When I was first starting out as a sixth grade English teacher, I built on what my predecessor had been doing. He was a much-loved tradition, a tall, kind man, and like many of the teachers at my boys’ private school he was very traditional. The students read Treasure Island, for instance, and a retelling of the Greek myths. He taught grammar, the kind you do with exercises, from a textbook. And he had his students memorize and recite a poem once a month. I did all of those for quite a while, though I replaced the original Treasure Island with a version retold for sixth grade reading level.

However, I built most of my curriculum around poetry, reading my students a new poem every day and inviting them to learn how to read critically, analyze a sentence, attend to layers of meaning, and learn how to discuss a piece of literature thoughtfully and with penetration. A short poem is a difficult text, and if you want students to develop text stamina, you can either have them read a lot of easy text or a small amount of difficult text, preferably both, so I did both.

Teachers like to complain that students don’t know how to read any more, but most students never did know how to read Robert Louis Stevenson unless it was before they had video games and social media, and even then they just faked it. They endured it. And if you assigned chapters for homework, the chapters didn’t really get read. The students looked it up online or did nothing at all. Then, later in life, they announced proudly that they had endured all that nonsense as a kind of fraternity initiation.

Oh, yes, there have always been students who, as I did when I was twelve years old, read difficult texts easily. I had an IQ of 182, anxiety, ADHD, and no social life, so of course I read and re-read Treasure Island, and a lot of Graham Greene, along with science fiction and James Michener. But your average sixth grade prep-school boy is really, really not interested in reading. His parents are too busy to read. Sometimes I thought those parents had very little interior life at all, honestly.

My method worked. We had a complex faculty evaluation system, and I was observed by peers and supervisors regularly. They were invariably astonished at what my students could do. See, I wasn’t like my predecessor. I didn’t want to march mercilessly through canon and let the students lag along; I wanted them to learn how to do things.

I could get them to do it because we read short poems. They were often difficult poems, ones that weren’t written for children. After we read it, I invited the kids to say something about the poem.

I wasn’t looking for a right answer, I was looking for evidence of engagement. And I got it. “Oh, now I get what you’re doing,” said my intern Bryan one day. “Jack is Jack, and Jamir is Jamir, but they’re both engaging with the poem on an equal level.” I note that Jack was a privileged white boy with a massive vocabulary, and Jamir was a black kid whom everyone assumed was being prepared for the football team. (Yes, a fellow teacher actually said that about Jamir. I may write about implicit and explicit racism in my workplace some other time. I saw a boatload of it.) (Names have been changed.)

Poems do mean something, but students had to be brave to really discuss them, and I made it easy for them to be brave. One time, a student raised his hand and said hesitantly, “It could be about anything.”

I said, “This time, I’m going to disagree. This one is about something in particular.”

“Then it’s about marriage,” he said confidently, and I nodded (though the poem was overtly about trees, but yeah, it was about marriage) and moved on.

Everything I did was evidence-based and founded in solid research, mind you. But people thought I was just being an old-fashioned educator like my predecessor, and I nodded and smiled. (Some time I will write about the way our society condescends to teachers and discounts what we actually know about teaching as opposed to naive theory based on nostalgia and elitism.)

In the process of teaching, I learned a tremendous amount about poetry, and I learned to love it myself, for myself. My mother read a lot of poetry, and sometimes quoted it. One time, as she descended into the paralysis of Parkinson’s Disease, she once recited some of Browning’s “Porphyria,” (a dramatic monologue about a man who has killed and is embracing his lover) and that was horrifying and powerful.

I started writing this because yesterday, as the weather got briefly warmer and March approached, I heard unexpected bird songs, and I thought of two different poems. I had to look them up this morning. One of them is “Thus Spake the Mockingbird” by Barbara Hamby, and the other one is “Saying Things,” by Marilyn Krysl.

My students loved both of those poems. That’s what I could do with sixth grade boys: I could teach them to love something hard that wasn’t related to making money.