The Sound of Words: An Introduction to Poetry

Background

Teaching Advanced Placement Language and Composition in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school system is challenging. The course itself is one of the more difficult sponsored by The College Board. Only twenty-five percent of students who took the test in 2008 scored a four or a five (compared to forty-five percent of the also popular and accessible AP Psychology course), and fewer than fifty-seven percent received a passing score.² The primary goal of the AP Language course is to create strong analysts with the skills to write effectively. Students must identify rhetorical choices, connect them to stylistic devices, and explain how the precise language of the text works to achieve the purpose of the author. The focus of The College Board examination is nonfiction; however, in Charlotte the task is complicated by the fact that the course also serves as a student's primary English credit for eleventh grade. In other words, we must teach these skills of nonfiction analysis while also incorporating texts from the traditional American literary canon—along with whatever other local requirements might come along in the ever-evolving implementation of the Graduation Project standards—and suddenly we find ourselves with far less time to focus on the new and challenging curriculum, essentially teaching three classes in one.e.

Further complicating the issue is the fact that students are coming increasingly unprepared for the course. I have taught the course for six years—with a two year break in between segments. When I began eight years ago, the jump in curriculum was so enormous that I was struggling to keep up. I could essentially throw any idea at my students—and because of their ability level they could turn almost anything into a fantastic learning opportunity. I learned right along with them. One would assume that at this point I could be on some sort of "cruise control," but every year the course becomes more difficult. While my mastery of the material and instructional techniques has increased, their agility in working with the language has decreased significantly. The possible explanations for this trend are myriad. Because of the open-enrollment policy, students are entering the course with a variety of skill sets, many with verbal PSAT scores well below the College Board recommendation. No Child Left Behind requirements focus classroom instruction on standardized test improvement—and most of those tests focus on reading comprehension or other skills for which there is one clear, correct answer—not analysis, writing, or independent thinking. Further, increased access to technology means that students are constantly accessing Sparksnotes.com or other such sources for that "right response," and because of this they have spent years practicing reading and absorbing what someone else has told them to think—more reading comprehension -instead of exercising their own powers of analysis and independent thought.ught.

This lack of student preparation would seem to necessitate more individualized instruction; however, demographic shifts in our population and economy have compounded the difficulties in facilitating student success in the classroom. I teach at Providence Senior High School in Charlotte, North Carolina. The combination of an explosive growth rate and a dwindling economy has impacted our ability to serve the individualized needs of our students. The Charlotte- Mecklenburg school system has grown at a rate of three percent per year; in other words, approximately four thousand students enter the CMS system each year, and a large percentage of them come from our attendance zone. It is anticipated that this growth will continue for ten years.³ Yet with recent setbacks in our national, state and local economies, the system has cut approximately twenty percent of the qualified teachers from our school. This reduction in force has led to the elimination of many Advanced Placement courses, and increased class sizes in those that remain. Students who come to the course with limited skills need individual attention, and with class sizes anticipated to be above thirty-five across the board, that individualized instruction will become more and more difficult. Our job as teachers will be to find strategies that will work effectively with larger groups of students.

The course requirements themselves are daunting for even the most skilled students because they are so advanced and outside the realm of preparation and prior expectations. I find that the mere mention of the word rhetoric can induce utter panic—to say nothing of the introduction to metonymy or epanalepsis. Students need assistance in learning how to break down a text into manageable pieces so they can see how the language creates meaning. They need guidance as they move from the familiar land of reading comprehension to the undefined wilderness of analysis. But even within all this uncharted territory, the concept that seems to be increasingly difficult for students, at least within my own personal experience, is the identification and application of tone.

Students struggle with the identification of tone and how it contributes to the establishment of purpose. They confuse tone with the mood, with the attitude of a character within the text, or even with the author's viewpoint on a particular topic. When originally considering the seminar description for "The Sound of Words: An Introduction to Poetry," I had an "ah-ha" moment—what if the sound is what is actually missing in our discussion? If the tone is the verbal stance an author holds toward characters, events or situations as reflected in his voice, then perhaps it is the concept of the sound of the language that has been missing from my presentations. Students spend so much time mechanically dissecting the diction, syntax and selection of detail that they don't stop to listen to the author. In essence, they are unable to hear what they are reading.