Brynn Saito in the Classroom

A. Brynn's poem "How to Prepare the Mind for Lightning":

1. Listen to the poem.

2. Reread the poem. What do you notice? Discuss with your partner.

3. Use the COMMENT feature to post at least one comment about what you notice on the poem. Put your & your partner's names at the beginning of the comment.

4. Talk with your partner about places that others have commented upon.

5. Form questions about what the author is doing in the text. Use the comment feature to post at least one question. Put your & your partner's names at the beginning of the comment. (You may wish to focus on literary devices such as form, repetition, imagery, etc)

6. Reply to another partnership's comment or question, again putting your & your partner's names at the beginning of the comment. Extend the comment by naming what you see Saito doing, or respond to a question.

If you want to go further:

B. Crowdsource analysis!

Teacher directions:

• Share the results with students. Now they have lots of evidence and commentary to use while writing a response. Bonus: they can practice citing their classmates.

• Alternately, you could remove names and have them discuss the validity of various interpretations.

C. Socrative: With your partner create a claim that identifies the theme of the poem. For example, "In 'Half-Mexican', Juan Felipe Herrera argues that by seeing people as only partially we do not honor their humanity or treat them with dignity.")

Teacher directions: Choose 'short answer'. There's an option to require names. You can reveal class responses & students can vote on the "best" answer.

D. Word cloud generator.

Teacher directions:

• Have students discuss: What do we notice? What do we wonder?

• Students can write a found poem with the words from the word cloud (I suggest eliminating words that occur less than two or three times as well as articles (to/a/the)--make it manageable for them.)

My students' favorite Brynn Saito poem: "Like Any Good American".

We use her photo essay Acts of Grace: Memory journeys through the San Joaquin Valley as a mentor text when we are writing a personal essay.

Brynn Saito's poems online: https://brynnsaito.com/onlineworks

The Yonsei Memory Project and an introduction to the Project by cofounders Saito and Nikiko Masumoto