved and committed partner, learning at least as much as you teach. At Native American, I learned how to integrate the Six Nations culture into what I taught. I learned from teachers who faced enormous challenges how to actually make my lessons fit with and enhance their own. I learned from administrators how to use their reading lists and upper grade tutors to take poetry off the page and into new territory. And from students (second graders!) I learned that a poem is different from a story “because it has a tune to it,” because it “is like a question.”

At the Buffalo Academy of Visual and Performing Arts (BAVPA), the teachers have very clear ideas about how to integrate poetry into their curricula. We meet, along with our cultural partner, twice a month during the school year and several times over the summer to plan themes, projects, and schedules. Working with grades 9-12 over the span of several years, I can watch students grow into poets; I watch them turn their poetry into every imaginable form of art and social comment.

Ezekiel Titus 10th grade student work (2005)

The BAVPA administration is so committed to ESP that they dedicated a room to it. For the first time, I’m not a “poetry lady guest,” I’m Sherry, and if it is Friday, then I must be in Gallery 110. Students who may not have responded to a five day visit have slowly entered the dance of poetry that has been going on at BAVPA for all of their high school years. Once they are sure of their voices, I help them delve more deeply into content, to take more risks. They come down to 110 to share poems during lunch or to read something new to a class from another discipline or grade level. I visit their studios and learn more about them (and their teachers) through their chosen art forms. Sometimes a senior leads the collaborative dance, sometimes a freshman, sometimes a teacher, sometimes me. Sometimes the rhythm is thrown off a little by a fire drill or field trip. Sometimes we are rocked by major reversals, as when our cultural partner suffered major layoffs that included our team leader, right before our big culminating event! But we are tangoing now, involved in each other’s lives in a creative, committed, soulful way, and we are sure of the dance’s worth. Jesse R., a sophomore, summed that worth up in a few short lines:

The truth comes out now
in this little moment of clarity
here’s my time to explain,
tell you about me.
Here I go.

Sherry Robbins is a Buffalo-based poet who has published two books of poetry, Snapshots of Paradise and Or, the Whale. She has been teaching poetry for 30 years and was named the 2005 New York State Teaching Artist of the Year.