Introduction
According to British Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, “Poetry is the form we turn to instinctively at moments of intensity, whether it be to celebrate or grieve. Why? Because of its compression and distillations, its different perspectives, its meditative pace…”1 A poet questions, argues, researches, learns, and describes every aspect of society. Our students process information and experiences in various means, and the classroom should be a haven for all thought.
Our students have the potential to be informative thinkers, critical citizens, and aesthetic poets. They have the ability to express deep and complicated emotions of adolescence in argumentative essays, expository writing, and metered lines. Many of our students’ writing portfolios are more filled with more informative essays than with various forms of poetry. There is a depth of emotional and collective understanding rooted in poetry that is missing. This lack of poetry is curtailing critical thought for both the teacher and student.
Many educators, including myself, are ignoring poetry. For the past two years, the administration and teachers at The Lea School in West Philadelphia focused on curriculum outlined by Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) for grades K-8. For two years in a row, my instruction was heavily focused on the informational standards for Pennsylvania Common Core for English because we were reading complicated, data-driven texts with challenging domain-specific vocabulary. In addition, our state testing is made up of 70% informational texts. I do not think I am a teacher who teaches to the tests, but I am drifting away from fiction and poetry in our students’ reading selections. This development is detrimental to our students’ critical thought and the scope of their writing portfolios.
This curriculum unit is designed for students in an eighth-grade English Language Arts class. Students will analyze a selection of poems about love and rebellion by William Butler Yeats through the approaches of New Criticism and historical and biographical contextualization. William Butler Yeats was a very famous and highly acclaimed 20th-century Irish poet and playwright. Autobiographical writings by Yeats and primary sources about Yeats’ personal life will be interwoven throughout the course. The most significant part of this unit is adding to the student writing portfolio of two to three poems.
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