Luck

Responding to Langston Hughes' "Luck"

I have no use for
rabbits' feet,
lucky charms,
or
pots of gold.
How lucky was
that foot
for the rabbit, anyway?
Lucky charms
lost,
now found-- where's
the luck
in that?
You know who's lucky?
You are.
You woke up
this morning.
Whether you had
a bad day
or
a good day
you had a day.
Every year
every month
every day
hour
minute
we roam the earth
we are lucky.
We can be
someone else's luck
to live,
to love,

to battle this journey of life,

it's luck.

Today is the second day of our poetry unit. We read two Langston Hughes poems to exercise active reading strategies on troublesome texts.
Today, students talked back to the text. The strategy is called, Talking To the Text in reading apprenticeship but I called it marginalia way before someone told me what I had been doing was new. (You know you're getting old when some new PhD is touting something you have been doing for years as a "new strategy.") Anyway, I didn't just want students to mark up the text with their own metacognitive inquiry, I also wanted them to respond to the ideas of his poem.

We brainstormed what we individually thought luck was: symbols, animals, events and phrases and then we contemplated what Langston seemed to think luck was. I don't agree with Langston's stanza that:

To some people
Love is given,
To others
Only heaven
(Daybook 11)

I shared my dissent with my classes and, as they brainstormed, I composed my reaction to the idea that luck is merely scraps from the table of joy that we like the family dog wait mournfully to retrieve, hoping all along a bone of luck will be flung instead.

I sat here earlier today trying to think what to write about this week. It has been nearly seven days since my last post. Showing students by example how to brainstorm, free-associate, and letting them see how you compose is pretty powerful. I didn't have the whining of "I don't know what to write." or "This is hard." They took the challenge and did the best they could.

It doesn't take much to make a happy teacher.