Teaching: Poems to Learn By

Lesson on page two

Quickly—let us get started

Mind—stop wandering

That is a haiku, a 500-year-old Japanese poetic form whose first and last lines always have five syllables, its middle line seven. Today, grade school teachers in the U.S. are turning to it as a new tool to teach English composition. Asked to write their own haiku (pronounced high-koo), children find that its precise rules and free content pose delightful puzzles, with solutions limited only by the flexibility of their vocabulary and the fetters on their fancy.

For the most part, haiku in English have been either translations of old Japanese poems or originals that closely imitated Oriental terms and themes. Convinced that the form had other possibilities, Mrs. Maeve O’Reilly Finley, a bouncy, Irish-born fourth-grade teacher in the innovation-minded public schools of Newton, Mass., began writing her own versions of haiku for her students in 1962. Her Haiku for You, a thin volume of 101 haiku for children, was published this summer.

Mrs. Finley’s haiku deal with such close-to-childhood subjects as kites, tadpoles, animals and birthdays. They also deal with modern communications:

Monster presses roll—

Letters-to-words-to-stories-

A newspaper born

and with city life:

Tall city buildings

Shadowboxing each other

From the bouncing sun

In her classes, Mrs. Finley starts by having her students read a haiku together, clapping in unison with the syllables, and then individually describe the images the poem conveys. To set them off on their own haiku, she gives them the first two lines, asks them to supply a third. The responses often reflect the down-to-earth quality of children’s imaginations. Once, for example, she gave her daughter the lines

On a class picnic

My friend Curiosity

Instead of an ethereal poetic sentiment, the daughter wrote

Ate six sandwiches

An eight-year-old girl, asked to compose a haiku about church, wrote:

Pillars strong and straight

People dressed in Sunday clothes

Child bored from sermon

Mrs. Finley arms her students with a dictionary and a Roget’s Thesaurus, finds that both become thoroughly thumbed as the children seek synonyms to fit the rigid line scheme, stretching their vocabularies. To keep them searching, she bans such overworked words as fine, nice, pretty and good. Mrs. Finley is not alone in trying to teach writing in 17 hard syllables: the National Council of Teachers of English reports that haiku are turning up in classrooms throughout the country. Creating a haiku, teachers have found, expands a child’s imagery, provides a quick sense of accomplishment because of its brevity. But the basic appeal of a haiku, says Mrs. Finley, is that “it is poetry, and children love poetry—they love to paint word pictures.”