< How to Make Haiku - the case of junior high school students >I think that the orientations and instructions so far have provided you With sufficient knowledge of haiku. Yet yqu may find it difficult to actually make a haiku. Easy to say, "You express inpressions in word and write them down" but difficult to do so! Here is a scene from my junior high school class. I Say, "Now I will give you slips of paper. Please write the five haiku you made at home and submit them. "Embarrassed reactions with sighs from the students go like:
Not all of the students diligently worked on haiku for a week. Some desparately try to make all five haiku in class. Dear readers may readily imagine the chaotic sight! Yet they managed to make:
Naoyuki was all occupied with a CM-like wording:
He seemed to be fond of it with a season word and 5-7-5 syllables properly used. Hopefully, it taught him something about a good rhythm for haiku. After several weeks of exercise on "refrigerator", he came up with an amusing haiku:
A Shrike stores game of frogs and rearhorses impaled on the tree branches, and comes back for them when food runs out. Wanting intelligence, however, it oftentimes forgets the impaled game, which look like scapegoats and amuse us. Art begins with imitation, it is said. Your progress depends on whether your imitation leads to development of your own personality. Koji studied haiku for three years in my class. During his early exposure to haiku, he would read about season words and sample haiku in the handbook of season words and talk to himself, "Well, I may make haiku like these." In one of my classes where I picked up and explained season words of the time, Koji was apparently interested in a gaganbo or a daddy longlegs and impressed with the following sample haiku in the "Saijiki" handbook:
He said to me, "Teacher, it's a big mosquito-type flying dragon, ism-t it?, and legs are often left on the shoji screen(paper-paned sliding window), you know." Following the conversation, he Wrote:
As I read it aloud among my chosen haiku, he Said. "I just copied haiku in the Saijiki handbook, you know."
The tapering end of the Rokk-o mountains Which ve saw from the classroom window suddenly gathered threatening clouds overhead. In no moment, strong showers assaulted us and ere swiftly gone after a while as though it never happened. We will remember the shower as long as we remember this haiku.
This well describes the passing seasonal features of Mt. Rokko as seen from the classroom window. I modified it to eliminate one of the two season words:
My students grew bored with the limited scenary from the school window and from time to time I took them out on a short journey to a cemetry behind the school.
On such an occasion Koji made this haiku which may need some explanation. He felt sensations over the change of scenary from brown-colored landscape to a grass-green field. The expressions are incomplete but I hope that he further fosters the good sense he demonstrated here. As you see, the Students who suffered all sorts of difficulties in making haiku at the beginning gradually learn to casually express themselves, feel the heart of haiku, and make sensible haiku toward end of the Second or the third semester. Let me introduce a haiku each made in the third semester by the students at my first haiku class:
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