Approaches to teaching poetry

Thus far, I have brought Ted Hughes's poems into class with very little introduction. I have given them the poem and asked "What do you think?" I am trying to ascertain to what degree they are honoured and inspired and egged on by this challenge, and to what degree they are frustrated by being faced with stanzas of difficult to comprehend poetry without any help of guiding light. I remember how useless and senseless poetry felt in high school. I'm hoping to leave them with a taste for it, not a bitter aftertaste.

So today, when we looked at a poem which I had initially decided to ditch because it was too hard for the "sink or swim" "What do you think?" approach, I told them,

"We're going to try something different today. I'm going to tell you what the poem's about." There were some hushed "no!"s which made me smile on the inside. ("Aha!!! So you do like being asked to make sense of it on your own!!") I told them, "I submit to you" (echoing a business professor from college) "that this is a poem about the process of thinking."

We then considered the title of the poem.

"The Thought Fox."

This elicited more moans and groans. "What it is with Ted Hughes and animals?" demanded M. After several students gave their sarcastic responses "He was attacked by an animal as a child." "He is an animal." we got down to a deeper discussion of why a poet would choose to write about animals rather than humans.

People in this class are often quick to disregard comments by A, a student whose analysis is sometimes off base, but mostly he's just not popular. Today, when the class was asked "why would a poet write about animals?" he said "Hughes probably sees similarities between animals and humans and can use animals to show us things about our own experience through them," I saw others roll their eyes, just because it was A. I said "Let's assume that this is 100% correct. If Ahmad is right, then how can we explain Hughes's choice to write about these animals, rather than just writing about the humans to which they're similar?"

It felt nice to hold up as quite valuable Ahmad's comment, since he is often shot down, as much by his classmates' looks as their words. I'm not quite sure what my role is in protecting/defending him, since often what he says is way off the mark, but today it was nice to be able to hold him as an example of having a great, well-expressed idea.

D. said it might be that humans have too many millions of emotions. Animals are seen by us to be more one-dimensional, emotionally, so he can give a simpler portrayal of a living being through an animal.

A. had the somehow both complimentary and contrasting pint that animals have greater physical and emotional freedom than humans do, so our human limitations can be left behind by a poet who writes about animals. I found these very intriguing ideas.

We then watched two clips of foxes in the wild which I found last night, in case these students are not familiar with foxes:

http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/an-arctic-fox-sniffs-around-the-tundra-in-millers-stock-video-footage/3B2FBBF2_0165

http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/video/an-arctic-fox-walks-around-on-the-tundra-stock-video-footage/3B2FBBF2_0120

I also loved the commentary as the clip rolled:

So cute!
Look at those eyes, Miss, he wants to kill you!
He's the devil.
Why's he digging?
Is he digging?
Why isn't he red?
Oh my gosh so cute!

Then we finally read the poem aloud:

THE THOUGHT-FOX

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox,
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

I adore this poem. I gave them about 12 minutes to talk in groups about the way the ideas of the poem that we'd talked about (the fox, the process of thinking, animals used to tell human stories seemed to be represented.) It was fantastic. I got around to every group in both classes (something I've been working on, since Monica noticed my tendency to stay with one group for too long, leaving others potentially stuck for minutes at a time) and then we had a great feedback session, in which people from each group participated. 

Kanafe

Feedback sessions in which every group contributes something are one of the ways in which classes can earn points in the fourth quarter basket of doom challenge, where not just spelling words, but timely arrival, being prepared for class, and quality of feedback counts and earns them points. The prize for the class with the most points? Kanafe and an extra 100% quiz grade for the quarter. 

Hemingway Short Stories

The HL class of eleventh graders are reading Hemingway Short Stories this quarter. This is the class that meets only once a week, so I'm picking stories that are short enough for us to read in class together. The likelihood of even a majority of the class reading the text on their own is very, very low, and I like the process of reading as a group. This group is so spirited, I love hearing their reactions as they read too.

It's been an educational experience for me as an international English teacher. Here's a summary:

Week 1:
We started with "Hills Like White Elephants," the only exposure to Hemingway I read in high school. I have almost no recollection of my reading experience of it, in 10th grade, but I remember the title well.

The story is about a couple sitting at a table outside a train station at a junction in Spain between Barcelona and Madrid. They order a few drinks and talk in a restrained, uncomfortable manner. They are talking about something which they never name, something the man refers to as "an awfully simple operation." He tells the girl, "It's not really an operation at all. I know you wouldn't mind it, Jig. It's really not anything. It's just to let the air in. I'll go with you and I'll stay with you all the time. They just let the air in then it's all perfectly natural."

You, reader, know exactly what this boyfriend is talking about. But we spent the entire period working out what this guy could be talking about. Some thought they were planning to run away. Others pointed out they were already "away." Some thought they were planning to carry out a suicide bombing attack. Others thought they were thinking of abandoning family. Even after someone said "Maybe they're thinking of having a baby" only one picked up on the scent and ventured that perhaps there already was a baby. S. said this very hesitantly.

I was frustrated that we didn't get beyond content and discuss any of the stylistic choices Hemingway makes, especially his choice to leave out so many details about the man and girl's relationship.

The best part of the class was during the reading aloud, when people would respond vocally with exaggerated sighs and groans of exasperation when the man said lines like "I don't want to do anything you don't want to do" or "I don't want anybody but you. I don't want anyone else." I asked them, once we started discussing, what they were reacting to - what are they thinking about these characters? In debriefing with Monica afterward, I realised this is where I should have started in the effort to coax them toward the abortion piece. I might have asked "What might couple be talking about if they're talking in this way? What do couples disagree about?"

Anyway, while Monica and I pondered their seeming lack of exposure to the idea of abortion after the class, Elaine came over and we told her what had happened. Elaine nodded, unsurprised. She has lived here for years and said, "Discussions of abortion never happen with men and women. It's not a discussion between couples. It's a discussion between female family members. They would not have recognised that setting as a possible setting where this topic would come up."

Oh.

I have been trying so hard this year to pick culturally appropriate texts for this class - this story represented one of my first major miscalculations.

Here's a link where you can listen to the story:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd93sbylF7k

Week 2:
Leaving "Hills" completely behind, we started with "Indian Camp," a story that packs a wallop. A young boy travels with his doctor father to a camp of Indians where the father operates on a mother who needs a C-section. The surgery is difficult and the woman is in immense pain. At the end of the story the husband of the pregnant woman, who has been lying in the bunk above her, is discovered to have committed suicide during the procedure.

What we tried this week was letting the students respond to the story immediately, before any feedback. We probably let them write for 12 minutes, and then had a handful of students read from or share about what they had written. I so enjoyed listening to their responses. I was impressed how many of them picked up on the degree of hardship implied by the sparse but revealing details about the Indians' situation. For example, L. noted that the Indians have very little, and are very poor, because they don't have soap.

"Those must boil," [Nick's father] said, and began to scrub his hands in the basin of hot water with a cake of soap he had brought from the camp.

M. noted how much pain the woman must be in, though we never hear her voice. The doctor says he hasn't "any anaesthetic" and that "when he started to operate Uncle George and three Indian men held the woman still. She bit Uncle George on the arm and Uncle George said, "Damn squaw bitch!" and the young Indian who had rowed Uncle George over laughed at him."

Some of them were very frustrated that this was the whole story. "There's a difference between a story that leaves questions, and an incomplete story!" said M.

"I don't like it when the story doesn't tell me anything," said N.

I was glad Monica was in the class, and could offer her opinion, saying "I wrote in my reflection that I like stories that leave me with questions. There's something there that the author wants me to think about."

Tomorrow we're going to reread the story, and I'm going to ask them what details strike them as important the second time around, now that they know the suicide is coming. Then, I'd like to ask them what makes a story a story. This I might do by just picking up where we left off last week, and saying "Is this story a complete story? What is a complete story? What could Hemingway be telling us if he leaves us with just part of the story?"

I think these stories emphasise that all stories are incomplete. Any story I have of any of my students, for example, or of their families, or their existence, is incomplete. When I see someone on the street, the story I have of the is incomplete. When I hear someone having a conversation on the bus and am tempted to judge them, I pretend that the story I have of them is complete, while it's woefully full of holes.

The other way I might go about this, and it rather depends on the nature of the discussion, is to say "Would this be a story without the suicide?"

Here's a link where you can listen to the story:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8sgIu5G7LM

The Kale Project

Yesterday when I went to Saleh Khalef to get sumac, za'atar and dates with Monica for her to bring home to people, I bought a bunch of kale for sale next to the check out. That's the kind of check-out aisle item I think we should have more of! The kale was grown as part of the Kale Project, as detailed on the tag:

Maan development centre in partnership with Refutrees is re-investing in crop diversity and small scale farming livelihoods in Palestine. 

Profits raised will support enhancing organic farming and crop diversity in Palestine.

Facebook: The Kale Project - Palestine

The Slow Goodbye

Hughes poem number four for the 11th grade is "The Seven Sorrows".

Yesterday, before we looked at the text, I gave the class a role play prompt for groups: "Three sorrows".

My favourite performance featured three students. First, two students approached a third who was sitting down. The two approaching seemed to be pushing and prodding and holding back, trying not to be the first to reach the other person. Finally one ushered the other in front and the front person stammered "A., I have bad news to tell you. He didn't make it." A fell to pieces.

In scene two a different one of the three took the chair,a nd the other two engaged in the same silent, physical argument over who was not going to have to tell the news. This time the news was "You have cancer."

The third time through, with the third student in the seat, the person playing the messenger said "The deal didn't go through."

In another role play, a girl was at a party, got raped in another room, then was scene throwing up into a toilet, then finally committed suicide. Y., who played the girl, was quite impressive.

In a third, a group therapy session featured a veteran who had had his legs blown off, a girl who had broken her arm, and a girl who had dropped her cookies and cream ice cream on the sidewalk. They argued about whose sorrow was legitimate and struggled to "support" each others' sorrows.

Here are the feedback notes from that class.

They held a very good discussion in both classes about the nature of sadness. In the 11-5 class we had a conversation about the sadness present in Hughes's life, and potentially the sadness he caused. His first wife, Sylvia Plath, committed suicide shortly after he left her for a woman with whom he was having an affair. Six years later, the woman he left Plath for also committed suicide, and killed their two year old daughter, by the same method Plath had used: gas. Bleak. There were passionate opinions shared about whether the responsibility for suicide can ever be blamed on someone other than the person who commits it. D. said absolutely not. She said this with such conviction, and so eloquently, ("No matter what the circumstance, it is never, ever the fault of someone surrounding the suicidal person. That person made a decision.") that her words will probably echo in the heads of her classmates in the future. I hope they will. D. is universally revered for being remarkably bright and articulate. When opinions are shared like that by students whom everyone admires, I feel like something important is happening in the classroom.

Today we got down to the poem's text. I hadn't actually been that keen on the poem, compared with some of Hughes's other pieces, but their comments breathed new life and significance into it. Before looking at the text we looked at this image to get an idea for the natural environment Hughes grew up in.

We talked about how the wind would rip across this setting (a moor), and how the transition between summer and winter would be significant. Because that transition was relevant to the poem, we also looked at and considered these images of autumn in Hughes's UK:

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Now read on to see how these images are relevant to the poem:

The Seven Sorrows 

   
The first sorrow of autumn
Is the slow goodbye
Of the garden who stands so long in the evening-
A brown poppy head,
The stalk of a lily,
And still cannot go.

The second sorrow
Is the empty feet
Of a pheasant who hangs from a hook with his brothers.
The woodland of gold
Is folded in feathers
With its head in a bag.

And the third sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the sun who has gathered the birds and who gathers
The minutes of evening,
The golden and holy
Ground of the picture.

The fourth sorrow
Is the pond gone black
Ruined and sunken the city of water-
The beetle’s palace,
The catacombs
Of the dragonfly.

And the fifth sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the woodland that quietly breaks up its camp.
One day it’s gone.
It has only left litter-
Firewood, tentpoles.

And the sixth sorrow
Is the fox’s sorrow
The joy of the huntsman, the joy of the hounds,
The hooves that pound
Till earth closes her ear
To the fox’s prayer.

And the seventh sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the face with its wrinkles that looks through the window
As the year packs up
Like a tatty fairground
That came for the children.

I asked them particularly about how structure and pattern in this poem contribute to meaning. They identified the patterns of repetition, the simple syntax at the beginning of each stanza, the long third line, and the gradual movement through images of nature into an image of a human contemplating the end of the natural year, and perhaps the end of his or her life. 

The poem's structure seemed, they felt, to emphasize the tedium, the length, and the inevitability of time. The seasons change, the winter comes, life is drawn out of the living organisms... the goodbye is not just sad, but slow. We watch it happen. 

L. pointed out that the slow goodbyes are the most painful, because we can watch them coming, like the pain of watching someone die from cancer. 

D. said that it seemed that the sorrows are presented so precisely because the speaker wants to convey exactly what's on his mind - he's contemplated these sorrows for a long time, and has given them an order and a structure, perhaps implying that he's had a lot of time at that window to contemplate the sorrow of autumn. 

There was another good bye today, that of Monica. She's back in the UK now, but will remain connected to the class by Skype and email. And I'll certainly keep running lessons by her and giving her updates on how the class progresses. We're hoping she might come back for a two week video unit in May. 

One simile

The poem of the day is Ted Hughes's The Jaguar, which has already, after 45 minutes, proved itself appropriate and accessible to these students. Here's the poem, with the simile we focused on the most bolded.

The Jaguar

The apes yawn and adore their fleas in the sun.
The parrots shriek as if they were on fire, or strut
Like cheap tarts to attract the stroller with the nut.
Fatigued with indolence, tiger and lion

Lie still as the sun. The boa-constrictor’s coil
Is a fossil. Cage after cage seems empty, or
Stinks of sleepers from the breathing straw.
It might be painted on a nursery wall.

But who runs like the rest past these arrives
At a cage where the crowd stands, stares, mesmerized,
As a child at a dream, at a jaguar hurrying enraged
Through prison darkness after the drills of his eyes

On a short fierce fuse. Not in boredom—
The eye satisfied to be blind in fire,
By the bang of blood in the brain deaf the ear—
He spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him

More than to the visionary his cell:
His stride is wildernesses of freedom:
The world rolls under the long thrust of his heel.
Over the cage floor the horizons come.

At first, E. said she felt like the simile showed a moment of peace and calmness compared with the shrieking birds. Indeed it does, but we teased out how Hughes is doing something sneakier here. Beneath the indolence of the tiger and lion, these cats are burning with the potential energy of the sun. M. noticed that they are the center of the universe, probably the central cage at the zoo, and that everyone is revolving around them and looking at them. The sun, pointed out S,, is static, but is boiling and bursting with energy. The smolder, but they are still. Y. built on that, saying that the sun can, at any moment, throw out a ball of fire that would destroy earth. These cats are similarly dangerous, and might jump or growl or attack at any moment, especially, as O., noted, they are caged and trapped against their will. 

Regarding the jaguar, L., reading the line that "his stride is wildernesses of freedom," said "He doesn't belong there." Where does he belong? "On safari!" 

O and N have good comments about how the assonance, the repeated "o" sounds of the second to last line, give the sense of the rolling of the world, through the rolling of the line, and emphasize the length of the world, and of his stride. 

The students will write about this poem on Tuesday or Wednesday. I look forward to reading their interpretations. 

Ted Hughes Poetry

The moment has come. Since the beginning of this year I've been excited to teach Ted Hughes poetry to the eleventh grade in preparation for their oral commentaries. In the commentary, they have ten minutes to talk about a poem and how its different features, from metaphors to word choice to structure and imagery, help in the construction of meaning in the poem.

Shortly before I began teaching this unit, I had a crisis of confidence, fearing that it would be too difficult for them. Monica and I discussed the poems and she encouraged me to give them a try. This week has revealed that they are indeed difficult, but, God bless these students, they are bringing a lot of energy to their exploration. 

The first one we looked at is called "Wind" 

Wind by Ted Hughes

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet

Till day rose; then under an orange sky
The hills had new places, and wind wielded
Blade-light, luminous black and emerald,
Flexing like the lens of a mad eye.

At noon I scaled along the house-side as far as
The coal-house door. Once I looked up -
Through the brunt wind that dented the balls of my eyes
The tent of the hills drummed and strained its guyrope,

The fields quivering, the skyline a grimace,
At any second to bang and vanish with a flap;
The wind flung a magpie away and a black-
Back gull bent like an iron bar slowly. The house

Rang like some fine green goblet in the note
That any second would shatter it. Now deep
In chairs, in front of the great fire, we grip
Our hearts and cannot entertain book, thought,

Or each other. We watch the fire blazing,
And feel the roots of the house move, but sit on,
Seeing the window tremble to come in,
Hearing the stones cry out under the horizons.

Monica and I wondered whether these students, who have never experienced the kind of Scottish moor wind that Hughes refers to here, would be able to feel its power. I'm not sure I can fully answer that question. They got a sense for the storm, but I don't know how much they felt it in their bones and blood. I for one, am bowled over by the description of the "tent of the hills" which "strained their guy rope" and the path of the gull, bent across the sky "like an iron bar, slowly." We spent three days on this poem, and by the end I think they had a good understanding of its feeling. 

Yesterday and today we've looked at a harder poem, The Owl. 

The Owl by Ted Hughes

I saw my world again through your eyes
As I would see it again through your children's eyes.
Through your eyes it was foreign.
Plain hedge hawthorns were peculiar aliens,
A mystery of peculiar lore and doings.
Anything wild, on legs, in your eyes
Emerged at a point of exclamation
As if it had appeared to dinner guests
In the middle of the table. Common mallards
Were artefacts of some unearthliness,
Their wooings were a hypnagogic film
Unreeled by the river. Impossible
To comprehend the comfort of their feet
In the freezing water. You were a camera
Recording reflections you could not fathom.
I made my world perform its utmost for you.
You took it all in with an incredulous joy
Like a mother handed her new baby
By the midwife. Your frenzy made me giddy.
It woke up my dumb, ecstatic boyhood
Of fifteen years before. My masterpiece
Came that black night on the Grantchester road.
I sucked the throaty thin woe of a rabbit
Out of my wetted knuckle, by a copse
Where a tawny owl was enquiring.
Suddenly it swooped up, splaying its pinions
Into my face, taking me for a post.

Apparently he was writing about Sylvia Plath, but I didn't know that, and so I didn't tell them that. Studying this poem made for a very educational day for me, since I had interpreted the poem in a certain way and felt quite confident that I had seen it in its entirety, but in class yesterday a group argued that the speaker could be seeing the world through the eyes of the owl. I told them, no that wasn't really possible. 

After school, Monica and I looked at the poem and she explained how they could be right. Frankly, I was not convinced by the evidence. There is too much that seems to be said to a human for me to believe the owl interpretation, but it showed me that I cannot be definitive in my denial of anyone's reading. Teaching poetry is hard, because it's hard to know when/whether I can assert any authority in terms of meaning. In Shakespeare there was a certain degree of interpretation they could wield, but we always came back to, the overall message that the character was trying to convey. In poetry, the overall message is far more nebulous. During the first class I tried to put their ideas on the board, but looking later at their own interpretations from group work on the A3 paper I'd given them, it was clear that trying to establish one meaning for the poem was a foolish and futile and unnecessary goal. Look at these annotations from group work posters (I posted the poem on A3 paper and asked them to mark them up):

O's typically serious and impressive take on the poem. After the group work he said, "OK, Miss, but what's the real theme?" The class's comments revealed to me how little I could have answered that question had I tried.

Hurray for free verse poetry!

This group asked me if this could be the description of a sexual encounter. If you read it with this in mind, it's quite convincing.

Another take on the ending. I love that they're bold.

A comment on the closing anecdote with the owl and his pinions (wing tips)

I loved that this group saw that the speaker acts as the discovery channel for the person being addressed - introducing them to nature in a way that overwhelms and impresses. 

 

"She has a specific answer in mind"

This week I've asked 11th graders to consider where they would set Macbeth if they were staging it in a modern setting. We started with a quote on the board, and built a concept map of themes and ideas that play a role in the play. Then I asked them to consider where those themes seem to be present in the world around them. Here's one class's concept map warm-up, before they made their own posters in groups.

In the other class, someone said "War" as a contemporary context. I said, "Can you be more specific? Where?" and N. said to the student with the marker "She's looking for a certain answer." She was not being snarky, she was trying to help her classmate. I took her comment like a bullet to the heart. I wish that they knew by now that I don't go searching for specific answers. I just want more details about what they're thinking. I want them to expound on their ideas, not align their ideas with mine. I explained this, saying "No, I don't have a place in mind, but I want to know more about what you're thinking."

I think it will be my perpetual goal to impress upon them that, in my literature classroom, it's their interpretation that I want to hear more about. I feel like I'm fighting the tide created by other subjects, and some other instructor's of my subject...