Posted by Ariana Miller, GD Poetry Co-Section Head for 6.2
Last semester, fall 2018, I was student teaching in a 9th grade English classroom. Teaching responsibilities were immediately and entirely handed over to me. My cooperating teacher, or CT, said that if I taught the curriculum she usually did that time of year, I could do whatever I wanted with it. It just so happened that I would spend four out of the six weeks of my placement teaching George Orwell’s Animal Farm. My CT wanted me to focus on one major theme of the novel—leadership. Naturally, as a Creative Writing major, I decided I would have my students write a poem about a time when they acted as a leader. My project spanned the four weeks we were reading Animal Farm, and was interspersed with my teaching of literary techniques Orwell used in the novel.