HeyJaredTeacher / Poet
In which I bring the world of the high school classroom and the world of the poem together, in life-giving ways. Opinions are my own.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 8
- Latest publication
- Sep 29, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 4, 2026
Latest issues
Apprentice (opens the original)
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Once there was a girl. She grew up near the woods where she would play all day with her brothers and sisters. She learned to swim in the river that ran through the woods. She learned to sing from the birds who woke her when she slept with her brothers and sisters in the forest.The girl grew strong. Her job for the family since she was old enough to remember was to carry: wood from the forest to the stove, food from the market to her kitchen, her little brothers and sisters on her back from the w
“Surge” (opens the original)
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A favorite English professor of mine at the University of Dallas, Greg Roper, used to say to students struggling to find their thesis or even topics that they wanted to write about, to “scratch what itches.” By which I understood him to mean: Pay attention to your own specific thoughts and feelings; write in response to them. Don’t select a topic or word or phrase or sentence because you think it is what you should choose to write. Write on and into the thing that calls you. Scratch what itches.
In Praise of John Warner (opens the original)
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I want to keep telling stories. I want to keep hearing stories. I want to teach the young people in the rooms I work (yes, I hear the connotation in that phrase, reader, let it stand) how to tell a story well.With that desire in mind, let me spend some time with this post sharing wisdom from one of my favorite teachers of writing and of storytelling, .John wrote a beautiful and funny little story in his recent Biblioracle newsletter, about a 5-week summer job his mother signed him up for, clean
“A Drowning Man Has No Need to Make Sure the River Is Flowing” (opens the original)
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In the same summer I was born, 1982, Israel, supported then, as now, by the United States, surrounded, besieged, and bombarded Beirut, Lebanon. In the words of historian David Gilmour, “Day after day, Israeli gunners sat outside the city lobbing thousands of shells into the densely packed apartment blocks. From the sea the Israeli navy pounded the coastal districts while F16 aeroplanes screeched overhead terrorizing the population and levelling whole buildings.”Then, as now, Israeli military sla
"Maybe We Never Know" (opens the original)
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As the reader of this Substack—and any former student of mine—knows, I am fairly obsessed with letters. (See my earlier post on teaching through letters, “A Modest Proposal” for another illustration of this obsession.) I thought it would be a fun post this week for you to have a window into “overhearing” a letter I’ve written to Greg Watson about his poem, “Maybe We Never Know,” and read Greg’s response as well. A variation on the “Dear Poet” assign
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