high expectations

I was afraid that reading e.e. cummings with my 7th graders would be an instance of setting my expectations a little too high. After all, I don't think I was ready for him at their age and I also don't want to give them any more bad-grammar role models than they already have. The poem we were reading ("anyone lived in a pretty how town," for a pronouns unit) has some especially knotty lines. But once I coaxed them past their initial frustration and knee-jerk dismissal ("This guy writes like a sped kid!"), they proved those fears wonderfully unfounded. After only one reading, a girl picked up that it was a story about a couple, something I thought I'd have to drill into them. The concept of pronouns becoming characters clicked as soon as I showed it to them. My favorite, though, had to be the K-Train's revelation to me at the end of class:

"Mr. Wayland, he writes funny."
"What do you mean?"
"He says things backwards."

It deserved a pound, but my hands were occupied, so I had to resort to a "fantastic." Which of course it was.

I'm trying to give my 8th-graders the same treatment, but they seem more likely to get frustrated or indignant when I ask them to think. Still, I got to write the ladder of moral obligations, "Obey God, Obey King, Obey Father," on the board and hint at the consequences of a character's breaking the bottom one. At least one girl seemed to be getting it. It's not so far to "Paradise Lost" from here.