JHS Poetry Slam Poems

A few weeks ago, I competed in my school's first poetry slam. I was the only faculty member to compete, but I had such a blast! :) I even made it to the second round of competition, which essentially means the crowd liked my first poem far more than my second.

Here are my poems from that evening, including the one I didn't get to read. Keep in mind my audience consisted of my students, so they're not my most serious work. ;)

Dear Lesson 6.2
Dear Lesson 6.2
"Graphing Polynomial Functions:"
I can't stand you.
Period.
I don't even remember learning you,
So you're obviously useless.
My students hate your guts.
Most can't even remember how to start your problems,
And several don't understand why we do your steps.
How do you expect me to teach you
with all of this loathing around?
I think I'll cut you from my curriculum
and just teach my kids how to graph with a calculator
instead.

Sincerely,
Ms. A


An Ode to My Facebook Inbox
As I turn on my laptop
I sign in and see
I have a new message
Waiting for me.
I get all excited --
From whom could it be?
I hover my mouse
Over the link
To discover the sender
And I stop and blink --

That's who sent me a message?
That's who thought of me today?
That's who took the time to write?
That's who I'll have to respond to?

That's who I'll be avoiding today...


Third Round Poem
I tried to write a poem,
But none of the rhymes would fit.

I tried to write a poem,
But all the rhythms were out of wack.

I tried to write a poem,
And all my ideas came out like blobs.

I tried to write a poem...

And then decided I probably wouldn't
make it to the third round anyway
So no one was going to hear it
So what was the point anyway?

Just getting the ball rolling...Part II

Ok, so the first part was the list of books I'm supposedly supposed to have read if I'm an avid reader.

Here's the list of books I've actually read (that are worth mentioning), either for class or on my own. They are in no particular order, simply the order I remembered them. I think it's crazy how I forget sometimes what I've read, even though the books have had so much impact on me. So I hope this helps.

Atonement, Ian McEwan
Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions, Edwin Abbott Abbott
The Lace Reader, Brunonia Barry
Love Medicine, Louise Erdrich
The Beet Queen, Louise Erdrich
The Bingo Palace, Louise Erdrich
The Painted Drum, Louise Erdrich
Four Souls, Louise Erdrich
Tracks, Louise Erdrich
Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, Louise Erdrich
Tales of Burning Love, Louise Erdrich
The Antelope Wife, Louise Erdrich
White Teeth, Zadie Smith
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Blue Like Jazz, Donald Miller
Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson
Proof, David Auburn
Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Frankenstein, Mary Shelly
Mrs. Dalloway, Virgina Woolf
The Inferno, Puragorio, and Paradiso, Dante
The Group, Mary McCarthy
Sula, Toni Morrison
Summer, Edith Wharton
Weeds, Edith Summers Kelley
The Perks of Being a Wallflower, Stephen Chbosky
The Westing Game, Ellen Raskin
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
The Adventures of Huck Finn, Mark Twain
The Prince and the Pauper, Mark Twain
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury
-----

UPDATE: 2/11/11
19 Minutes, Jodi Picolout
55 Essentials, Ron Clark
Friday Night Knitting Club & Knit Two, Kate Jacobs
Millennium Series, Steig Larson
The Hunger Games, Susan Collins
A River Runs through It, Norman Mclean

Just getting the ball rolling...Part I

To get this conversation rolling, I want to have a running total of the books I've read from the BBC Top 100 Books list. So, I've copied the list here and placed an "x" next to the ones I've read. I'll try updating when/if applicable. As of 4/6/10, I've read 27.

1 Pride and Prejudice X
2 The Lord of the Rings
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible -X (most of it, anyway)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare X (not everything, but most of it)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood -
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan X

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel -
52 Dune - Frank Herbert -
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons -
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac -
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce -
76 The Inferno – Dante X
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola -
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker X
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro X
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White-X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks -
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole X
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
100 Les Miserables — Victor Hugo X