If You're Not Here, Please Raise Your Hand: Poems About School - Book Review

This post was written as a Master's course assignment for Texas Woman's University.

 

1. BIBLIOGRAPHY

Dakos, Kalli. 1990. IF YOU'RE NOT HERE, PLEASE RAISE YOUR HAND. Illustrations by G. Brian Karas. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing Division. ISBN 0027255816.

2. BOOK SUMMARY

Kalli Dakos highlights the joys and woes of the typical (and not so typical) happenings within the walls of a school classroom for young children. In this collection, some of the poems are free form, while others display a particular rhyme scheme. The lengths of the poems vary from four lines, to over four pages, and the humor expressed throughout the pages is hilarious and contagious. 

School-age children can certainly identify with the issues that arise in Dakos' poems, like the item that the narrator of I BROUGHT A WORM brings for show and tell: "I brought a worm... I ate the worm!" (pg. 3). Children of all ages have probably hidden out in the bathroom at some point during their school careers: "The bathroom is the nicest place/To sit and wait for bells" (HIDING IN THE BATHROOM, pg. 36). And the children beg the teacher to empathize with their efforts to try hard in YOU CAN DO BETTER: "Could you/Sit beside a friend/And not speak too?" (pg. 21).

Dakos is not afraid to tackle difficult subjects that children are inevitably exposed to, including death, failing a grade, and being teased. She also displays good daydreaming imagery in THEY DON'T DO MATH IN TEXAS: "And every classroom/Had a popcorn machine,/A drink machine,/And a candy machine/With five different chocolate bars/And six choices of gum" (pg. 18). What child hasn't dreamed of a classroom that looks like that?

Humor is a big player throughout the collection as well, appearing in CALL THE PERIODS (pg. 46), a huge run-on sentence that is dying for punctuation, GO TO THE BAHAMAS (pg. 51), which the narrator has never been told to do, and so, figures that she is really in trouble, and IF WE HAD LUNCH AT THE WHITE HOUSE (pg. 59), a funny example of the typical lunchroom chaos.

3. POEM HIGHLIGHT

The poem that I would like to highlight from this collection is DANCING ON A RAINBOW (pg. 41). As a connection activity with the reading of this poem, I would guide the group of children in an crafting session decorating cut outs of paper rainbows. We could start with the base of a rainbow/cloud shape, paste on different stripes of color to represent the rainbow, as well as some cotton balls as clouds at either end (which are mentioned within the poem). We could also discuss the feelings that each child experiences when they see a rainbow across the sky, and relate it to the feelings expressed in the poem, especially which particular teachers the children might feel this way about.

DANCING ON A RAINBOW

When my reading teacher

Comes to get me

For my special reading class

I feel like

Dancing on a rainbow.

To me she is

     a light in the darkness

     the twinkle of a star

     soft as a cottonball

     a true friend.

When my reading teacher

Comes to get me

For my special reading class

I know what it is like

To dance on a rainbow.

(By Kalli Dakos)