Poetry at Hamomi

I feel it is long overdue for me to give credit to all of the English teachers I've had over the years who have guided me throughout my academic career. Teaching this subject truly is not an easy task and I never realized just how tricky it can be until we started a poetry class with the students at Hamomi.

To provide some background, the volunteers that were here for a week the first week we got here provided the students in Class 5-8 with their own journals, a space for them to write, draw, do anything that helped express their creative side-- a component in the Kenyan curriculum that is lacking. Eric and I thought it would be fun to continue the journal classes by teaching them basic poetry, expanding their creative side and perhaps opening a window for future poets to emerge. Boy, were we in for a treat.

 We pretty successfully guided them through Haikus, although it took time to explain to them that while their three lines may all have the correct number of syllables, they must be about one topic. One sentence about food being good, and the next about your mother's name is Mary, with the conclusion about hens laying eggs doesn't quite work. And yes, that was an actual example. But, after a lot of practice, lots of clapping out syllables, and countless examples, the students had it down.

So feeling confident in our poetry teaching abilities, we decided the next step would be to teach them the basic structure of the rhyming poem. Simple enough, right? WRONG. In coming up with our lesson plans to teach basic rhyming, we neglected to take into account something that would ultimately be the downfall of our experiment: the Kenyan accent. While I pride myself in speaking "correct" English with the "correct" accent, Kenyans speak what they call " the queen's English", or some sort of variation of that. We thought rhyming would be straight forward,  with the basic rule that the words must sound the same to be considered a rhyme. Well, when I say car, and they say ca, that creates quite the disconnect between what  I consider rhyming that what they do.  This brings us to one of the class periods, where we put a word on the board and had them give us other words that rhyme with it. I'll use the example of sun for this blog. although there are many many examples I could use, this one is the best for conveying my point.

The word is sun. Students excitedly wave their hands yelling "cha cha, me cha me cha" ( cha, short for teacha--teacher) and snapping in your direction to get your attention-- yes, snapping. I can only imagine the world of hurt an American student would be in if they snapped in their teacher's face to get noticed. But, back to class. As we call on the first few students, we are encouraged that they may actually be getting this rhyming thing down. We've added words like done, run, and the other son to our list. Then one student says, "bun", but not bun like the hamburger, bun as is "burn"-- what you don't want to happen to the meat. Eric and I exchange a worried glance, as they aren't completely wrong. The way they say it is correct, however, we explain, you must look at the way it's spelled and how it sounds matched up against the word sun. Yet, we find this contradictory, as we've tried to enforce upon them the idea that words don't need to be spelled the same to sound the same ( reference done and sun). Let's try another one. We're given can. Sigh. Oh boy.

Let’s try School. We're given drool, cool, fool, pretty good. Fuel.... Hm. Eric and I differed, as I think they could be used to rhyme, for all intensive purposes, but Eric says they are two different rhymes ( fuel rhymes with mule, and mule does not rhyme with school). So, we let is slide and it is added to the list. Then, we’re given full. Full clearly does not rhyme with school, however, the way they say school-- schull, and full-- sounds almost identical. Bigger sigh. What have we gotten ourselves into. I don't know who is more confused at this point, the students who don't understand why the words the way they say them don't count or us as we try to further explain that how they are spelled and pronounced must be taken into consideration. i think we were way out of our league with this one.

Some more rhyme suggestions from the students:  lap and pat, me and meat, ate and meat. no, no, no. After having five lists of words that rhyme, we encourage them to try to use two of the word from a list to create a couplet. We spit out examples like, "  I was late arriving at the gate" and " I cry when I hear a lie" or " the morning light was oh so bright". Charged with ample explanation, we waited a few minutes as the students hurriedly scratched out sentences.

Now comes the next entertaining part of being a teacher at Hamomi, aside from the snapping and cha hollering. While the students are almost always exceptionally behaved, when it comes time for you to check their books, all bets are off. Ten of them shove their books in your hands, one piling up on top of the other. They shove each other out of the way, interrupt the one you're currently reading, all trying to be the next one to be read. Oh, this is also accompanied with the " cha" chant. It's really quite amusing. I looked at the first few and wondered where we went wrong. Here are some examples:

" Me and my friends sat under a tree"-- While Me and Tree rhyme, I tried to explain, the word me should be at the end of the first sentence, so that it lines up with tree.

" The sun was bright. I went through the gate"-- This student took one word from two different lists, however, I told her, you must pick two words from the same list to make a rhyme. One word from each list doesn't work.

" I like to play, the hen lays eggs". SIGHHHHHHHH.

I must stop here to say that I was not frustrated with the students, but rather with my less than clear explanation on the structure of the couplets. I truly don't know how else we could've made it more clear. We gave so many examples, went through numerous pieces of chalk writing different rhymes on the board, underlining the words, making lists, we felt like we exhausted all of our energy and still weren't getting through.

At this point, we are encouraged that some of the students have managed to grasp the concept of rhyming, class 7 and 8 more so than 5/6, but we have not given up hope. We plan to do more exercises with fill in the blank poems and bring in poems in Swahili ( thanks to the suggestion from our friend Brian, as all Swahili words are pronounced just like they are spelled). We will continue with rhyming until the students get it down or become severely uninterested in the topic, at which point we'll switch gears. I have a feeling as to which one will come first, but we'll keep our fingers crossed.

Laurel