Madness 2012- 1 and Done

Well, the voting is over.  My poem didn't win. I'm a little disappointed, but I enjoyed the experience. My "opponent" wrote an outstanding poem. She deserved to win, and I'm actually quite happy for her. Being in the poetry challenge taught me that I'm more competitive than I realized.  I didn't think I cared about winning until the voting started. I found myself checking the scoreboard several times today to see how many votes I had. The final tally was her- 60 to my-37.  I was worried I might not get any votes, so I'm grateful for the 37 kind folks who voted for my poem.   
Another cool thing that came out of the challenge happened when I showed the scoreboard to my students and gave them time to click through and read the poems. They couldn't vote because only one vote was allowed for every IP address.  Next year, I'll make voting sheets for them and tally their votes. Then we can enter one vote as a school. Several kids asked me if we could do a poetry challenge. .  I think that would be a great National Poetry Month activity. First, I need to think of a way to keep the poets anonymous so it doesn't become a popularity contest.  As middle school students, it will be hard to keep them from telling their friends the title of their poem. I also worry that poems that don't get any votes might cause the author to feel hurt.  If anyone has ideas on how to handle these types of things, please let me know.

If you haven't checked out Madness 2012 at Think Kid, Think, take a look. I think you'll like what you see!  Maybe next year, you'd like to join the challenge. It was a little tense for me worrying about the word I was going to get,, if I could actually write a poem in such a short period of time, and if anyone would vote for my poem. Would I do it again?  You betcha!