In general, Miss Stretchberry is encouraging and kind: she tells Jack his poems are indeed poems, and she encourages Jack to write to Walter Dean Myers himself and invite the poet to visit their classroom. Ultimately, she convinces him to let her put his name on the poems. Miss Stretchberry also types and displays Jack’s poems anonymously for the first several months of school, which allows Jack to gain confidence in his work. She makes a point to type up students’ poems and print them on colored paper, which, Jack discovers, make the poems look like “real” poems. Gradually, she encourages him to try his hand at writing poems, first ones modeled after ones they’ve read in class and then poems that are entirely his own. But Miss Stretchberry proves to be a quietly supportive force in Jack’s life. She makes a point to introduce her students to poetry, particularly famous 20th-century poets like Robert Frost and William Carlos Williams, and she also encourages her students to write their own poems.
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