It was a difficult poem, to be sure. But I’d adjusted accordingly.

First, I’d given students plenty of footnoted definitions. Words like “smouldered” and “pungence” (the poem used British English) would have left them flummoxed otherwise.

Additionally, I’d asked a fairly simple series of questions as part of our weekly inference practice: “What can we tell about this lady? What does she look like? Is she old or young?” As always, I expect the students to back up their answer with the text, and I’ve given them a simple formula to follow.

  • Make a claim: “The lady is x.”
  • Back it up from the text: “I know this because the text says…”
  • Explain your thinking with one or two sentences: “This shows she’s x because…”

I really don’t feel like it’s all that challenging. Besides, it’s something we do every Friday — inference work.

“It’s like shooting free throws,” I tell them. “It’s the most basic skill we do when we read, inferring.” It’s why we do it every Friday, week after week.

Thirdly, I’d cut the text: we were only working on the first stanza. The rest of the poem, I felt, might confuse them more.

Finally, I am always walking about the room as students work, offering help and answering questions, helping redirect or clarify thinking or ask questions that help them see the text in a new way, and there is a co-teacher in the room as well.

The text itself was a poem by Amy Lowell, “The Lady.”

You are beautiful and faded
Like an old opera tune
Played upon a harpsichord;
Or like the sun-flooded silks
Of an eighteenth-century boudoir.
In your eyes
Smoulder the fallen roses of outlived minutes,
And the perfume of your soul
Is vague and suffusing,
With the pungence of sealed spice-jars.
Your half-tones delight me,
And I grow mad with gazing
At your blent colors.

So given the questions — “What can we tell about this lady? What does she look like? Is she old or young?” — and the formula we’ve been using all year, something like this was my objective for student achievement:

The lady in the poem is beautiful. I know this because the poem starts with the words, “You are beautiful.” The poem wouldn’t say “You are beautiful” unless the lady was beautiful. The writer might be joking, but I don’t think so.

Also, the lady in the poem is old. I know this because the poem says, “You are beautiful and faded.” I know from my own experience with clothes that usually it’s old things that fade. So if the writer says the lady is faded, she must be old.

Of course there would be varying degrees of writing proficiency with that (I don’t teach writing — I’m the literature/reading teacher), and I would have to help some students reach that second realization. Also, that final sentence of the first paragraph requires some evidence as it makes a claim. What in the poem suggests the writer Still, most of them saw these things and wrote something similar.

Many, but not all.

There are several students who receive special ed services in that class — it’s an inclusion class, and there’s a co-teacher in there for that very reason. Many of the inclusion students have behavior issues that accompany their learning disabilities, but some just quietly do the best the can.

One such student produced the following in reply to the above prompt:

we know about this woman that she is beautiful and she likes an old opera tune and the perfume of her soul and she is young and her appearance is a grow mad with gazing and eighteenth-century boudior and her personality is blent colors

The lack of punctuation and capitalization is fairly typical of average eighth-grade students these days, at least in my school. That’s not my concern with this excerpt. What initially fascinates (and saddens) me is the content: it simply makes little to no sense at all past the first two clause-like elements: “we know about this woman that she is beautiful and she likes an old opera tune.” Beyond that, it seems like just a random collection of elements from the original text.

There is, however, a pattern. She clearly referred back to the questions: she explains about “her appearance” and then “her personality.” So this was not an apathetic student just randomly grabbing some words and throwing them together. This was not a vindictive act of “I’ll just put complete nonsense there because…” It’s a genuine effort at answering what was for her an incredibly difficult question.

Yet there’s more than just that. Look closely: she links “appearance” with “gazing,” a verb connected to seeing. She links “personality” to “blent colors” because the poem says “your blent colors,” so she clearly recognized that possessive pronoun and made a stab that that might be related to “her personality.” It’s not a bad interpretation, to be honest.

It’s really a valiant effort, truth be told.

But I didn’t see that at first. Grading so many such assignments, week in, week out, I get to where I’m only scanning, truth be told. Which is to say, I read it, but I read it so very fast that I’m not really reading it in the truest sense of the word. I’m not reading it like I read a book that I’m really enjoying, or even an email from a colleague. I’m looking for specific things very quickly.

I’m doing what I tell my students not to do.