Teacher / Poet #40

A Modest Proposal

A Modest Proposal

I want to write something about letters. Letters as a form, and letters as a teaching tool. Young people reading this who I’ve taught, those who have been in my classes for longer than a week, will already be rolling their eyes. Omg, Czaia, really? Again with the letters?

In almost every class I’ve taught, especially those in the last decade, I have students write so many letters: letters to me, letters to themselves, letters to each other about their work, letters to other students in other schools, even letters to living writers.

I don’t have a fancy-sounding rationale for why we write so many letters in my classes. Like many decisions in my teaching life, and in my life-life, I’ve made this one based on intuition. (Thanks, Father Brown, for making this quality of my being clear to me in correspondence regarding a recent Teacher / Poet issue.) I sensed in these assignments, from the beginning, that students’ authentic voices were making their way onto the page. Real and inimitable phrasing and modes of expression. And perhaps even more importantly a match between conversational and writing voice–which is so often lost, and so often very early in a young person’s schooling life. When I sensed this happening, I committed to it, and more deeply, and more often as a teacher. That is the long and the short of my decision-making on writing letters in class.

Of course, it is also always a good idea as a teacher in an education system like our own to have more clear and less fuzzy reasons than “intuition” to justify your decisions. So here’s another: “this is what real writers do.”

Real writers write letters! Lots of them. In fact, once real writers become well-known and well-regarded enough, people even collect their letters, put them into books, and other people buy those books of letters. Can you imagine? Real people paying real money to read the correspondence of other people? So it is, and has always been, in the world of literature.

Not to mention that so many of the most enduring works of literature are written in the form of letters. Think about James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, composed as a letter to the author’s nephew, or Martin Luther King’s “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” addressed to “moderate” religious leaders who were not supporting King’s racial justice work (and in effect standing squarely in its way.)

Or, in recent memory, there is the work of Ta-Nehisi Coates whose Between the World and Me is a memoir written in the form of a letter to the author’s son. And The Message, Coates’ latest book, a work of journalistic reportage and a memoir as well, is addressed to a group of students in one of Coates’ Howard University classes.

And regardless of your religious convictions or lack thereof, it would be foolish not to acknowledge the importance of this literary form to the New Testament of the Bible. How else to make sense of it without all of those letters from apostles to communities of believers in the gospel?

And you, dear reader, doubtless have many, many other examples of your own. In fact, just as I’m trying to move on from these examples to a different avenue of reflection, I can’t help but sputter out–“And let’s not forget Lady Whistledown from Brigerton! Who gets all of 18th-19th century London talking with her sharp-tongued interpretation of events in the fictionalized royal court.” You see how hard it is to unsee the ubiquity of this form once you’ve first glimpsed it?

But I was meaning to talk about the letter as a teaching tool. As you know, there is a whole lot of talk these days about AI. In the AI talk in schools, chatGPT in particular comes up a lot, probably because students (and teachers) use it a lot now. What does this have to do with letters?

Well, the “literary analysis essay” has long been a staple of literature and language arts classrooms. This assignment–and its variation in other school classes–has also always been a tempting one (even before the internet) for students to cheat on. To turn in work that is not their own. And, honestly, I understand why that is.

Oftentimes, students are assigned to write on a work of literature they have not chosen to read. And the chief (and often only) audience for their writing, their teacher, knows that work of literature much, much better than they do. Often, they are struggling to understand what is happening in the text, let alone come to terms with their thinking or interpretation of it. Then along comes Cliff’s Notes. Then the internet. Then Google. And now chatGPT.

If you have a transactional relationship with your own education (a relationship which we encourage in our educational system–do this thing not for its own sake but for what it can get you–), then it follows that you would naturally have a transactional relationship with the deliverers of the information that you want to obtain. And with the texts that hold that information. Note that I say “information” and not “wisdom.” Wisdom, which is surely what so many of the poets and playwrights and novelists are after in their work, is not possible if you approach it in a transactional manner.

But from many students’ perspective, if you can get the essay you need–5 paragraphs on Gatsby or the Iliad, or Morrison’s Beloved or whatever it is, and have it ‘humanized’ so it reads like a high school student sorta wrote the thing, why not?

I get it.

And yet, for most of you reading this essay, you are hungry not simply for information but for wisdom. And if you’re a teacher reading this essay (which, let’s face it, almost all of us are in some capacity), then you want to figure out how to work against the grain of that transactional view of education I’ve sketched out above, and towards a more humane and relationship-centered one. There are many great laborers working in that vineyard. And a lot of systems and movements being proposed to create or make a large change.

My aim in this essay is more modest and focused, a proposal that any teacher could put into practice tomorrow: have your students write more letters.

I’ll share two letter assignments I’ve done with students this year–one that I have shamelessly stolen from the Academy of American Poets, and one that I made up in collaboration with teachers I’ve met through my work in Notre Dame’s Advanced Placement Teacher Investment Program (AP-TIP). Both of these assignments are genuinely fun for both you and your students to do, and they also get students to write literary analysis that puts forward a thesis and offers evidence and commentary to support it. (Last I checked, all that stuff is still in the Common Core / College Board, right? I mean, except the ‘fun’ part, of course.)

First, for the theft outright (thanks Heid E. Erdrich via Frost for that phrasing): the “Dear Poet” project. Some of you might already know of this lovely initiative. The idea is fairly simple: students read a poem by a particular living poet. They study it, question it, consider it from as many angles as possible (including the angle of their personal life). Then they write a letter to the poet about their response to the poem. This, in itself, is a beautiful thing to do in any classroom, as it shifts the audience from the static ‘oneness’ of the teacher to a living artist who has in some way intrigued or engaged the student.

But then just as exciting to me was seeing the thoughtful and engaged responses back from the poets themselves. For samples of this back-and-forth between poet and student, check out these letters from 2022, on the Academy’s website.

So, with little work beyond clicking to “apply” on the Academy of American Poets’ website, you, too, teacher / reader, could get your students to do this assignment. Of course, with the largeness in scale of the Academy of American Poet’s project, there would be no guarantee your student would get a response from the poet they wrote to. And that reciprocal aspect was of vital importance to me. I didn’t want the students to get a sense of ‘writing into the void,’ but of a real, live artist on the other end of their letter, responding to them.

So I decided to create my own list of poets who I had had the good luck to meet and interact with over the years–in readings, in my MFA program, online, via social media, etc. I reached out to them, explained the project, and asked if they’d be willing to write some letters to high school students about a poem they’d written. About 15 poets said yes, enough to cover all my sections of classes at the time. (This first year I did the initiative was 2020-2021–a year our high school was completely online. Remember those days?)

What a gift from these artists! Out of respect for my own school’s guidelines regarding publishing student work, I’m not including particular examples here, but I have to tell you: the precision, care, and quality of the writing on this assignment is always off the charts. As you might imagine, the assignment does take a good bit of logistical work and organizational thinking (especially at the front end). But it is really worth it.

So that is a letter-based assignment I’ve had running for the past five years now. A new one for me this year that is equally exciting involves peer to peer interaction and interpretation of a poem.

With teaching poetry, I’m always looking for new ways to hook students on the art form, and in ways that connect with what they already know about it. (Many students come in to our classrooms memorizing the lyrics of favorite songs or lyrics by insta-poets.) So I’m always thinking about acts of reading and interpretation that are non-academic and of interest to a broader public. Podcasts are another beautiful example of this kind of form. And, as you’re no doubt aware, reader, poetry podcasts in particular have been flourishing.

To list a few for you to sample, if you don’t already know about them: Poetry Unbound with Padraig O’Tuama, The Slow Down with Major Jackson, Poetry VS by the Poetry Foundation. (And I’m sure you have many others–please do add them in comments below.)

All of these podcasts have the benefit of emphasizing poetry as a spoken art, getting it out of our heads and off the page–into our mouths and our ears. I wondered aloud to colleagues this summer, at one of those AP-TIP workshops I mentioned earlier, “How fun would it be for our students to make their own poetry podcasts–and then share them with each other?”

Two teachers I shared this idea with, Suzie Baldwin and Lauren Schwartz, were amenable (even excited) about the idea. Together, we had our students select a poem to read and interpret. Then, after having listened to our teacher examples of podcasts, they created one of their own, using the screensharing program, ScreenCastify. (There’s a free educational account you can create that will be fine for this purpose.)

We then paired our students up with each other, pen-pal style, and they were able to see and listen to each other's podcasts. And then–to stay on theme here–they wrote letters to each other summing up their thoughts on the poem their partner’s interpretation of it. Again, as with the “Dear Poet” project, the quality of analysis was very high, and perhaps even more heartening was the rhetorical awareness. It was clear from the writing and conversation around this project that students knew that another intelligent young person was going to receive their video and letter on a particular poem, and that that intelligent young person might have different ways of reading and interpreting the text. So they wanted to be persuasive and thoughtful and respectful of this peer audience.

Also, though Suzie, Lauren, and I as veteran English teachers may have lots of experience reading poetry, we all had to admit that so many of the poems students chose for this project we were reading for the first time. So we were not the “experts” of the text to be set up as judges of student writing and interpretation. In this way, we were genuinely facilitating fresh encounters with poems–and having those fresh first encounters ourselves. (Not a bad side benefit.)

Of course, with assignments like the two I’ve mentioned, with as many moving parts and participants, there are bound to be hiccups. And there were. Technology that didn’t work on the first go. A reluctant (or lazy) student or two who didn’t hold up their end. A poet who may have forgotten about their letters and was a tad late in responding, etc. etc. So, as a teacher, if you dive into this world of assignments, you do have to relinquish a bit of your control over every last aspect of the assignment, since you are in community with so many others. But vale la pena, as they say. It’s worth every bit of trouble you may encounter.

And for the skeptic out there (and the one inside me) who may reasonably ask, “Well, couldn’t chatGPT just write the student letter, too?” Well, yes, they could. But how would they do it?

Because I was curious about this possibility, I actually typed in to the chatGPT box my letter prompt for students, as well as specific titles of contemporary poems–that students were interpreting or writing to a living poet about. I even included links to the poems themselves. And I found out something strange. In contrast to the ways the AI would accurately scan and spit back reams of applicable evidence from a novel like Their Eyes Were Watching God (another text we’re studying in my classes this year), when asked to examine and offer specific textual evidence from the poems in our letter assignments, chatGPT actually made up text. Yes, you read that correctly. Whole lines, stanzas, themes of poems were just invented whole cloth by the computer!

Perhaps this is because poems (especially new poems) do not have the same “digital footprint” as longer and more widely read works. But even a pretty well-known poem by the poet laureate of the United States, Ada Limón, “A New National Anthem,” provoked these outright fictions by chatGPT.

I wrote in the chatGPT box: “Write a letter to another student about the Ada Limón poem, "A New National Anthem." Include specific textual evidence.”

ChatGPT responded (in seconds, of course): “The poem begins with a striking contrast between the idea of a national anthem and Limon's vision of what could truly embody the spirit of a nation. She writes, "The anthem is not sung. / It is not a flag waving in the wind." This immediately challenges the conventional symbols of patriotism that we associate with national pride. Instead of glorifying symbols like flags or anthems, Limon suggests that real national values should be rooted in more humble, universal experiences, such as connection and care.”

None of those lines chatGPT are in the actual poem, nor are the multiple lines that chatGPT cites in the paragraphs that follow. I repeated this exercise with multiple poems I or students had read in class or for pleasure–Dana Gioia’s “Prayer,” Javon Jackson’s “cuz he’s black,” my own poem, “Knucklehead,” just for kicks. In all these cases, chatGPT wrote a smooth and slick letter that made up the text of the poem that it was supposedly analyzing and citing.

What do I take from this? As with many things in life, that it is beautiful and a benefit to be ‘under the radar.’

And also, that the act of policing, monitoring, and surveilling may not always be worthwhile. And considering that queries like my own (“keeping the chatGPT browser open”) have significant environmental impacts, maybe it is worth trusting your own knowledge of a student’s work rather than a computer’s.

So, here I am, back at intuition. Happy letter-writing, dear reader.

Until soon,

Zach

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THANK YOU NOTES:

-Thank you to these wonderful humans who wrote to my students this year:

Sarah Cortez

, Ann Iverson, Nathaniel Perry, Father Joseph Brown, SJ, Kelly Scott Franklin, Michael Kleber Diggs, Matthew Johnson, Philip Metres, Luis Daniel Salgado, Jen Manthey, Patrick Hansel, Dralandra Larkins, Maria Hamilton Abegunde,

Mary Grace Mangano

, Anne Sawyer, Ariane Sandford, and Isha Camara. Your generosity and attentiveness does so much good in the world. And truly cannot be measured.

-Thank you to Lauren Schwartz and Suzie Baldwin. Your willingness to try this assignment with me meant so much–and made for connections we could not have imagined before the beginning of the school year.

-Here’s a link to that marvelous (live) podcast interview with Ta-Nehisi Coates on his new book The Message. It’s worth the full listen.

-What about you, reader? What are literary (or nonliterary) forms of letters this Substack post made you think of?