Chapter 1
HOW TO TEACH POETRY
The ability to teach poetry is held up by many as the measuring stick of a good English teacher, and this is possibly why so many lesson observations or job interviews use poetry as the subject. If you can’t teach an aspect of the English curriculum with a poem, then you may not be up to the job.
A poem is a grenade of ideas and techniques in one small, perfectly formed unit, the impact of which can be far-reaching. Established teachers will have hundreds of poems in their arsenal, ready to teach as one-off lessons or as part of a scheme of work. They are often the go-to option when inspiration has packed its bags and slumped away. (Or you’ve had a late night!)
My advice to all new English teachers is to make a folder of poems you can use in lessons. Like push-ups in PE, the poem is a staple exercise: easily resourced and quickly done. ‘Come on, give me five stanzas.’
My first attempts to teach poetry were comical. Once, as a student teacher, I attempted to cover three rather complex poems in a single lesson as the class’ established teacher looked on smiling. Another time, I spent the best part of three lessons trying to teach just one poem really well. Three lessons on a six-line acrostic about animals is probably not the most demanding for a GCSE class. Understanding poetry, in itself, is a fine art: an art that’s taken me years to perfect. Well, I say perfect; I really mean, be better than I originally was.
Here’s the poetry manifesto I’ve written to share with students:
The job of an English teacher is sometimes just to make students see the relevance of what they are doing. Teenagers rightly question why we do certain things. Why do we study Shakespeare? Why do we have to do poetry? Our job is about building that relevance into the lesson. We need to make that connection. That building of connections has been misinterpreted as a ‘hook’ or a ‘starter’ – or, even more dangerously, as a ‘fun’ activity. Fun is a word bandied about by parents, students and teachers. The danger comes when we seek simply to draw out the ‘fun’ aspect of learning, because learning is tough. If we wrap it up in a nice, fluffy, pretty way, we create a false impression of what real work is. Focusing on the relevance is a much better starting point.
In the classroom, teachers have to work on that relevance and connection. Yes, students have varied and different lives to us, but we need to work on building up their experiences. There has been a relatively recent focus-shift in education to the concept of cultural capital; the particular sort of cultural knowledge that one generally obtains through having experiences. Experience-rich and experience-poor students are immediately evident in any classroom: one child might make frequent visits to London; another might never have been. A recent GCSE exam question featured a woman working in London and leaving Oxford Circus. One student in my class wrote that the woman had just left a circus. A simple assumption to make. What caused it? A lack of knowledge caused by a lack of experience. Knowledge and experience are closely linked and our role, as teachers, should be to increase the former by increasing the latter.
Take a poem like ‘Dulce et Decorum est’ by Wilfred Owen. There are many different ways an English teacher might inform students’ experience of the poem.
Before you start with anything whizzy, creative or ‘fun’, think about the relevance of the poem to the students. Open their eyes. How does it feel to lose a child, for instance? Ben Jonson’s ‘On My First Son’ explores this awful reality and, like much of the canon, we can use it to teach young people empathy with another’s tragedy.
Often, the first step is to ask what the ideas or questions in a poem are. In English, as I often say to my students, we develop our thinking and we explore how others think. Where better to see that than in poetry? A poem is pure, undiluted thinking or feeling. A poem is an idea. A poem is a thought. A poem is a feeling bottled.
Why is it that humans turn to poetry in the happiest, or the saddest, of times? Let’s get married – what poem shall...
