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The Mending Wall
The Mending Wall

by Jimi Purse, Chief of Operations

Poetry is an amazing and fascinating tool for learning – especially for children. It infuses basic writing and language skills with creativity, cadence, and joy in ways that offer children an opportunity to find their own voice. Children find similarities between poetry and music, poetry and games, as well as poetry and dance. But something happens when these children become adults; their love of poetry dwindles or often disappears.

In an article on Huffington Post last year, it was noted that a national poetry survey revealed that 9 out of 10 American adults do not enjoy poetry and only a mere seven percent reported reading a work of poetry in the previous year. The Huffington Post author, also an English Professor, then reveals that she hated poetry for years as an adult.

Why do we grow up loving something so creative and beautiful, only to end up despising it?

The Huffington Post author's opinion is that poetry becomes associated with school and often a stressful time of school – and so when it is recalled, years later, it comes with feelings of stress, anxiety, and dread. It is often memorization and required performance of poems that leads to these feelings during the school years, and thus avoidance later in life.

It made me think of our elementary Montessori classrooms at Aidan, and how poetry is beloved by the children and how frequently I find students expressing themselves through poetry. This past Fall, I found a number of students in the Upper Elementary classroom writing spooky and funny poems for Halloween. They took great joy in reading their poems to me and their classmates. There was no pressure to memorize and perform, the poetry was written for the children by the children. Some wished to share, and others kept private.

Recently, I was in Ms. Majeed's Lower Elementary classroom and I mentioned I was writing a blog article about poetry and some students wanted to share their poems from previous years with me. They went to the book shelf in the classroom, and retrieved two beautiful, hand-bound books called "ImaginAidan." These books were collections of student poetry from the previous two years. As the students shared with me their poems, their eyes lit up and they began to laugh. Recalling how fun it was to write those poems in previous years, they asked if they could write new poems with me for my blog post. "Great idea!", I exclaimed – probably louder than I should have in the middle of the work period.

The students brought the "ImaginAidan" books down to my office and spread out around the coffee table in front of the couch. Using pencils and paper they began to write poems together, sharing ideas and laughing at the images their words conjured. After writing two poems, they encouraged me to share these new poems – along with their previous works from the ImaginAidan compendium – in my blog post. I thanked them for their contributions and walked them back to class.


This experience inspired me to look up one of my favorite poems from my High School English class, "The Mending Wall," by Robert Frost. It made me hope that all of our Aidan students look back fondly onto their years studying and writing poetry in school, so that they change the statistics for their generation. I also set a new goal – to read a poem a week and rekindle my childhood love of poetry as an adult.

There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
Robert Frost, excerpt from "The Mending Wall"

I encourage you all to seek out poetry on your own – re-read your old favorites or check out something new!