Objectives
Discussion Goals
One of my primary goals as a teacher is to help my students find, and then use, their voices in academic settings and beyond. In order to achieve that goal, I first need to lessen my students' affective filters. "Affective filter" is a term coined by Steven Krashen, based on his research in second language acquisition, and it is "a screen of emotion that can block language acquisition or learning if it [makes] the users…too self–conscious or too embarrassed to take risks during communicative exchanges". 9 My AP students enter my classroom lacking the requisite vocabulary to speak about poetry. As we uncover basic terms and strategies for studying poetry, I believe that my students' affective filters will be reduced. My hope is that this will diminish the stress that students tend to feel when studying poetry, and will open their eyes to the underlying beauty and complexity of poetry. Also, since the language and structure of the poems may be foreign or challenging to my students, the subjects of love and loss provide entry points through which students can discuss the less verbally current poems in the unit. Once my students recognize that they can conquer the daunting task of analyzing poetry, they can apply this confidence to other areas of their lives in which they have felt silenced or subdued.
Writing Goals
By the end of this unit, I want my students to have gained momentum regarding academic writing. First of all, I want them to learn the language of analyzing poetry, such terms of vocabulary as stanza, couplet, and volta, as well as rhetorical devices like personification or metonymy. Once they gain more facility with this language, I would like my students to be able to develop written assertions about a particular poem in the form of a thesis, and be able to prove the validity of this thesis through the use of well–chosen evidence in an effectively written essay. I would also like my students to be able to draw comparisons between poems, as well as between a poem and a work of art.
Finally, my other objectives are all grounded in the California state standards and in the goals in the College Board's AP English Literature Course Descriptions. The standards being met by this unit can be found in Appendix 1. They focus on reading and writing skills.
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