Rationale
Middle schoolers are like most students in that they are more attentive when they feel a connection to what they are being presented with. Perhaps the reason so many students feel helpless and apathetic when it comes to studying poetry is that they often feel that its content and style are too far removed from their personal experiences. Maybe the key to making poetry less intimidating to students is to begin their study of it with content that they can readily relate to. Eventually students' capabilities will be developed and their confidence strengthened; they can then be given a wider variety of poems, and the ones that had at one time caused confusion will perhaps be more accessible to them. As our seminar leader said, teachers have the opportunity to open students' minds to "the ways in which poetry surprises us out of our normal habits of perception" by helping them see common people in a new light. In this unit, we will look at "fathers."
The fear that students feel when approaching poetry is a result of the fact that they think it is too removed from their personal experience. It would probably surprise students greatly to learn that some great theorists share their ideas and feel that poetry that accomplishes its goal is not the stale, talky, intellectual stuff that often confuses them. Instead, poetry should put us back in touch with the "freshness of things" (Brooks and Warren, 68).When poetry strays away from a connection with the senses, it loses that freshness, and, mostly likely, its interest. Our goal is to expose students to this kind of "good poetry", that is, poetry that relies on the dramatic presentation of a particular type in its concretenessin our case a person to whom they can all relate, the father (or father figure). Our goals in this unit include introducing students to the basics of poetry and teaching comprehension strategies that they can effectively apply independently. We also have the more affective goal of awakening students to the agency that they possess in their individual situations. Reflection can lead to success. In spite of even the dreariest or most disturbing of relationships that they have to face personally, recognizing and calling attention to those situations gives students a chance to be more fully aware of how they can make choices that will positively affect their futures.
Additionally, as teachers we must attend to the connection between reading and writing. There is a direct relationship between these two variables, so it is in the best interest of our students for us to work to improve both of these areas of their linguistic development. Since many of my students are struggling readers, this unit includes within its study of poetry the teaching of certain comprehension strategies. Once taught, practiced and applied, these strategies make independent readers out of dependent ones. The list of strategies that help students understand texts better includes: clarifying, comparing and contrasting, connecting to prior experiences, inferencing (generalizing and drawing conclusions), predicting, questioning the text, recognizing the author's craft, seeing causal relationships, summarizing and visualizing. Arguably, one could teach all of these within the context of this unit, even though some students need practice with one strategy more than with others. Individual modifications are always best assessed and adopted by the permanent teacher, but for our purposes, I am suggesting a focus on clarifying, visualizing and connecting to prior experiences. The real benefit from this aspect of the unit comes in the actual teaching of these strategies. We expect students to be able to apply these strategies without explicitly teaching them how to do that. If we really want to develop independent readers, these skills must be taught explicitly. Through think-alouds and repeatedly reinforcing both the names and processes involved in these strategies, students' reading comprehension will rise because they have been adequately equipped.
Essential Understandings
Students will complete this unit with the following realizations:
- Poetry can be understood! Strategies like clarifying, visualizing and connecting to prior experiences aid in that understanding.
- Poetry is different from prose.
- Poetry allows us to remember freely; consciously remembering our personal histories allows us to more positively affect our futures.
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