Open Door Poetry

Patricia Doreen Hendy

The Emeritus Tutor of Erdiston Teachers' Training College, Barbados

Patricia Doreen Hendy is a graduate of McGill University. She writes poetry in all forms and issues under her penname, Paterika Hengreaves on her blogs: poetrynest.blogspot.com and poetrydish.blogspot.com. She has travelled extensively in the Caribbean, North America, England and New Zealand. On her arrival in the island known as the "Long White Cloud" in April of 2004 she became a member of the "Hibiscus Coast Writers" founded in 1993 and whose Patron is Brian Morris (NZIBS). This group of writers met once each week at 1.00 p.m.at Red Beach Methodist Church Hall, Whangaparaoa with Dee Evans who was the group's President at the time.

She has two children (Francoise and Charles). She married in 1966 Edgar Hendy he died on June 6, 1995. She has six sisters and two brothers. Two of her sisters have died (Nurse Angela Barnes) died 2006 in Ohio, USA and (Nurse Sheila Brome, a ward Sister at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Barbados) died in 2014).

She believes that one's environment is more influential than heredity in determining one's development. Her teaching career spanned 1961 to 2004. She taught students in the primary, secondary and tertiary education of the Barbados Ministry of Education. Fourteen years (1979-2000) she worked with the Caribbean Examination Council in the structuring of examination materials for Business Education in Secondary Schools and as a marker and Chief Examiner. She became a Business Education Tutor at Erdiston Teachers' Training College in 1989. In 1993 she became an Education Officer in the Division of Management and Supervision at the Barbados Ministry of Education Youth Affairs and Culture. She returned to Erdiston in 1997 and retired from Erdiston College in 2004. Her hobbies are crochet, gardening, travelling and writing poetry.

Teaching in 21st century classroom is about learning across the curriculum. Students must see those connections that integrate the various subjects being taught in schools and those purposes these subjects serve beyond those formal school years. Teachers have embrace the philosophy of constructivism in designing their teaching environment so what they need the most, are appropriate resource materials that help students to make vital connections, develop the ability to transfer concepts across subject lines and use process skills (discussing, writing, classifying, listening, drawing, dramatizing, recognizing, composing) during their learning activities.

These important truths about learning and the role resource materials play in knowledge acquisition place poetry in an expanded light that goes beyond providing pleasurable reading for lovers of this art form as seen and as is manifested in the book "Open Door Poetry."

This book offers a frame-work of ideas and interprets poems that are written in traditional and non-traditional formats, genres and comments are provided on each poem bring focus on roles performed by personas. This book provides dynamic resource materials for teachers whose students are in the range of 12-16 years in secondary school or the high school. "Open Door Poetry" places poems beyond the border of reading, writing and performance by providing a conduit for arousing learners' senses in the learning process and facilitates interdisciplinary teaching approaches in student centered classrooms.

The poems as featured in "Open Door Poetry" are designed to provide resource materials for teachers who use thematic webs,thematic lesson plans and interdisciplinary teaching approaches in student centered classrooms. Themes such as implicit and explicit are in the 288 poems are there to be extracted under the guidance of their teachers in student centered classrooms.  Poetry is no longer the "Cinderella" on the school's curriculum; it is a filter and a connector per se.