Poetry at School
How to teach poetry
How do we introduce poetry to students and tell them what it is?
A few weeks ago, we had organized a session on poetry for teachers. The idea was to delve deeper into poetry and discuss how best we could get children to bond better with it. The session commenced with a song and I began by asking colleagues to recall one or more film songs which, in their understanding, were laden with metaphors.
The silence that followed made me wonder where I had erred. I then wrote on the board a few lines from a song to discuss the metaphors it contained. However, the participants found it difficult to connect the metaphors with the song. Most people like and listen to film songs but rarely associate them with metaphors or with any other figures of speech. Someone said that an exercise like this could suck the joy of out of songs. This left me wondering if we connect with metaphors only when we wear our teaching hats. Do we not connect them with our lives?
What is poetry?
Going forward, one of the questions that came up was how do we introduce poetry to students and tell them what it is. The answers ranged from “not prose”, “rhyming”, and so on but no one suggested that each student could interpret a poem differently without being incorrect. As Samuel Taylor Coleridge once remarked, poetry is “the best words in the best order”. As our discussion progressed, my colleagues’ struggle was palpable, despite having invested significant time in reading, reciting and listening to poetry.
Unfortunately, the “conventional teacher” runs the risk of reducing a William Wordsworth classic to a list of difficult words with their meanings or explain the beauty of a Robert Frost as THE interpretation of the poem. In other words, we wean children away from poetry. On the other hand, I recall my English teacher who immersed us in Shelley’s To A Skylark. I am not sure of the exact impact it had on me or my love for poetry but, even more than two decades later, I can still recall her infectious passion and the skylark she drew on the board. Eugenio Montale famously said, “I wait for poetry to visit me.” Poetry surely visited our class that week.
So, what can we do besides, of course, waiting for poetry to visit us?
What we can do
We can begin with the basics. We can figure out what poetry means to us. Or, what is a poem? Paul Celan’s response to the later is epic, “A poem, as a manifestation of language and thus essentially dialogue, can be a message in a bottle, sent out in the — not always greatly hopeful — belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps. Poems in this sense, too, are under way: they are making toward something”.
And possibly move on to how, if at all, can one teach poetry? Siddhartha Menon, a teacher and poet, has an eloquent take in his Building A Cathedral: An approach to teaching poetry. “I ask myself what I might be doing when I teach poetry. A simple, and perhaps the most honest, answer is that I am pleasing myself and thereby, I like to think, my students”. We could also delve deeper by bringing in factors like age and comfort with the language. Then, of course, we need to try out actions. There are neither secret formulae nor short-cuts, and we will have to work our way.
In the recent months, in school we have focussed on the text. The poem. We have read poems — alone, in silence, together, aloud, in tandem with online videos online and re-read them. We have begun many days with poems as well. We have tried to encompass a wide range from the classics to the contemporary and from the religious to the revolutionary. In the process, not only have we built up a decent collection of books on poems but have also made inroads into our conversations. Some of us have become friends with poetry and a couple have also fallen in love with it. We understand this is a beginning and sooner than later the students will join us.
Comments
Post a Comment