Tuesday 5 July 2011

Committing Poetry

The documentary film Committing Poetry  in Times of War  tells the story of Bill Nevins, a humanities teacher and youth poetry coach who was suspended and later fired from his teaching job after standing up for a student who wrote a poem critical of the war in Iraq.
Is it not the job of teachers to help people see things in a different way, allowing students to question, challenge and crtically engage. The teachers who I remember fondly, encouraged me to do this.
With the current media under scrutiny, values of thoughtful inquiry, away from schools of conformity, should be more than welcomed.In the case of Bill Nevin's the people rallied round.Inspired by the notion of creativity as a tool of change.
I find it unbelievable that students are not taught to engage with their imagination like this every day. I disagree with a lot of things, luckily for me, I discovered the joys of freedom, the enemies of this are already at the gates. But I still deny fascism a platform, that too is my right.
As for Bill he simply carried on teaching elsewhere and engaged himself in writing his own poems
http://www.committingpoetry.com/

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