Overview
Leonardo da Vinci, the master of art and science, is said to have been asked the great secret of his creativity and brilliance. His answer? "Saper Vedere," or to know how to see. 1 By studying poetry, with a focus on sonnets, elegies, and ecphrasis, my hope is to arm my students with the tools they will need to know how to "see" literature, poetry and art in a deeper and more meaningful way.
Unlike da Vinci, my AP English Literature students often struggle when they attempt to examine, no to mention articulate, what they see. As Deborah Samuel notes, students "resist understanding why they respond in the way that they do." 2 This is particularly troubling for me because, despite the emphasis that is placed on metacognition (awareness of one's own strategies for learning or thinking) at my school, my students want to resist being metacognitive. Furthermore, when faced with the daunting task of studying poetry, many students are stopped in their tracks. "I hate poetry" is a phrase I hear often. Perhaps some students feel, as Richard Andrews (as quoted by Benton) says, that poetry is "an enclosed, self–referential world to which only an elite gain access" 3. Or, some students may resist poetry due to "its associations with the feminine for 'macho' boys, many of whom [resist] reading of any sort and [reserve] a special contempt for poetry". 4 Whatever the case may be, it seems to me that when studying poetry, my students are likely to be apathetic, if not downright resistant.
Thus, I will work to counteract these feelings about poetry in my unit, "Examining Poems about Love and Loss", which will take place in my Advanced Placement English Literature course. This class is comprised of thirty–two 11 th graders. For many of these students, this will be their first high school course dedicated solely to literature, since we teach a Humanities–based curriculum in the 9 th and 10 th grade, focused more on history and literature about history than dedicated to the study of literature. This unit, devoted to sonnets, elegies, and ecphrasis, will take approximately four weeks, during which time I will meet with my students for two or three blocks a week (blocks are 100 minute class periods).
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