I’ve come up with a writing exercise for middle and high school students that’s easy to administer and fun to do.

The exercise:

• doesn’t cost anything
• doesn’t require any special training or skills to administer
• is very non-threatening to poetry-phobic students
• practically runs itself

These qualities make this exercise extremely scalable, to use a term common in tech. What this means is we could very easily have every middle and high school student in this country engaging with several poems a week for all the years of their schooling without running into resource limitations. Imagine what that might do for our society!

I’ve love to see “Poetry Pro-Am” tried in:

• classrooms
• after school programs
• libraries
• bookstores
• anywhere else a group of kids from about grade 5 through 12 can be gathered

You can read more about it here.