Haiku

I love haiku. I love haiku because I had an RA in college who, if you locked yourself out and required her keys, would make you write a haiku for her. I hated haiku then, but now I love it.

Actually I love haiku not because of my curmudgeonly RA, but because they use so few syllables, there is metric requirement but it is not complicated, and it's such a beautiful way of asking students to summarize something in very few words. They have to be very effective to make it work. You also have to practice this a lot with your students until they get good at it. Write many haiku (haikus? haikunes? haikua? what's more than one haiku?) with them.




Recently we've had a spate of fascinating adjectives. So today in a fit of review-the-vocab happiness, I divided kids into groups of three and asked them to write a haiku. I then quietly assigned each group an adjective. The poems had to be able to be described by that adjective. When they finished, I took up their poems, typed them, showed them to the class, and we read them together. Then, we tried to guess what adjective they were trying to write their poem for. I present to you, without further ado, a poema periculosum (dangerous poem):

cervus carus est
si cervus amaverit
te venabitur.

a deer is precious.
if the deer will have loved you,
it will hunt for you.

Why a deer? Beyond me. But it was a great review assignment, let the kids loose with their creativity, and because it was a group assignment, they could play off each other not only for inspiration but also lingual assistance. Guessing was a lot of fun, too.