Slam Students: Teaching Slam Poetry
In this unit I will present poetry in three parts: English Slam, Slam en Espanol, and Bilngual Slam. In addition to that I will present several poems published in Cool Salsa, edited by Lori M. Carlson, which takes many poems and shows the English and Spanish versions of them. With each set of poems I present, I will ask the students to discuss several questions. First, what is the poem about? While this may seem like a simple question, it has several layers. Most Slam Poetry is saturated with metaphors, which will be good practice for students in analyzing poems. The questions become much more difficult for the poems I present in Spanish because my students will not know the majority of the vocabulary. They will need to rely on cognates, repetition, and the poet's performance to identify the theme, tone, and general idea of what he or she may be speaking about. The second question is; what poetic elements are present? The students will hear rhyme and repetition in many of the examples that I show them. They will pull evidence from the text and decide whether these elements are effective or not for what they believe the poet is trying to convey. Pulling evidence from the text is another standard of the Common Core which they will be touching on here. The third question is: do you agree with the poet? In other words, do the students feel the same way as the poet? Most poetry is very subjective and this is a good opportunity for students to begin thinking about their own writing. Are the poems that they will be exposed to inspire them to express their feelings or create new ones the students never had?
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