The World Motivation
When I was about 15 - that would be some 60 years ago - I remember my father, a secondary school teacher, was always keen to know what homework I had been set, and would look over my shoulder.
“When I was about 15 - that would be some 60 years ago - I remember my father, a secondary school teacher, was always keen to know what homework I had been set, and would look over my shoulder.”
— Michael Rosen · Teacher
When I was about 15 - that would be some 60 years ago - I remember my father, a secondary school teacher, was always keen to know what homework I had been set, and would look over my shoulder.
I love rereading Shakespeare plays and Im constantly finding bits that Ive overlooked or not understood before.
Performance poetry is not one genre. Some chant, sing and dance. Some stand rooted to the spot and stare. Some chat their way in and out of their poems like stand-ups. Some confess, some rage. Some play with words, some talk plain. The point is, it's live and in the moment.
Im generally of the view that we should know the names of those who enacted and justified imperial power - but only if the glorifying can be supplemented with plaques that tell us the shameful histories of, for example active participation in the slave trade or highly successful and profitable lives extracted from slave plantations.
In the first year in New York, I went to this amazing teacher named Jen Waldman. She does lots of different classes, but one of her classes was where you went and worked on a song. And suddenly I felt like an artist again, and because I had worked the whole song, when I went into the audition room, I could connect to something in the 16 bars.
When every church becomes a school, every cathedral a university, every clergyman a teacher, and all their hearers brave and honest thinkers, then - and not until then - will the dream of poet, patriot, philanthropist and philosopher become a real and blessed truth.
The medium of response in America is fame; that's how a person that bounces a ball can make millions of dollars, and a school teacher with no fame makes $35,000.
My very beloved and deceased third-grade teacher, Cliff Kehod, was the one that I really remember calling me Ike a lot. It just stuck. It is a dog's name, but I love dogs.