Recently, I read Emily Dickinson’s “Hope is the Thing With Feathers” to my high-school students in order to set up a writing assignment. Dickinson describes hope in terms of a bird that perches in the soul, and the students were to follow Dickinson’s example and create their own vision of hope through the use of metaphors.
My motive went beyond lessons in grammar and punctuation, to a more pressing goal: to invite hope back into the classroom. This particular group of students had endured more than their fair share of adverse childhood experiences, and as they progressed through their treatment for drug and alcohol addiction, their essays had taken a very dark turn. Their personal writing meandering through tales of neglect and abuse, and far too many concluded in dead-ends of despair. If they could bring hope to life on paper, and assign it some tangible form, they might just resurrect it from the dead in their lives as well.
[For more of this story, written by Jessica Lahey, go to http://www.theatlantic.com/edu...p-without-it/395438/]
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