This poem was written by a 4th Grade student at my school, the Bronx Charter School for Better Learning. It happened a few years ago. Her teacher gave the students 20 minutes each morning to write whatever they wanted in a notebook that was pretty much for their eyes only. If the teacher did glance in a student’s notebook, the teacher wouldn’t mark it up or point out spelling and grammar errors.
One day I was walking by in the hall and the teacher ran out to get me. “Come look at what X wrote!” she exclaimed.
We went over to X’s desk and asked if we could read her notebook. She handed it to us and I saw she had written quite a few remarkable poems – poems she had no intention of showing anyone. They were just things she wrote and experimented with. I asked if I could photocopy them and she said, “Sure.”
Our school has a long tradition in poetry reading and writing. “The World” is just one example of what our kids have produced in class or on their own during free writing time.
