Poooooems!

Like Joe, my first assignment involves poetry, something that seems to befuddle or just bore many freshmen. I never really care much for poetry when I was younger either, so I’m hoping to offer students some new approaches to poetry. Bean’s detailed list of different lessons offered a lot of fresh, exciting ways to teach poetry in the classroom. As I mentioned in my comments to Joe’s post, I plan on incorporating a lot of in-class poetry analysis through freewrites and discussion. I want to make sure students are comfortable speaking of and writing about poetry before diving into the first paper assignment. While I’m sure some more standard freewrites requiring summaries/explanations of certain terms will be helpful (i.e. “Consider the following lines from Bob Smith’s his poem, ‘Spaghetti Rocks My Socks Off’: ‘I love noodles / that are like ferrets / roaming the ocean floor and eating bananas’. Define and explain what poetry devices are used in these lines”. The real example, of course, will be much better!). I think some of the other lessons, however, could be stimulating and maybe even (gasp!) fun. For example, while the Data-Provided Assignments are geared toward the sciences, it could be fruitful to apply this to poetry. I could provide a sort of Mad Libs type exercise that required students to string together a poem from the word/phrase bank provided (this would be the data). The students would have to identify, when piecing the poem together, each poetic device. Sharing the poems aloud in class would not only solidify the concepts, but would also be pretty funny. I’ll probably have them write a poem of their own as well, utilizing a certain number of poetic devices which they would identify and explain in a separate summary. The fist lessons Bean describes, those that link course concepts to a student’s personal experience or previously existing knowledge, might be a useful tool to introduce poetry. I’d like students, for an out-of-class assignment (perhaps the first piece of homework) to find examples of poetic terms or devices in the everyday world, whether it be in a commercial, scrawled on a bathroom stall, contained in a restaurant menu, etc.