Lesson Plan: Group Assignment

& Student-led Exercise

Divide students into small groups (trios work well) and
give them a week to:

1. Meet together outside of class with their copies

of The Common in hand;
2. Select, as a group, a poem they particularly like,
3. Prepare to read that poem aloud to the class, and
4. Design and lead an in-class writing exercise for their
classmates and teacher that is inspired by a
technique or aspect of that poem.
Example

One group chose Fatimah Asghar’s poem “Kul” from

Issue 14, read the poem aloud, and noted that it was
based on one word that could mean several, potentially
opposite things – a contronym. The students had
generated a list of contronyms in advance and projected
them on the board (e.g., “sanction,” “oversight,” and “left”).
They then invited their classmates to write at least a few
lines of a poem that would, in their words, embrace these
opposite meanings.

“I like this exercise not only because it gets students

engaging with the fresh texts in detailed ways (at the
same time we are all receiving and getting into our new
issues) and working together, but also because it gives
them a sense of what it is like to be in front of a class,
teaching (potentially useful information for those who may
be considering that path.)” – Amy Weldon

Adapted from Amy Weldon, Professor of English, Luther

College

Lesson Plan: Discussion

Student-led discussion:

Ask student groups or individual students to lead

discussions on essays and poems from a single issue,
identifying specific attributes of place-based writing and
how that might apply to their own writing and/or how they
perceive the places they inhabit.

Workshops:

Ask students to read all the poems, stories, or essays in a

single issue, and to discuss them as a group—how they fit
together and/or form a cohesive group across the whole
journal, almost as if discussing a collection of poems,
stories, or essays by a single author. How do they fit
together with the rest of the issue?

Assignment

Identify a poem (or story or essay) from the issue that

uses memory to link a past and present experience with
place; write a poem (or story or essay) that functions in a
similar way, but draw from your own experience
Allah, you gave us a language
where yesterday & tomorrow
are the same word. Kul.

A spell cast with the entire

mouth. Back of the throat
to teeth. What day am I promised?

Tomorrow means I might have her forever.

Yesterday means I say goodbye, again.
Kul means they are the same.

I know you can bend time.

I am merely asking for what
is mine. Give me my mother for no

other reason than I deserve her.

If yesterday & tomorrow are the same
bring back the grave. Pluck the flower

of my mother’s body from the soil.

Kul means I’m in the crib eyelashes
wet the first time they open. Kul means

my sister is crawling away from her

on the bed as my father comes home
from work. Kul means she’s dancing

at my wedding not-yet-come
kul means she’s oiling my hair
before the first day of school. Kul

means I wake to her strange voice in the kitchen

kul means she’s holding my baby
in her arms, helping me pick a name.