Nine Year-old Creates the Tornado Poem

Brian is one of the students I tutor as a representative of Champion Learning Center. He's nine, and attends what the New York City Department of Education considers to be a "failing" school. My job as a Champion tutor is to assist him in Math and ELA (English Language Arts) and monitor him over the course of six weeks. Bryan is an able reader and writer, and can maneuver his way through some of the Math he's given. However, he has low-self esteem and thinks he has horrible handwriting. During a recent assignment in which his teacher wanted him to write a poem about spring, he grew frustrated. After we had worked out a nice 18 line poem detailing his day enjoying the warmer weather, he showed me his page. His words shifted to the far right-hand margins of the page. "This isn't a poem", he said, about to start over on a fresh piece of manila paper, "It's not written evenly."

What did I do? Although he's only in the fourth grade and hasn't learned about experimental poetry, I told him that poems didn't have to be in a certain format, that there are many styles, such as concrete poems, where the words serve to create an image. Slightly amused, but still a little upset, he said, "But my words don't form a picture, it just looks like a tornado on the page." I looked at him and smiled, "Brian, what you've created is something new. This is...Tornado Poetry! Congratulations!" His frown turned into a smile, and he was really excited to hear that his writing wasn't a failure like he thought only minutes earlier.

I'm thrilled that I could achieve a small victory by instilling a sense of pride in his work. It's unfortunate that a lot of children think there's only one way to do something, and if they don't conform then they're wrong.