Poems by Teachers about Teaching: WPCTE Celebrates National Poetry Month
To celebrate National Poetry Month 2026, the blog committee put out a call to WPCTE members asking for teacher-composed poems about teaching. Enjoy the fantastic submissions below, and thank you to these amazing teacher-poets for sharing your work and your hearts with us!
Zimmerman Wedding
Teaching high school English means someone always
asks, “can’t we just watch the movie instead?”
The bell rings mid-sentence,
and half the class is out the door in a rush.
A forgotten pencil.
Someone chose to not read.
Someone finished it and has strong opinions.
We spend twenty minutes arguing
about why a character lied,
as if the answer changes anything.
A hand goes up
just when the room almost goes quiet.
My saving grace when conversation stops.
But, by third period,
the board is full,
my coffee is cold,
and somehow we are discussing
why words written years ago
still sound like they belong here.
by Cassidy Black, Indiana Area Senior High School
First Day, Again
The campus breathes differently in August—
a faint scent of printer ink and coffee grounds,
mixed with the green insistence of late-summer grass.
I know this air.
I’ve walked through it for decades.
Once, I counted years in syllabi,
pages in reading lists,
faces in neat rows that blurred into the next semester’s faces.
Now I count in smaller things—
the way the first cough echoes in a quiet lecture hall,
how one student’s pen taps
like a metronome before the music begins.
They arrive in waves:
some cautious, as if the doorway were a border crossing,
others all elbows and laughter,
already narrating their own beginnings.
And I, the steady lighthouse on the shore,
am here to keep the light turning.
I’ve learned the first weeks are not about what I teach,
but how I listen—
to the stammer of someone finding their voice,
to the stillness that follows a hard question.
We build the semester together,
brick by brick,
word by word,
until the walls of the room are papered with understanding.
Every year I think I’ve seen it all—
and every year proves me wrong.
So I sharpen my chalk,
open the windows to let in the hum of the quad,
and take my place once more
at the start of the story.
by Elizabeth Kuhns-Boyle, Community College of Allegheny County
Those Who Can
“Those who can,” they say, “do,
and those who can’t,” they say, “teach,”
ignoring one obvious truth:
We all teach every day –but
We don’t all teach well.
Every dad who tells his son not to cry, to “walk it off” and “be a man,”
Every mom who tells her daughter to skip dessert, “sit like a lady,” style her hair just so,
Every waiter who asks for an easier-to-pronounce name for the waitlist,
Every retail worker who follows some people more closely than others,
surveillance so thinly veiled under “just-here-if-you-need-anything” that everyone can read the subtext.
Every influencer spon con that promises spending money can make you
thin and pretty and happy or
tough and strong and invulnerable
Every Disney movie with a slender, light skinned-eyed-and-haired princesses,
rescued by some prince she’s never met,
somehow still so obviously her One True Love
&c., &c., ad infinitum.
There are s o m a n y bad teachers out there
—everywhere always so ubiquitous they are invisible—
it’s no wonder our kids are so often sad, anxious, or lonely.
What is teaching but doing?
(or, at its best, undoing all those toxic lessons
the youth and we ourselves internalize)
Those who can must
And those who can’t must learn t o t e a c h.
by Hannah Lewis, PA Leadership Charter School, WPCTE Vice President
When It Rains...
Gathering of Green -
Water cans, Youth's wisdom
When it Rains, it Poems.
by Aspen Mock, Forest Hills Junior-Senior High School
Painted Petals
Paper petals pressed
into pain, polished upon
pavement. Poetry's parade.
by Aspen Mock, Forest Hills Junior-Senior High School
Sustenance
Massive, ancient trees
Our boughs reach for the River-
Of What do We seek?
by Aspen Mock, Forest Hills Junior-Senior High School
Written during the Rain Poetry Johnstown Teacher's Workshop
Wellspring
Abound from the ground
Kigo and Satori spring-
It's raining Haiku!
by Aspen Mock, Forest Hills Junior-Senior High School
My student died today
Three students
Two life-flights
One student DOA
“We can’t release the names
Until the families have been notified.”
Families
Families
Families
Searching for faces in attendance
Questions sit in empty seats
Who isn’t here?
Who is alive?
Who isn’t?
How much can a school take?
And how is a school not a family?
by Janel Prinkey, Rocky Grove Jr. Sr. High School
Omoiyari
As I pick up the gum wrappers from the floor,
the abandoned papers from English, math class, or environmental science,
the pieces of mutilated pencils,
and all of the tiny lined-paper fringes that never quite seem to make their way into the garbage,
I lament why students can’t just throw their own trash away.
Why am I stuck here on my hands and knees, collecting scraps like a bird building a nest,
while they are long gone home for the night?
And then I try to find a new perspective, and I begin to wonder how this tiny
act of service
brings me closer to the space in which I teach and the students whom I strive to reach.
I think of students cleaning up their own schools in Japan,
I think of omoiyari and cultivating empathy, and
I think of a conversation once had with a colleague who offered to help me pick up the pieces
off my floor so I wouldn’t be late to lead musical practice running out the door but then she said:
“The custodian complains about the mess, but isn’t this kind of her job?”
And I think of empathy for her, plus the brilliance that comes out of the mess,
and I wouldn’t trade the craziness, the nest of paper scraps and discarded ideas,
the buzz of fourteen-year-old energy and nonsense and brilliance that I’m gathering from the floor as I scramble out the door—any of it—
I wouldn’t trade it for the world.
Anonymous
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