Time to do some reflection on what makes Beacon such an amazing place…

Friday night, Beacon had its "I Sing America" poetry festival. It’s something that we’ve been doing for five years now. Sam Laybourne used to teach 11th grade English. Essentially, he said Walt Whitman first sang America, and then Sherman Alexie – 100 years later – answered him, and now it was his students’ turn to sing their version of the American vision. So for the past five years, over 100 Beacon juniors have read hundreds of American poets, written thousands of poems, revised them, and then finally performed them in front of several hundred of their peers. The poems range from the brilliant to the less-than-brilliant, but one student summed up the moment when she said, “I’ve never been so proud of my grade as right now.” These kids have proven that they can both learn about Modernism and Post-Modernism, about couplets and rhyme schemes, but most importantly, they have shown us what they can do. And when the kids turn in the analytical papers that go along with the performance and creative writing components of this unit, it will be – if history is any indicator – as strong as anything they’ve written this year.

I was lucky enough to teach the ISA unit for two years before turning it over to Katie Balaschak who has taken over my 11th grade classes. Both years, it was the highlight of my year, as it really was the essence of what I think the spirit of Beacon’s educational philosophy is. We deconstructed dozens of poems, wrote even more and then the unit culminated with a performance that showed off the best of what we had learned. Was it easy? No… and certainly, I am sure that there were kids who performed who couldn’t wait to get off the stage, but also, I know that there were a lot of kids who found their voices on that stage, and I know that there are kids who took that performance with them long after the night was over. I saw it again Friday night in the faces of those poets on stage and in the energy the crowd gave back to them.