Last year, Sam Tidwell walked across America.
On Thursday, he walked into the auditorium at Soledad High School to speak to 300 seniors about poetry and writing.
His message: It doesn’t take a cross-country sojourn to bring out your creativity. The journey starts within.
Tidwell, a 23-year-old college graduate, described a year of walking from his native Greenfield to New York. He told of the people he met, places he stayed, highs and lows along the way. The English literature major wrote a blog along the way and plans to write some poetry as well.
Poetry. It’s an art form that, teachers admit, wasn’t widely pursued at Soledad High in the recent past. But since September, seniors in English class have been pumping out poems in a south county version of a renaissance. Each of about 300 students has written at least 50 poems, according to English teacher Ericka Radcliff.
Why has poetry caught on at Soledad High? The classes allow students to play with words without the rigid confines of spelling, grammar and sentence structure. Students are graded more on participation than their poetry, Radcliff said.
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