Objectives
This unit is designed to enable eleventh and twelfth grade vocational students to recognize, to appreciate and to use the features of poetry that are most accessible to them, especially in the generation of their own verse. The goal of the unit is to establish appreciation of poetry by means of exposure to a number of poets who have written poems in a variety of forms on familiar vocation-related subjects and on the theme of work in general. A congruent goal is to provide students with the skills and the opportunity to generate their own poetry, with emphasis on the career areas in which they are involved. The specific foci of lessons in this unit, both in the critical study and the writing of original poems, are: sound devices; imagery involving the five senses; tonal (emotional) concerns; figurative language; rhythm and rhyme patterns suitable to different purposes; and selected poetic forms.
Most vocational high school students are not experienced poets, nor are they for the most part habituated poetry readers. However, many are amateur poets, and most possess the sensibility to learn how to use the fundamental devices employed in poetry at a more sophisticated level. For these reasons, the unit centers instruction on fundamental notions designed to acquaint students with appropriate models, and to encourage production of original verse based on those models.
First, students will identify commonly employed sound devices in poetry when they read, and will be able to choose sounds discriminately for their own poetry. Student poets will identify and use: onomatopoeia, assonance, consonance, and rhyme when effective. Next, they will identify and create selected figures of language, including: metaphor, simile, personification, symbolism, hyperbole and apostrophe.
Of particular relevance to adolescents is the ability to identify tone in poetry, and to have ready tools to help them select words appropriate for their emotional denotation and connotation, when they are generating their own verse. The poignant occasions of a teenager's first experience with death or love, not to mention strong feelings they have about their futures in career-centered schools, are just a few examples of why this particular facet of poetry is uniquely important in this age group.
Students are then shown, by way of some simple scansion exercises, that poets think carefully about rhythmic units. They will practice the production of feet and meter, employing iambs, trochees, anapests and dactyls. Students will also recognize and experiment with free verse.
Students will read, recognize and be able to create poems in free verse, in Shakespearean sonnet form, in American haiku (tercet), rhymed couplets, and a narrative verse form (probably ballad). All of these forms are modeled and students practice them during the course of the unit.
Finally, the notion of imagery is generally perceived by high school students to be a matter of extensive visual description. Consequently, this unit addresses this misapprehension by having students practice the identification and use of images across the five senses. This can be a particularly rich experience for vocational students whose careers are filled with the sights, sounds, smells and tactile experiences endemic to the trades, service industries—particularly the culinary arts—and to the workplace in general.
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