Coaching and Being Coached

I kept ignoring Marko’s pleas for more coaches at Hamilton High School. I live in the Bitterroot and take as many local coaching days as I can. But I kept hoping this session would be filled without my help. Why? Because it was poetry. Jen Carmody asked her students to write a Three Stanza Memoir.

I mostly write nonfiction. I don’t write poems and don’t know much about different types of poetry. I jokingly (sort of) refer to myself as poetry-o-phobic. Some poems I like and more I just don't get. There's even one I love, read over and over again, but don't understand most of it (“Renascence” by Edna St. Vincent Millay). 

But the pleas kept getting more desperate, so I reached out to Marko. “I have time to do the coaching,” I told him, “but am not sure how to coach poetry.” I was nervous admitting my uncertainty to him, a poet who teaches poetry, but he wrote back right away. He suggested that the concerns for a poem would be the same as they would for a personal essay or tribute paper—an emphasis on wording that provides vivid sensory images and concrete details. Well, that I could do. 

I read the assignment, studied the grading matrix, and, to my great relief, Jen provided an example of this unique form of poetry. When I met with the students, I realized that this was new to them too. I did what I always do—asked what they wrote about and why, listened to them read, praised the best of what they had done so far, and worked with them to find their voices and express themselves even better. 

When I got home, I ordered a copy of the book that inspired this assignment, N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain. Then I wrote my own Three Stanza Memoir, a story about my childhood kitchen. Can I say I’m a poet now? Hardly. But this is one of the unexpected ways that coaching pays us back by improving our own lives. I admire the bravery of students to reveal themselves in their assignments and share them with a stranger. They inspire me to learn a new style of writing and put it to use to improve my own stories. We coaches also learn from each other and, in this case, our coordinators. Like the students, we just need to be open to being coached.