Haiku Workshop – Writing Tiny Poems to Explore School-Related Difficulties

We took a haiku-writing workshop with coach and author Doret Jordaan, inviting people to create “tiny poems” around school-related difficulties. The outcome was really phenomenal! Not just in the beautiful and poignant poems created, also in the discussions they opened up.
One thing that really struck me, as it so often does with this work, was how much our experiences are shared and easily relatable. Whether growing up in the USA, South Africa, Japan or England, and whether we are talking about school experiences today or two generations back, whether for boys or for girls, many of the same issues arise and endure. They are features of our common humanity.

Here are some of the haiku participants created, with Doret’s guidance. We will compile a longer post of the full workshop, with haiku and a summary of the discussion topics we covered.
In the meantime, why not try your hand at creating your own haiku (5/7/5 syllables) about a personal school experience, and post it in the comments below? We’d love to read it.

This last one perfectly captures our vision in a “tiny mission statement”.