Slam or spoken word poetry, and its sometimes extemporaneous hip-hop-style recitation, is a trendy way to prove to students that a poem has a life beyond the page. But one teacher and her middle school English class in Madison, Wisconsin have taken the curriculum in an R-rated direction.
An investigation from Wisconsin’s MacIver Institute found eighth-grade teacher Abigail Swetz of O’Keefe Middle School would promote sometimes sexually themed student work; her lessons called for “found” poems about intimate aspects of students’ lives. And the eighth-graders, usually 12 or 13 years old, had their performances published on Swetz’s YouTube channel for all to see.
A tip from a concerned citizen sparked the investigation by MacIver’s Bill Osmulski. After MacIver emailed Swetz, her principal and the district superintendent a little more than a week ago, Swetz set her YouTube channel to “private.” But MacIver investigators compiled the following video from downloaded material—
The MacIver report, by investigator Bill Osmulski, reads:
(You can read more from Osmulski here.)
Swetz’s teacher training also centered on the no-holds-barred expressive and confessional poetry curriculum. And she encourages students to participate in open mics and leads field trips to poetry contests, where she reportedly also performs original poetry of her own:
It was also at an off-campus poetry event attended by students that she reportedly said, “We’re not at school, so I get to be political. As if you didn’t already know, I support gay marriage.” Of course, natural details about a teacher’s home life can’t reasonably be off-limits, but educators do still (or used to, as a matter of practice) keep personal matters ostensibly separate from class discussions.
According to Osmulski’s report, “[Madison Metropolitan School District] would not comment if the district has any policies about explicit material and presentations. [MacIver News Service] also wanted to know if parents had objections, could they opt their children out of the class?”
But it seems the Madison Metropolitan School District, according to its website, does have rules dictating how classroom teachers should treat “controversial issues”—sex, drugs, and the politics surrounding sexual preference presumably fall under this heading, particularly in a middle school classroom. It’s district policy that a teacher “[u]ndertakes the presentation of a controversial issue to students only after careful study and planning,” and “[c]onfers with the principal or staff specialist if there is doubt regarding the appropriateness of discussing a controversial issue.”
Rules like these, last updated in 2002 and currently in active effect per the district website, tend to arise from necessity. And while they’re on free-spirited end of the spectrum (a teacher is a “participant” and “moderator” in discussions, the policy reads), it’s pretty clear Swetz has run afoul of more than a few statutes. Take for instance the requirement that a teacher “[w]ithholds the expression of personal opinion unless asked a direct question.”
Swetz seemingly confesses to flouting this one in a poem, recited an after-hours open mic session, about how she decides what she’ll teach the class—”Some days I look out over my students and I close my lesson plan and I shut my door and I open my eyes to the lessons they really need to learn, no matter what some dead old white guy legislators in Washington deem worthy of my curriculum.”
Teachers’ concealing their biases and withholding personal opinions in the classroom are crucial practices to ensure intellectual development. (They’re also, I’ll venture, increasingly rare.) If children’s “critical thinking” indeed requires an “atmosphere in which student feel free to express opinions and to challenge ideas,” they should never feel pressure to align their own writing and thinking with their teacher’s politics, nor to push the envelope in their poetry assignments to suit her taste for the avant garde.
Unlike Swetz’s now “private” classroom videos, actually age-appropriate slam poetry lesson plans aren’t so hard to find online. “Touchscreen,” about technology’s cheapening human life, would be a particularly strong classroom resource as a model for student poets. It doesn’t get much more age-appropriate that teacher and slam poet Taylor Mali’s “Totally Like Whatever You Know?“—a spoken word poem celebrating the lost art of speaking with conviction about actually worthy subjects.
