For the past three months five Rutgers–Camden MFA students and one PhD student in childhood studies have been teaching poetry to third, fourth, and fifth grade classes at Camden elementary schools. Established by the Rutgers–Camden Office of Civic Engagement, this outreach effort represents one of many initiatives associated with the Rutgers North Camden Schools Partnership with Pyne Poynt, Coopers Poynt, and R.C. Molina. Other partnership programs include a tutoring program, visual and performing arts activities, and a moot court club.
Rutgers–Camden MFA student Michael Haeflinger says poetry can both liberate and be liberated by children.
“I teach poetry without rules. You want rhyme? Go for it? Don’t want to rhyme? No problem. No image is too ‘weird,’ no idea is false or wrong,” says Haeflinger, who most recently resided in Berlin, Germany. “I think that poetry is a heavy word that carries a lot of assumptions about language that children don’t always want to deal with. Getting past that can be tricky, but once you have demystified it for them they seem to be more open to it.”
Haeflinger, or “Mr. Mike” as he’s known in Nancy Hilbert’s fourth grade class at Molina, led the 22 budding poets on various workshop exercises including writing a group poem, making their own myth poems, and discussing basic elements of poetry.
Fourth grader Thalia Colon liked learning that poems don’t have to rhyme or even make sense. “They could be about your life, but could also be about a dream or from your imagination,” she says. Ten-year-old Jamilka Cruz wrote so many poems about Japan’s recent crises that she created her own book.
Haeflinger, originally from Ohio, but now living in Camden, shared some of his own widely-published poems with the children. The class rhyme master nine-year-old Quason Winstead in turn wrote a poem about Mr. Mike: “We had fun with Mr. Mike/He wrote about a fish on a bike/I think from here to Rutgers is a big hike/I like poems that’s how me and Mr. Mike are alike.”
But ultimately it was Haeflinger who found his poetry to be the most energized from the outreach experience. “After the first workshop I did, I left the classroom with this overwhelming sense that I was doing something wrong in my own writing, that I had gotten away from the wonder and mystery with which a child will often approach his or her own writing,” he recalls. “I tell myself more now: ‘Think like an eight year old,’ and it really helps me relax.”
Media Contact: Cathy K. Donovan
(856) 225-6627
E-mail: catkarm@camden.rutgers.edu