Why the Teachers Union Hates Poetry Recitals

There were two things my siblings and I were required to do on Sunday mornings. Go to church and recite a poem. The former was a rule adhered to by all the kids on my block. The poetry? My friends thought it was a form of child abuse, before the term was even invented.

I had mixed feelings about it. I did not enjoy the memorization, but I did enjoy my mother’s approval when it was done. I can still recite many of those poems today.

Georgia and Arkansas have recently introduced new educational standards that include memorizing and then reciting poems. Sounds like a good thing, right? But guess who is objecting?

You got it. English teachers are criticizing the measure as being “mechanical and prescriptive.” It’s “rote learning,” they say, which doesn’t help children learn how to think “creatively” and “critically. “

This idea of teaching kids how to think rather than what to think is hardly new. It was part of my curriculum when I was in high school almost 60 years ago. And there is some sense to it, to be sure. But it’s incorrect to assume that learning how to memorize and recite long passages of poetry doesn’t do anything to improve the brain.

For my siblings and me, the Sunday morning mandate was immensely valuable in many ways. At the simplest level, it taught us how to memorize text – which is a skill that can be extremely gratifying and even useful as an adult. It also imparted in us a respect and admiration for poetry in particular and literature in general that has made our lives much richer than they would be if our primary form of personal entertainment was watching baseball or playing Diablo III.

The problem is that so many teachers today have no idea of what creative and critical thinking is. The proof of that is what is going on at so many high schools (and even grammar schools) around the country. In spreading the gospel of Critical Race Theory and Gender Ideology, America’s teachers are engaged in a pandemic of educational indoctrination that includes “facts” that are not factual and analytical theory that is not in the least bit analytical. And to make matters worse, they are failing students that have the nerve to think on their own.

Here’s what happened to one student that did some independent thinking.

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“A poet’s work is to name the unnameable, to point at frauds, to take sides, start arguments, shape the world, and stop it going to sleep.” – Salmon Rushdie

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A Thousand and One 

Written and directed by A.V. Rockwell

Starring Teyana Taylor, Will Catlett, Josiah Cross, Aven Courtney, and Aaron Kingsley Adetola

Premiered Jan. 22, 2023 (Sundance)

Released in theaters (US) Mar. 31, 2023

A Thousand and One is not a great movie, but it’s a good movie with some very good moments. It’s also a movie that is going to launch several careers, including that of A.V. Rockwell, its writer and director; Teyana Taylor, who plays Inez, the main character; and Will Catlett, who plays Lucky, Inez’s on-again, off-again marital partner.

Set in the 1990s and 2000s, it follows a woman who decides to kidnap a child named Terry (that she claims is hers) out of the foster care system and raise him as a single mother in Harlem. The timeline, which begins with the kidnapping and stretches until the child is ready to go to college, depicts all the challenges you would imagine she would face.

What I liked best about the movie – something that many critics mentioned – was the acting. Starting with Teyana Taylor as the lead character, but also including Will Catlett and several of the story’s chief supporting actors. They were all, at least for me, authentic and interesting. They left me feeling that there was so much more to them than the film had time to show me.

There were a few gratuitous social messages shoved into the story that detracted from the drama, such as B-footage criticizing Mayor Giuliani for his stop-and-frisk policing policies, and two-dimensional characterizations of White landlords. On the other hand, I very much liked the fact that A.V. Rockwell wove into the movie the issue of the importance of Black fathers in Black culture. (Which, if you listen to the likes of Thomas Sowell and Candice Owens, is the number one reason for the crime and lack of economic, educational, and social advancement that has been a fact for Blacks in America since the War on Poverty began in the 1960s under Lyndon Johnson.)

There was one more problem I had with the movie that Brian Tallerico mentioned in his review:

“Much of [the] veracity collapses in a final act I’m not sure the film needs. Without spoiling, there’s another secret in Inez and Terry’s life that completely recasts everything that came before in a different light, and the narrative decision pushed me out of a story that had felt so intimate for so long. The movie doesn’t need a twist. It’s done so much to make Inez, Terry, and the world they inhabit feel real; it’s a splash of cold water to be reminded this is a melodrama, and maybe always was. The final scenes are manipulative in a fashion that the movie otherwise defies for most of its runtime.”

But these criticisms are forgivable because of the strength of the plot and the quality of the acting. A Thousand and One is a movie I would definitely recommend.

Critical Reception

Despite the fact that, as I said above, I didn’t think A Thousand and One was a great movie, critics gave it mostly high marks.

* “Come for Taylor’s breakout performance, stay for a tender, confidently told story of Black motherhood and sacrifice. Rockwell is one to watch.” (Amon Warmann, Empire Magazine)

* “The delicately pitched performances, luminous cinematography, and quiet, jazzy score counteract [any] excess, creating a stately feel that’s rare in stories of contemporary urban suffering.” (Leslie Felperin, Financial Times)

* “Character portraits just don’t come any sharper than A Thousand and One.” (Bob Mondello, NPR)

You can watch the trailer here.

 

About A.V. Rockwell 

A.V. Rockwell, a first-generation American of Jamaican descent, was born and raised in Queens, NY. She took some film courses as an undergrad at NYU, and taught herself how to direct by shooting a series of 10 documentaries and narratives about New York’s inner-city life – titled Open City Mixtape – in 2012.

Her first short film, Feathers, won the Grand Prize at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival. A Thousand and One, her directorial feature film debut, premiered at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival and won the Grand Jury Prize.

In this interview, not surprisingly, she cites Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee as influences. Click here. 

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Iam Tongi

Tongi, an unknown kid from Hawaii, won Season 21 of American Idol. His audition, just months after his father died – an emotional rendition of James Blunt’s “Monsters” – had the judges in tears.

Challenge: Listen to it here… and try not to cry.

Here’s Tongi singing “I’ll Be Seeing You.”

And here’s his version of “What a Wonderful World.”

If you want to know more about Iam Tongi, click here.

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