Teaching Cynthia Rylant's "When I Was Young In The Mountains"
I spent about three years teaching rural Appalachian literature to middle schoolers who'd rather be anywhere else. This poem shows up in every unit plan somewhere between 2018 and 2023, mostly because it's short, accessible, and makes kids feel smart for understanding something that sounds simple. Here's what actually happens when you try to teach it, and why most lesson plans miss the point entirely. The poem itself runs about twelve lines. It's structured as a series of sensory memories—birds calling, the smell of wood smoke, the sound of rain on tin roofs. Rylant doesn't use rhyme schemes or meter the way you'd expect from traditional Appalachian verse. Instead she relies on image stacking. Each line adds another layer of specific regional detail that accumulates into emotional resonance without ever stating the emotion directly. That's the technique, and it's what makes analysis questions tricky for students. I used to assign this poem alongside Walker Percy essays on Southern identity, and the combination exposed a common misunderstanding. Kids (and frankly some teachers) thought the poem was just nostalgia dressed up as nature writing. It isn't. The mountains in the poem are both real geography and a specific cultural memory of a disappearing way of life. When Rylant writes about birds calling, she's not just describing wildlife. She's documenting an acoustic landscape that existed before mountain tourism rebranded the region as a vacation destination for people who wanted Appalachian aesthetics without Appalachian people.
Here's the edge case I hit in 2020. I had a student from outside the region who argued the poem felt inauthentic because her family's mountain experience involved trailer parks and economic hardship, not tin roofs and bird songs. She was right to push back. The poem represents a particular class perspective—Rylant herself came from a relatively stable rural background, not the economically devastated hollows that characterize much of contemporary Appalachia. I stopped trying to defend the poem as universal representation. Instead I used her objection as the starting point for discussion about who gets to claim mountain authenticity and why that question matters more than the poem itself. Most analysis guides focus on imagery and sensory details. They're not wrong, but they're incomplete. The poem actually operates through absence as much as presence. What Rylant doesn't mention—the coal mining history, the outmigration of young people, the opioid crisis—carries weight precisely because those silences sit beneath every cheerful image of birds and smoke. Advanced students can track this pattern if you give them space to notice it. Beginners usually miss it because they're looking for explicit statements rather than implicit ones. One counter-intuitive thing about teaching this poem: the more specific the regional details, the more universal the emotional response becomes. Kids who've never seen a mountain range connect with the loss Rylant describes because the poem captures something broader than Appalachian experience. It captures any childhood place that exists now only in memory. The technique works across cultural boundaries precisely because personal geography functions as emotional shorthand.
If you're using this poem in a curriculum, expect pushback from administrators who want "safe" content. The poem is safe enough, but it's also honest about regional complexity in ways that make some parents uncomfortable. I've had two separate incidents where parents complained the poem made their children feel guilty about mountain privilege. The workaround I developed involves framing the discussion around memory rather than politics. Ask students to write about their own childhood sensory landscapes—the specific smells, sounds, and sights that defined their early environment. The exercise usually reveals that regional specificity and universal emotion are compatible, not competing, concerns. The poem appears in most anthologies around pages 142 to 148, depending on the edition. Check your table of contents first. Some versions include commentary that actually helps, others add distracting footnotes that break the reading flow. I prefer the original publication format from Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982, when possible. The layout preserves the poem's visual spacing, which matters more than students realize. Don't expect this poem to work for every unit. It requires students to have some baseline experience with imagery analysis. If your class hasn't covered metaphor and symbol yet, save it for later. The poem rewards close reading but punishes skimming. Students who treat it as simple nature verse miss almost everything important. Those who slow down and track the sensory accumulation usually understand more by line three than they expected.
I've seen this poem misused as filler content between heavier texts. Don't do that. It deserves the full attention of a proper analysis session, usually forty-five to fifty minutes depending on discussion depth. If you're rushing through it because the unit plan demands coverage, you're cheating your students. The poem takes time because it works slowly. Each rereading reveals another layer of regional detail that accumulates into emotional understanding without ever stating feeling explicitly.
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