It's called Final Words from a Middle School English Teacher's Final Year--"poems" based on the final 200-wd vocabulary list I used my final full year at Harmon Middle School; Aurora, OH; 1996-97.
Here is the introductory material ...
And Other Doggerel and Wolferel
(July 14–November 1,
2019)
by
Daniel Dyer
Copyright © 2019 by
Daniel Dyer
Dedication
To our son and his
family:
Stephen Osborn Dyer
Melissa McGowan Dyer
Logan Thomas Dyer
Carson William Daniel
Dyer
“Words, words,
words.”
—Prince Hamlet in Hamlet,
2.2
Preface
When I
began my teaching career (seventh grade English, the fall of 1966), I didn’t
pay much attention to vocabulary instruction. Oh, I taught spelling (you cannot
overestimate the appeal to inexperienced teachers of something that’s either
right or wrong!), grammar, usage. But for some reason I cannot recall, I just
did not do much with vocabulary.
That
changed.
Later on, I
read in some teachers’ magazine a research piece that said that there was no
One Best Way to teach it—but that some approach was better than no
approach. And so I eventually settled on this:
• I took
all words from the texts we would be reading throughout the year (those final
years it was The Diary of Anne Frank, the play script; The Call of
the Wild; Much Ado About Nothing; a variety of short stories and
nonfiction).
• I
arranged them into twenty groups of ten. (That’s 200 words, if you’re
mathematically challenged.)
• We
reviewed them continually.
• On quiz
day, the students had to spell each word, write its definition (and make it
accurate enough to be acceptable—for some years I made them write it verbatim),
and be prepared to use five of them in sentences (they never knew which
five).
I retired
from middle-school teaching in January 1997, so what you see here are the words
from my final full school year, 1996–97.
A few years later (2001) I started
teaching high school juniors in Hudson, Ohio, at Western Reserve Academy, a
nearby boarding school (I could walk or bike to work), and I continued with the
technique outlined above. The words were “harder” (though I still took them
from our literary texts), and so I continued until the spring of 2011, when,
once again, I retired.
And all the
vocabulary lists went into file folders in my study.
Until I got
the idea to write a series of doggerel about those middle-school words.
**
This volume
you’re now viewing on your Kindle device (or app) is one of a series of such
volumes—a collection of doggerel (silly poems with little literary merit) that
I’ve assembled from the posts I do on Facebook and from my blog Daily Doggerel
(which lives on blogspot.com).
In Daily
Doggerel I focus on a theme—and usually crank out 100 or more, uh, “poems” on
that topic before I shove it all into a Kindle book. (If you check my author
page on Amazon, you can see how much of my time I’ve … devoted? … to this
enterprise.)
So … here
in this volume you will find one hundred “poems” based on the vocabulary words
I used with my eighth graders back in the mid-1990s. Each “poem” employs two of
our words. I do them in order, list by list, all twenty of them.
In this
volume you will also find a section called “Desultory Doggerel”: These are
lines I’ve written and generally, though not always, posted on Facebook—lines
about various quotidian and/or silly things. Like changes in the weather,
critters that wander through our yard (or don’t quite make it across the road),
coffee-shop moments, memories, and so on.
Finally,
there is a third collection of lines, the sort that I’ve been, for quite a
while, calling “Wolferel,” a word I invented many volumes ago, a word to
identify lines that are a rung or two (or three or more) up from doggerel but
not quite far enough up the ladder to qualify as poetry. A wolferel is a more
serious doggerel, just as, you know, a wolf is a more serious dog.
**
You’ll
notice that there’s a bit of a break in mid-October. The reason? Illness. I
came down with some sort of virus that basically shut me down—it seemed,
at times, for good. And, at times, I was almost grateful for that. For … The
End. Couldn’t eat. Couldn’t drink. No energy. Slept about twenty hours a day.
I ended up
in the ER, where they re-hydrated me, and, for the first time, I saw on my interior
GPS the Road to Recovery. And I hopped on it. Eagerly so.
One result?
This volume. So … don’t blame me for it. Blame the medical profession!
—Daniel
Dyer
Hudson,
Ohio
November 1,
2019
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