March 5, 2024 - Michael Salinger
American Embassy School – New Delhi
The American Embassy School in New Delhi walks the walk.
Enriched by Diversity is not just a slogan on the high school building it’s interwoven within the fabric of the school. We had a wonderful two weeks working with teachers and students from pre-K through 12th grade.
Librarians extraordinaire, Dr. Chris Fazenbaker and Wendy Guyer planned (and adapted on the fly) a great visit. We saw the middle school choral ensemble perform one of Sara’s poems to music they composed, attended an author pancake breakfast, a student cast dinner theater, and did an elementary assembly and classroom workshops. We were busy in the best of ways.
We wrote: memoirs, personification poems, short summarizing narratives, sentence variety packs, point-of-view poems, yes yes yes – no no no pre-K masterpieces, infomercials, extended metaphors, feelings made visual poems, and subjective vs objective poems. We harnessed rhyme and honed our public presentation skills – like I said, busy in the best of ways.
What made this visit so exciting for us was the total buy-in of the teachers we worked with and their willingness to try more than just one workshop – this kept things fresh for us and the participants.
All the while the humor and attentiveness of our two poet wranglers, kept us on track, hydrated, and cheerful. Two crackpot poets couldn’t have asked for a better memory-building fortnight.
Thank you, AES! Seeya next time.