Prepare for wherever life takes us

This week Colony High School hosts its seventh annual Poetry Out Loud school competition. Poetry Out Loud is a national poetry recitation contest that began in 2005 with a pilot program in the Washington, D.C., area. The program went national in 2006, and Colony High began its association with the program that same year.

Sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation, the competition employs a pyramid structure: students learn and recite poems in their classrooms, and classroom winners and individual students are eligible to compete at school-level competitions. School winners move on to district contests, and district winners advance to state-level matches.

One winner from each of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands earns an expense-paid trip to Washington, D.C., for the national finals. The competition has grown each year; in 2010, according to the national Poetry Out Loud website, more than 350,000 high school students across the country participated.

Now I know what you’re thinking: Poetry recitation? Really? Is that a marketable skill? Will it help anyone get a job? I’ve survived just fine without ever memorizing or reciting a poem. Memorization in today’s world is a waste of time anyway.

It turns out that researchers have studied what college professors expect of their incoming students and also what employers expect of young people joining the workforce. Interestingly enough, both the professors and employers provided similar lists. David Conley, author of “College Knowledge,” lists the following core skills for students to succeed either in higher education or employment:

• Critical thinking, problem solving and analytical skills.

• An inquisitive and curious nature.

• A receptivity to critical feedback and a willingness to act on it.

• An ability to accept failure and learn from it.

• An ability to make persuasive and articulate written and oral arguments.

• The ability to weigh sources for credibility and relative importance.

• The ability to use technology to enhance learning.

• The capacity to draw independent inferences and reach conclusions.

Looking at that list, Poetry Out Loud (and a host of other school activities) really fits the bill. The item that stands out most on the list of skills to me is an inquisitive and curious nature. This is a hard skill to teach. I am sure about my own curious nature; one of the things I like best about being a librarian is the wide range of questions I get from students and teachers every day and the opportunity I have to help them find answers.

Often, long after a library patron has left, I am still researching and reading in response to a question they’ve asked. Passing that curiosity on to our students, however, can be a bit more challenging. Poetry Out Loud gets right in there as students search for poems and then research the poem’s author, relating that information to their interpretation of the poem. Analytical skills and the ability to draw independent inferences are covered in the process of the student developing an interpretation of the poem. Receptivity to feedback, willingness to act on it and the ability to accept failure and learn from it all come into play in the public performance and nature of the competition.

This year’s national winner, Kristin Dupard, a senior from Mississippi, noted in an interview that when her teacher first suggested she participate, she was less than enthusiastic. While she had always like poetry, she said what really made the experience click for her was her realization that she would combine her own response to her chosen poems with her research and understanding of the author’s life and experiences.

Clearly, Kristen and all the other Poetry Out Loud participants engaged in all the higher-level thinking skills noted as necessary for college and employment. Kristen’s tangible reward for all that hard work: $20,000. The skills and experience she gained doing it? Priceless.

Poetry Out Loud is just one example of a school activity that many people, sadly, would describe as useless. I’m devastated every time I read that a state like Louisiana has decided to “reform” education by presenting students with the chance to test out of classes or gain credit through alternative means that don’t require attendance and participation in a school and its activities.

A life spent in education has taught me that none of us knows where life will take us. I’ve seen students who spent all four years in JROTC, and who decided in the end not to enter the military. I’ve seen students who swore uphill and down in high school that they would never do something, and I later learned they ended up doing just that.

My own 11th grade English teacher prophesied that I would be a teacher, and I laughed in his face (surely he’s laughing now). Life has an exquisite (or perhaps excruciating) sense of irony. We don’t know what our students will face in their future, but I am sure that they have a better shot at facing it well and surviving it with dignity and grace if they have had as wide a range as possible of experiences in high school.

Prudence Plunkett is the librarian at Colony High School.