{"id":6822,"date":"2020-02-10T23:24:35","date_gmt":"2020-02-11T03:24:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/teachersandwritersmagazine.org\/?p=6822"},"modified":"2023-02-22T15:41:00","modified_gmt":"2023-02-22T19:41:00","slug":"the-taste-of-happiness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/teachersandwritersmagazine.org\/the-taste-of-happiness\/","title":{"rendered":"The Taste of Happiness"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

FROM THE ARCHIVES: This article was originally published in Teachers & Writers Magazine, Winter 2009-2010<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

AS A FIRST-YEAR Writers in the Schools writer\/teacher in Houston last fall, I have to admit I felt like I was entering an obstacle course blindfolded. Even though we had an information-packed day-long orientation and I shadowed an experienced WITS teacher for one class, I still felt like I was heading into my school blindly. I knew I had to jump right in and feel my way through all the challenges before I really felt any confidence at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I thought I would be comfortable in front of a classroom after teaching college journalism courses, but somehow facing a room full of expectant ten-year-olds was much more daunting than those jaded twenty-somethings of my previous experience. These bright-eyed  fourth-graders\u2019  opinions  really  mattered to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

After my first day of teaching I felt more confident with each lesson, and I loved coming to school each week to work with my fourth-graders.\u00a0\u00a0When\u00a0\u00a0that first year was complete, I decided to hone my skills by teaching at the Summer Creative Writing Workshops, co-sponsored by the School Literacy and Culture Project at Rice University and Writers in the Schools. As a writer, I was paired with a classroom teacher and we pooled our resources<\/a> and skills to develop lessons that would inspire our summer camp students. One lesson that was especially successful in our two-hour time slot was called \u201cThe Taste of Happiness.\u201d Our objective was to get the children to learn to describe emotions in a tangible way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We had taught simile the day before and our stu- dents were already getting quite adept at using \u201clike\u201d or \u201cas\u201d to make comparisons in their poems. We now wanted to go deeper into description by encouraging them to use their five senses to describe emotions and feelings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I started out the lesson by asking  the  students how they felt when they woke up that morning. The question elicited lots of responses from my rowdy bunch of rising sixth-graders. \u201cSleepy and sad to wake up,\u201d said one. \u201cHappy for camp,\u201d said another. \u201cMad that my mother woke me,\u201d said yet another. I suggested that words like sad, happy, and mad are used so often that they\u2019ve almost lost their meaning; they tell us something, but leave so much out. I said that we needed to come up with better words to describe how we feel. To start, I asked the children to tell me all the emotion words they could think of. I filled half of our large grease board with words like delighted, angry, frustrated, bored, depressed, stressed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We reminded them of the five senses\u2014seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting\u2014and then asked the children to come up with a list of great sensory\/descriptive words, calling on all of the senses. We filled up the other half of the board with words like rough, smooth, slimy, slippery, frizzy, dry, soft, hard, freezing, burning, tangy, crisp, fragrant, burnt, sour, jangle, boom, rowdy, flash, muddy, lumpy, awkward, sturdy,<\/em> and more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then I told the children we were going to do an exercise where we used mystery bags to help stretch our vocabulary of descriptive sensory words. This was an idea from one of our long-time WITS writers. I simply prepared paper grocery bags partially stapled shut so that only a hand would fit inside and passed one to each group. Each bag contained an everyday household object with a bizarre or distinct feel, a unique smell or different type of sound: balled-up duct tape with the sticky side out, slivers of soap, unusually shaped dry pasta, \u201cstinky\u201d cheese, sandpaper, and an odd-shaped seashell. Any type of objects can be used. The point of the exercise is to force students to rely only on their sense of touch, hearing, and smell when examining each object.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I told the kids there were three rules for this activity: 1. Only one person reaches into, smells, and shakes the bag at a time, 2. you can\u2019t look, and, 3. if you think you know what the actual object is\u2014don\u2019t say it out loud. Before they got started, I told them to number their paper according to which bag their group received. Then I asked them to list as many senso- ry\/descriptive words as they could for the object. I heard one group yell out, \u201crough, that feels rough.\u201d I urged them to expand on this, using a more descriptive word, or a simile if they could. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cHow else does it feel?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLike my daddy when he doesn\u2019t shave,\u201d said one. \u201cCoarse, it feels coarse,\u201d said someone else at the table.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cGood word,\u201d I smiled. \u201cWrite it down.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once this was done I gave them the somewhat harder task of matching these descriptive words with an emotion; for instance, I sug- gested, something smooth might feel happy or calm. Something knobbly might feel confused. Something with a sharp smell might feel stressed. Something that makes a loud bang might be excited. I told the students they could use the lists on the board if they wanted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When they had written all they could I asked them to make a guess about what the object was. Finally, I had each group pass the bag to the next group and begin the process again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The students worked diligently, passing around  the bags and wring down their sensory descriptive words and an emotion word. Coming up with the emotion word was trickier, but the students met the  challenge with enthusiasm.After excitedly revealing what was in each bag, I gave the children a short break. When they returned,    I introduced the children to a simple poetic technique called anaphora<\/em>. Anaphora is a type of repetition created when successive phrases or lines in a poem begin with the same words, often resembling a type of chant with a sing-song quality. This repetition, I told the students, can be as simple as a single word or as long as an entire phrase. This is a very old poetic technique, I said, and can be found in the poems in the Bible called Psalms and in the writing of William Shakespeare. I told them that a more modern American poet named Mark Strand, who has been the U.S. Poet Laureate, used anaphora in his poem, \u201cFrom a Litany.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I praise the trees on whose branches shall sit the Cock of Portugal and the Polish Cock.
 
I praise the palm trees of Rio and those that shall grow in London.
 
I praise the gardeners, the worms and the small plants that praise each other.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
I also showed them the work of another American poet, Joe Brainard, who used anaphora in a book- length poem he wrote about his life called \u201cI Remember.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I remember one very hot summer day I put ice cubes in my aquarium and all the fish died.
 
I remember \u2018lavender past.\u2019 (He has a ...).
 
I remember after people are gone thinking of things I should have said but didn\u2019t.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
I asked the students if they could tell me what phrase was repeated in each poem. I then told them I wanted them to write a poem putting together all that we had learned that day. The assignment was to create a poem describing an emotion using their senses, and to write it using anaphora. We looked at their  lists from the mystery-bag exercise and used some of the words for examples. \u201cHappiness feels like slippery slime in the sun,\u201d said one. \u201cHappiness tastes like orange candy,\u201d contributed another. I  encouraged them to use other emotions and then they began coming up with tactile words to describe rage and loneliness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Before they wrote their own poems, I read them a poem called \u201cLove Like Salt,\u201d by Lisel Mueller. I told them Lisel Mueller was born in Germany, moved to America for college, and became an award-winning poet and writing teacher. I asked the students to listen for the anaphora technique in Mueller\u2019s poem and the sensory images she uses to describe a feeling or emotion.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Love Like Salt<\/strong>
By Lisel Mueller<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It lies in our hands in crystals
 too intricate to decipher
 
 It goes into the skillet
 without being given a second thought
 
 It spills on the floor so fine
 we step all over it
 
 We carry a pinch behind each eyeball
 
 It breaks out on our foreheads
 
 We store it inside our bodies
 in secret wineskins
 
 At supper, we pass it around the table 
 talking of holidays by the sea.<\/p>\nReprinted by permission of Louisiana State University Press from Alive Together: New and Selected Poems by Lisel Mueller. Copyright \u00a91996 by Lisel Mueller.<\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
The students were now more than ready to write their own poems. What emerged was amazing. They explored emotions like joy and concern. \u201cJoy is the smell of chocolate,\u201d said one child. \u201cConcern is the makeshift cruise ship,\u201d wrote another. \u201cDisappointment is the rain cloud welling up before a fun day at the amusement park.\u201d Their innermost feelings were being expressed in tangible ways. There were so many wonderful lines written that at the end  f class we decided to put them together into a group poem. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Below are two of the student poems that emerged from this exercise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Sadness<\/strong>
ERI\u00a0YABE
\u00a0<\/strong>
Sadness is the death of a loved one.
It\u2019s the tear coming out from your eyes. The empty box of tissues.
\u00a0
Sadness is having a broken heart.
It\u2019s the moving somewhere you don\u2019t know. The wound that never heals.
\u00a0
Sadness\u00a0is\u00a0the\u00a0floating\u00a0fish\u00a0that\u00a0is\u00a0in\u00a0the bowl.
It is the silence in your body. The forgetting of the past<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
\n
Hope<\/strong>
ANGEL ZHANG
\u00a0<\/strong>
Hope is like a diamond, resting in the rich earth.
It is a child clinging to its mother in a sea of people,
a rusted bicycle untouched.
\u00a0
Hope is the waves crashing against each other,
the moon resting on the poofy clouds,
the grass dancing to the rhythm of the wind.
\u00a0
Hope is the California redwoods that stand tall,
the stars that watch us during the night. Hope springs eternal.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
I think I will never cease to be awestruck by the ability of children to use poetry to express their emo- tions. Often unfiltered, these emotions are refreshingly authentic and easily called up by young poets. It is a gift to be able to witness their work. Their self-assurance has transferred to me, the teacher, and has helped me to emerge, after my first year in the classroom, as a more confident and creative writing teacher.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
Our Many Feelings

Joy is the first step into middle school.
It is the sprinkles on top of an ice\u00a0cream cone.
\u00a0
Sadness\u00a0is\u00a0the\u00a0tear\u00a0coming\u00a0out\u00a0from\u00a0your eyes,
The empty box of\u00a0tissues.
\u00a0
Joy is the smell of\u00a0chocolate. It is the first bite of\u00a0cake.
\u00a0
Pain is the knee being scraped on the side walk.
It is the shame of walking out the door.
\u00a0
Blue is the tears of a person.
It is the sadness of the person\u2019s heart.
\u00a0
Disappointment is the rain cloud welling up before a fun day at the amusement park.
It is the feeling when you are short a quarter unable to buy that piece of gum.
\u00a0
Joy is the melted marshmallow with honey. It is the dark chocolate with\u00a0milk.
\u00a0
Shame is ripping your pants without noticing.
It is the embarrassment of mistaking someone else for your Dad.
\u00a0
Hope is like a diamond resting in the rich earth.
It is a child clinging to her mother in a sea of people.
\u00a0
Furious is the power to hate your brother. It is the brother that annoys you.

Concern is the makeshift cruise ship.
It is the greatest, the call of your mind.
\u00a0
Depression is the pain of ropes tied across your chest.
It is tasting rotten chocolate.
\u00a0
Joyfulness is the moment you graduate from school.
It is the joy of getting a job.
\u00a0
Depression breaks you down till you don\u2019t feel anything.
It is like having a broken heart till you can\u2019t live.
\u00a0
Joy is like candy dissolving in your mouth as you suck on it.
It is the liveness in your life.
\u00a0
Hatred is the heights on a really tall building. It is the fear that I\u2019ll fall.
\u00a0
Joy is the first ever time you eat a marshmallow.
It is the last second of your homework.
\u00a0
Concern is the holding hands of a mother and child.
It is the padlock on the fence. The medical center in a city.
\u00a0
Joy is the start of a new day. It is the love of your pets.
\u00a0
Refreshing is the fuzzy feeling after a long, comfy slumber.
It is the cold lemonade after a hot, sticky summer day.<\/p>\nClass poem by Harriet Riley’s students, The Pencil Daggers: Sarah, Helena, Kirby, Asad, Mira, Angel, Isabelle, Alex, Brandon, Annie, Jay, Connie, Catherine, Neeshali, Alyssa, Edwin, Meagan, Eri, Brooke, Maria, Zachariah<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Image by Vagner Xaruto<\/a> from Pixabay<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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