THE CLASSIC SLAM
On April 28th, 2011 Get Lit-Words Ignite will be hosting Los Angeles’ first CLASSIC SLAM. This citywide teen poetry slam is the first of its kind because teens will be slamming classic poetry (Pablo Neruda, Gabriel Garcia Lorca, Walt Whitman, Langson Hughes, Sylvia Plath, etc…) along with their own original poetry.
IN ADDITION… it involves
teens from 18 different regions of Los Angeles County – including Compton,
Watts, Santa Monica, San Gabriel Valley, San Rafael Valley, Hollywood, S Los
Angeles, Inglewood and more…
Teens will compete for
scholarships and bragging rights. But more than this … the CLASSIC SLAM will
ignite and unite the teens of Los Angeles. They will come together to
share stories and to be inspired by the classics, both new and old, and even more
important, each other.
At Get Lit…
“A classic isn’t a
classic because it’s old… a classic is a classic because it’s great.”
Teacher’s training
Budget Cuts…
The nation's
second-largest school system is facing an estimated $408-million shortfall.
They need to cut money
from somewhere…and that somewhere is often, the arts.
After all, they are
“extra.” Aren’t they? What’s really important are the 3 R’s… reading, writing,
and arithmetic.
Interestingly, the
Greek’s model was the 3 A’s…
Academics, Athletics,
Arts.
Seems more logical
doesn’t it? We all know that different students are motivated to learn by
different things. By cutting core Arts programs, we lose the ability to engage
thousands of students in the love of learning.
And here is where we are...
But there is a solution!
Spoken word poetry has
proved a very effective way to inspire teens to write and engage in the
learning process. Get Lit adds the memorization of classic poetry to broaden
the scope.
An evaluation by
Professor James Catterall and his UCLA team calls it “immensely effective” and
Producer Leo Eaton of the soon to air PBS special, “Arts in the Mind,” says,
“Get Lit is different (from many arts programs), demanding discipline, hard
work, and commitment. You hold their feet to the fire and expect great things,
and we see in the program how your kids rise to meet the challenge. ”
So there we have it…
PROBLEM … SOLUTION.
But with budget cuts –
how do we connect the two?
“THESE TOO ARE YOUR CHILDREN THIS TOO IS YOUR CHILD...”
- LUCILLE CLIFTON
If a child is hungry, you feed it. And the children of Los Angeles are hungry for knowledge, opportunity, inspiration and A CHANCE. So we rallied 18 teachers from high schools/regions throughout Los Angeles County including Watts, Compton, Hollywood, South LA, Alhambra, San Gabriel Valley, Santa Monica, Pasadena, etc… and provided training in Get Lit’s curriculum. With a $20,000 grant we received from the Angell Foundation, we are paying these teachers to teach our curriculum to their students over a 12 week period, impacting over 2,500 teens. Many of these teens come from arts deprived schools whose students were hit particularly hard by budget cuts. And over the next 12 weeks they will be exposed to a myriad of new things.
Through Get Lit’s
curriculum/workshops students are introduced to a wide variety of poetic styles
from different time periods. They are instructed to analyze, memorize, and
perform a classic poem that they select, grasping the vocabulary and high
ideals of the piece while connecting the poem to their own lives. They
memorize facts about their poet’s life and share these with their class. Next
they study poetic terms and form, analyzing the devices used in the poem they
have selected, and then responding back to the piece with their own original
poem. This poem may model the structure used in the original classic or simply
be inspired by the theme, but it must reveal the student’s inner life and be a
poetic gem in its own right.
Next the students tackle
the memorization and performance of a longer “group” poem along with a group
response. For example, students will memorize and perform “Charge of the
Light Brigade,” as an intricate group piece and then turn around and perform a
modern day spoken word response about the Iraq war or gang violence in Los
Angeles. All of this culminates in a graduation ceremony where students
demonstrate what they have learned for their parents, faculty and other their
peers in the school.
A final anthology of all
of the students’ work is created and distributed to each student so they have a
record of the entire experience. Students spend 12 hours in the class (often
broken up into 12-week workshops) and many more hours outside of class memorizing
poems, defining vocabulary definitions, researching information about their
classic poets and the time period in which they lived, writing and editing
their original poems and practicing their performances. It is a very
intense and transformative experience that leaves the students far more
knowledgeable about themselves, poetry and the world around them.
At the end of the 12
week period, each of these 2,500 students will go through a “graduation”
ceremony where they perform for each other, their parents, and their
communities. Then some of the students will choose to go on and compete in a
qualifying slam for a spot on their school’s team. Each school will have a team
of 4-6 poet representatives. They will have 1 month to practice as a group and
come up with 6 classic/response poems needed to compete in the CLASSIC SLAM
quarterfinal, semifinal, and Grand Slam Finals events occurring April 27th
and April 28th.
There are 108 poets, 18
schools, and 1 ultimate champion.
Teacher, Jose Moreno,
from William Workman High School encapsulated this CLASSIC SLAM experience and
opportunity perfectly when he said, “The other night, when I stood on the
field at our school’s football game and watched those players under the lights,
I thought… there’s got to be a way to get more kids into the light.”
“Education is not the
filling of a bucket, but the lighting of a fire.”
William Butler Yeats
Get Lit...IGNITES!
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