Classroom Activities
Modeling the Read
Just as it’s important for students to know that they can work with a poem on their own and draw value from it simply by applying their own thinking to it, so too should students see how methodical and systematic close reading happens. This is really as simple as the teacher reading the poem with the students and showing them the process of a thorough close read from beginning to end. This is an act of guidance, however, not the introduction of a mandated process of poetry study. It’s important that the students still maintain agency in forming their own approaches to the study of a political poem. The teacher – as one with more experience and education in poetry reading – is a guide providing help for students and showing ways of dealing with a poem that students might not have considered. There are no worksheets here, no “graphic organizers”, no “Rules for Close Reading” or “SOAPSTone” lessons – only the teacher, the poem, and the students.
The actual way this unfolds in the classroom is simple. Every student gets a copy of a poem. Then the teacher, at the front of the class, reads the poem closely and narrates their thinking to the students. As the teacher works with the poem, the students get to see and ask questions about the story of the teacher’s reading. Students have their own way of looking at a poem (or maybe they still can’t find success in their own personal reading), but they get to observe a more comprehensive approach and glean from the teacher’s efforts tools that may work for them. The environment of course conditions how this observation happens: the poem can be written or projected on the board and the teacher can annotate in front of the class; research can be shown “on the fly” by having the teacher look up information with the internet on the projector or the class can be given printed research ahead of time; and with live internet access students can choose a poem to project that the teacher can demonstrate their methods without preparation, just as the students would.
Every teacher’s methodology will be different, of course, but it might be useful to look at Robert Frost’s “The Gift Outright” as an interesting example of how a thorough political reading can complicate the value of a poem. Given just the most basic information that this poem was read at the inauguration of President Kennedy and then time to read it, most students will cringe immediately with the first lines, “The land was ours before we were the land’s.” It seems like this poem is dealing with the claim Americans make to legitimate ownership of the country’s territory, but this is problematic considering the violent means we used to secure it. Taking land from Native Americans is one of the great shames of our history, but here it’s celebrated! “She was our land more than a hundred years / before she was our people.” The poem goes on to explain the relationship between Americans and the land under the rule of England, then the giving over of themselves to the land, finding “salvation in surrender.” The poem ends with a vague allusion to “Manifest Destiny,” reinforcing the seemingly central idea that there is an intrinsic and natural connection between the American people and the land they claimed. Many students will not respond positively to this.
Here is where it is interesting to walk the students through a political read and show them what else they might find. Political poems deal with the person in society, so it’s a good idea to start with the person writing the poem. Who was Robert Frost, and where did this poem come from? On the projector the teacher can look up biographical information and select the details likely to be important for reading the poem, writing them on the board while students copy everything the teacher writes onto their own copies of “The Gift Outright.” The teacher’s notes may look something like this:
Frost began life in the city, working various jobs, but always wanting to be a poet.
Serious about this commitment for his whole life.
Highly educated, including some years at Harvard.
He owned a farm for a while that he tried unsuccessfully to manage.
Left for England and worked there with major poets, including Ezra Pound.
One of the Dymock Poets.
Returned to farming on return to the U.S. in 1915. Family place for many years.
He taught and wrote in the highest levels, at Amherst and Breadloaf
Continued to win numerous awards.
Spent his later years in Florida.
Read this poem when 86, but it was published 20 years earlier.
At this point the teacher might bring to light the fact the farming was not just a major part of Frost’s life, but something he wanted in his life. He was given a farm, he tried and failed to run it, and yet he still returned to it later in life, making it a part of his family life. Considering Frost as a farmer, how does a farmer look at his land? There’s a deep relationship, one of seemingly mutual dependence as the crops depend on the farmer just as the farmer lives by his crops. A farmer cannot simply exploit their land without thought for the land’s needs or the crops will soon exhaust themselves, growing less every year. Frost would have learned hard lessons from his early failures, and his successes too would be important to him. How does this inform the poem?
When Frost writes, “The land was ours before we were the lands,” it suggests the time Frost owned a farm but had no experience farming. He owned the land by title, but he had no relationship with it. What if this poem is about the conflict between political claims and authentic residence? Drawing lines and boundaries and handing out titles without a thought to the relationship between the actual person and the actual ground they walk on? Maybe instead of elevating American expansion and colonialism it’s a cry against exploitation of the American land and people? Instead of claiming and exploiting land to make America great, does this poem suggest land is meant to be storied, artful, and enhanced? What does it mean to give ourselves outright? Holding these questions in mind, the teacher can return to the poem and examine the overall meaning in a new light. Even more importantly, students see the importance of the poem’s author and situation and learn to be flexible in their first reading.
After reviewing Frost’s poem with these questions in mind, the teacher might now examine the form of the poem and how this addresses the questions they and the class have been asking. For instance, the sixteen lines of the poem suggest a sonnet, and this creates a series of expectations that Frost will either honor or break. Pertinent questions might be, “Where are the quatrains, sestets, or octaves? Why the enjambed lines when we should expect full stops? With all this disorder, where is the order? Why sixteen lines of blank verse? Where is there word play?” The teacher would ask these questions while writing tentative answers on the poem for the students to follow.
This activity doesn’t give students a checklist of “Ten Steps to Read a Political Poem!” Instead it shows how a simple approach can yield a great deal of useful information. If they learn to read a poem to gain a sense of it without permanent intellectual commitment, then to look up background information that sheds different lights on the poem, and finally to reread the poem with a sensitivity both to form and meaning, they will be ready to read difficult works independently. Because these are intellectual habits more than content knowledge, it’s important to repeat this activity with the students as often as possible so that they come to see this as a natural way to work with political poetry.
Draw Sharing
Drawing can be a way into sharing expressions of students’ lived experiences without the fear and pressure amateur writers often feel [about] poetry writing. On a sheet of paper or in their journals have students create two columns, one for things, people, or events in their lives that are important or meaningful to them, and the other column for things, people, or events that they tend to experience regularly. The point here is to give the students a space to reflect on their ways of life in both large (moving from another country, the death of a family member, passing a difficult class, winning or losing a fist-fight, etc.) and small ways (eating or skipping breakfast, walking to the bus stop, getting cat-called, texting with friends, etc.). Then, from these columns students should select one or a couple of things they feel like spending some time on, and on a fresh sheet of paper they should draw that experience. They can draw it however they like so long as they feel like it best represents themselves, but it should be something someone else can understand because after a period of time they will share it.
Sharing the drawings is the heart of the activity. First, students find it easier to share drawing than writing: for some reason I don’t understand they feel like the stakes are lower with drawing and they often make themselves more vulnerable with this form. To make things even easier, students should share their work in small groups, then each group can present their work (this form allows shy students in the group to ask another to present for them too). Sharing their work creates a valuable sense of community, but it can also help them come to terms with their identities as amateur writers. If the teacher comments on the value of the work and the students are praising each other’s efforts too, and then the teacher shows students a masterpiece of political art on the projector (Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, for instance), the class’s attention can be drawn to the fact that their pictures were good and valuable even though they did not match the craft of a professional. Furthermore (with Guernica especially), the class can see how their work is in fact more accessible than a professional’s masterpiece, and this adds to their value. If the teacher likes, they can offer the students another piece of visual art more accessible to them yet not at all less visceral (Francisco Goya’s The Third of May 1808 offers both intensity and accessibility) and ask the students to analyze the work as artists: What is going on in the picture that you notice, recognize, or respect? The connection can then be made to poetry: even though they may (and will, and probably should) doubt their own poetic voice’s quality, they should have the confidence that their writing will still have value to this classroom community – to their peers and teacher – and it may even have the potential to have value outside the classroom. This drawing activity gives students an educational experience that they can remember and gain confidence from.
Another valuable experience comes from their initial examinations of their lives that they carry out in preparation for this activity, and then the decision to commit to one of those experiences for their art. There is potential to explore where politics fits in private and public life. Let’s say a student drew something private and trivial – eating breakfast, for instance. The right questions can turn this into a political event: What do you eat for breakfast? Cereal and milk? Does a parent make it for you? You do it yourself? Why? Your mom is at work and your dad is asleep? He works nights? So you’re alone when you wake up? Do you make breakfast for any brothers and sisters? A little brother? He’s 8? How much do you take care of him?
Obviously this kind of questioning has to be done with discretion and sensitivity, but it’s important to see that even the most trivial lived experiences can show something important about political pressures. The student who drew breakfast might be a student shouldering great responsibilities, and there are political and economic reasons for this greater than their own household. There is always a connection to something greater – this faith drives the teacher’s questions. The student who has a stay-at-home mother, a wealthy family, and few economic or political pressures also doesn’t escape: with privilege comes expectations and responsibilities, other pressures to participate and maintain the systems that created this privileged life, and a line of questioning might explore what those are and how they work for this more wealthy student.
The students’ first poetry writing can follow this form, making their initial efforts feel somewhat familiar to them. They can look at the columns they made for their art, they can look at the drawings themselves, and try to represent in words what they did with lines, shading, and color. Just as pencils, erasers, scissors, glue, and markers are tools to create art, so too are figurative language, lines and line breaks, rhyme, meter, length, and diction tools for poetry.
Collaboration
Students have a lot to offer each other when they share their skills, background knowledge, and life experiences as they work together to read, write about, and discuss poetry. Ideally, students do at home the work that is personal and they use class time to work together in a variety of forms. Just as the entire class engages in Socratic discussions, so too can they work with the poems in smaller groups. There are many methods for breaking up the class into collaborative partnerships: ideally the teacher strategically arranges students’ personalities and skill levels into a productive unit, but more often than not this is simply not expedient. Random, constantly changing groups ensure a certain level of fairness, while allowing students to choose their own partners provides a certain level of comfort. The greatest factor that mitigates any problems that particular groupings of students can create is clear objectives and clear directions to get there. The following are three broad categories of work that students may collaborate on for their benefit.
Analysis
Collaborative analysis is the backbone of the activities for this unit. Moving from individual readings of a text to an entire class discussion is often difficult, but allowing students to talk in smaller circles gives everyone open space to try out their ideas and see what their colleagues think. The groups are best guided by a question or problem that they can use to frame their responses. After they work, they can either report out or submit a written record of their discussion or conclusions. If students are working on a difficult poem and they all come to class with sparse annotations or puzzled expressions, it can be effective to give them space to work together to analyze and informally record their analysis through annotations. Not only will this encourage a more thorough examination of the poem, but as the students copy each other’s analysis onto their own papers they will have an artifact of this thinking that may help boost their confidence.
Collaborative Essay
It’s not often that students are asked to collaborate on formal writing. In fact, it’s so rare that they tend to see writing as such a personal enterprise they aren’t sure how to begin. Collaborative essay writing is especially important because it draws students together not just to create analysis of a work but also to present it in a clear and reasonable way. Furthermore, it explores the writing process by forcing students to look at writing methodically. As the groups work to formally and completely respond to a question, problem, or prompt (from anything as simple as “What does this poem mean?” to “Do you think the poet escapes the judgment of his own poem here?” – any question the teacher is genuinely interested in the answer to will likely engage the students as well) the writing both unfolds linearly in stages and recursively as their thinking evolves and the find themselves constantly revising their thesis. This activity takes a great deal of time at first, and students benefit from a flexible deadline, yet they should also be pushed to commit to a thesis if they find themselves in an endless circle of revision. Interestingly, this activity tends to work best with a word limit instead of a word minimum, with 300 words being a reasonable number.
Collaborative Poetry
There are a few ways to approach collaborative poetry. Because students are sharing their experience, the writing will have a little more distance than something written by an individual. This distance, potentially, makes the poetry a little less serious than they might write on their own. This poetry must serve a different end than self-expression, and generally group poems can be useful as exercises in form and content. By the later years of high school students have already practiced writing sonnets, and they may groan when asked to do this again, but sonnets are a great way to show them what the actual function of form is. I don’t think it’s often taught why poets write sonnets; it’s just understood that they do. If students are given a topic – something local and high-interest, ideally – and then asked to write a sonnet but to break the form deliberately in one or two places, it draws attention to the expectations that arise with form. They might begin to see that sonnets, pantoums, blank verse, sestinas, haiku, and all the various forms are meant to signal to the reader when they initially see the page, “This is what I am. This is what you can expect of me. Read me this way,” but then the surprise comes, and the form is necessary for the surprise. No one notices a masked man throwing a brick during a riot when chaos and commotion are everywhere, but the same man throwing a brick in Buckingham Palace makes all the newspapers. In the same way students should work together to create a poem with rigid form, and then ruin it somewhere important and be prepared to explain why.
It is also useful to look even more closely than the details of form to imitate specific poems. This can be done by asking them to write the same poem but about a different subject, keeping (as closely as possible) the tone, meter, rhyme scheme, stanzas, and figurative language. This is ambitious but not impossible – certainly a good project for students to work on together – and like other aspects of this unit the struggle and the experience of writing is more important than the final product. To make it easier, a poem could be provided with a missing stanza, and students have to create something that would fit. It would be interesting to see what decisions they made, how many groups made the same decisions, and what they learned about the poem from the exercise.
All of these activities have as their goal to sharpen students’ vision as they look at a poem to notice more of what is going on in and around it. This sensibility is then turned on the poem of their choice for their culminating assignment, and turned also to their own world as they create poetry that speaks to it. They have the further benefit of cultivating in the class the feeling that they are a community of writers, each student strengthening the confidence of the voices of their colleagues.
Class Anthology
A meaningful activity that can happen for the duration of the unit is the creation of a class anthology of poetry. Students are reading poetry outside of class, inside of class, each other’s poems, their own poems, and collecting these into an enduring record goes a long way toward validating their efforts. Moreover, the anthology has instant credibility in any other English class where it’s used: students have immense respect for each other’s creative writing. Telling students that this is a serious anthology and that, while not professionally published, other people will see their work, the teacher can solicit students to submit at least one poem written by an author they respect that speaks to something true and important about our world (the focus being politics, with the understanding that personal, private, or confessional poetry can be shown to have a broader social application); at least one poem they have written that they feel conveys something meaningful; and, if they like, a short commentary on each that a reader might find informative or interesting. This activity is particularly useful in creating gravity for their work. When they write their poetry, or find a poem that’s important, it can be forgotten once the unit is over if it is simply one of many grade-transactions they have with a teacher. If there is a book (and ideally if they each have a copy) of their poetry that is present always in the class, it can be turned to or returned to when a relevant topic arises. The curation of this anthology can be simply hole-punching their work and putting it in a binder, or students can submit their work electronically to be formatted into something more professional. This depends on the resources of the teacher and class.
Comments: