CI 5410 Week 4.1 - Assignment #2; "Poetry Scavenger Hunt"

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GENERAL INTRODUCTION
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Before diving into any specifics surrounding the following assignment idea, I would like to share a confession with you – even though I’m an English teacher, I loathe, and I mean LOATHE, the study of formal poetic elements. Although I absolutely delight in discussing / manipulating arguments, language, and multimodal text, I have always perceived the breaking down of poetry into its myriad of constituent parts to be an EXTREMELY painstaking, unfulfilling, and otherwise anxiety-filled process. This sort of process reminds me of deconstructing / solving a complex math problem, where pluses, minuses, and multiplication symbols are substituted with iambs, troches, and feet (and believe me, I am B-A-D at math!). As a cumulative result of such focused study of these elements, I feel as though I do not have the time (let alone mental energy) to make sense out of and / or appreciate any beauty that a given poem possesses. In short, where some people find delight / beauty in discussing / manipulating these formal elements of poetry, I find anxiety, fear, and frustration; emotional responses presumably shared by many students undertaking such a task!

As I engage in further self-reflection in the attempt to figure out WHY, specifically, I have such a negative attitude toward the study of formal poetic elements, I feel as though the anxiety and distaste I experience stems from how I was expected to learn these elements as a student; through the largely decontextualized, non-authentic “decoding” of some random poem forced upon me by the teacher. Although our course text does a nice job of clearly exploring these poetic elements, as well as contextualizing them via the selection of some fairly beautiful / good poems (at least by my subjective criteria / opinion), I did not have a choice in this matter! I did not have the choice to handle a collection of poetry that I was fascinated by and was able to identify with forever whatever reason! I wasn’t able to flip through pages and select a poem that I found meaningful at the time, a poem that resonated with ME! I was not able to reap the benefits of others co-engaging / coaching me through the process (other than the author of the handbook, that is).

As I argue that many of our students perceive the study of formal poetic elements to be similarly decontextualized, non-authentic “decoding” exercises of random, arbitrarily selected poems that they cannot / do not personally identify with, I urge you to consider the following assignment.

Before I further jump into any specifics, I argue that this activity should take 2-3 class periods as I argue that authentic, potentially “dirty / gritty” exploration is crucial to the activity’s overall effectiveness. But more on that in a moment (again, adjust to YOUR unique learning context).

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SPECIFICS
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Materials needed

As you are no doubt a committed teacher of literature, you ideally have not only a shelf, but an entire ROOM stocked absolutely FULL of diverse texts; poetry and prose, old and new, traditional and non-traditional, English / American and world-centric, male and female, textual and visual, and so on and so forth. In other words, you will ideally have a large library of literature reflective of the diverse students and learning styles that walk into your classroom each day. If you feel as though your library is lacking, take the time to “stock up” before considering this activity (for a quick fix, see what you might be able to borrow from other teachers). Ideally, you want to have a textual selection that you are at least relatively confident that each and everyone one of your students can sift through and eventually find something that they identify with and find meaningful for whatever reason, even if they cannot articulate that exact reason to you!

If you feel confident that you have the library I so dramatically describe, on to the next steps…

-Make a textual mountain in the middle of your classroom however orderly or disorderly (sometimes this sort of study is messy business) you desire.

-After constructing and distributing some sort of simple worksheet / graphic organizer, quite literally set your students “loose” on the mountain of texts. Although the specific expectations you design are of course dependent upon YOUR unique learning context, I imagine requiring students to…

a.) find textual examples that somehow exemplify a range of specific formal poetic elements (e.g., iambic pentameter, imagery, alliteration, assonance, and so on)

b.) record them on their worksheets or journal pages

c.) state specifically HOW / WHY the example they isolated reveals some sort of desired poetic element

NOTE 1: You’re of course going to have had to give your students at least some pre-instruction to formal elements of poetry prior to beginning this activity for obvious reasons. However, I do not think that this pre-instruction has to / should be very intense. Again, my meta-rationale for this activity is that students will have an easier time / take more pleasure in exploring formal poetic elements if they have much more agency in the process; the agency to select their own texts, uncover the elements in the order they desire (almost a sort of self-scaffolding as they potentially work themselves up from easier to more difficult elements to uncover).

NOTE 2: AND THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT! If you simply turn students loose on this task without your guidance, I am very confident that this task will fail miserably. Instead, I suggest you keep the following actions in mind to keep students on track and provide them with the necessary guidance and scaffolding:

-Mill around the room, keeping an eye on who is having trouble. If they are having trouble with a Shakespeare text, suggest something that you believe they might identify with more closely (again, hopefully you are aware of your textual selection, as well as the personality and identities of your students).

-As groups begin to uncover poetic elements, STOP, verbalize the discoveries to the rest of the class (to fight the craziness of noise, perhaps schedule large-group check-ins every 10 minutes or so), and co-explore with your class the following:

1.) What, specifically, a group uncovered passage-wise (you can further read, act, and verbalize the passage).

2.) How / Why a given textual selection is a good example of a given formal poetic element.

-And finally, embrace the chaos!