Impressions of a teacher about the participation of her students in the "Unamuno Author Series" meetings
During the 2017-18 and early 2018-19 academic years, our 1st and 2nd year high school students IES Ramiro de Maeztu have been participants in meetings with contemporary American poets of the “Unamuno Author Series” organized at the International Institute. The experience has been not only very pleasant but highly positive in many aspects.
Reasons:
In the first place, this approach of the students to poetry written in English has served to break the barrier of difficulty that understanding the meaning of the poems entails for them. Many of our students find poetry inaccessible perhaps because of the way it has been presented to them, mainly through figures of speech.
Our objective as teachers when presenting and reading with them the poems that they were going to discuss with their authors later, has been to focus more than analysis, on the emotion of a poem. This has been possible in the meetings where, by having the same creators of what they had read, everything has been much more understandable, more real and alive, closer.
In each and every one of these meetings, the poets (mainly women) have made their poems something very vivid and lived since they shared the process by which they wrote the poems that we read and the emotion that each of them contained, helping to create a very intimate atmosphere on many occasions.
Secondly, I would like to add that it is a privilege for both the students and the teachers who participate, to share a space as special as it is the downtown library for these meetings that, I am sure, contributes to that intimate and close environment for the exchange of points of view, questions and impressions.
In each and every one of these sessions, once finished, many students have remained to continue asking questions, that is, to get even closer to the writers. For this reason, the only thing that all of us who have participated, both teachers and students, want in these meetings is to repeat, repeat and repeat the experience.
virginia n.
