The subject is being murdered one worksheet at a time
Photos by Siyavash Izadi
We’ve all experienced the frustration of being forced to read things for class that we didn’t want to. As students, we’ve suffered through lessons of Robert Frost and Shakespeare and afterward, never thought twice of returning to poetry. But why is that? Because of the way it is taught.
Outside, and even inside of university English classrooms, it is regarded as “inaccessible” and “pretentious” and is generally left alone. One merely has to say the word “poetry” and images of finger snapping hipsters is conjured up in the minds of almost anyone. But if poetry has played such a substantial role in our human history — through songs and story-telling and a great chunk of our printed legacy — why is it treated as alien?
Here are some numbers that showcase poetry’s position in our society. BookNet Canada tracked poetry sales in Canada at a mere 73,000 books in 2010, accounting for just 0.12% of total market sales. In comparison, Apple Insider reported iTunes music sales at nearly $1.4 billion in its first quarter of 2011.
This is very disheartening because it proves that an interest in poetry exists in the hearts of many, but this interest isn’t shining through. Lyricists are themselves poets, but this message isn’t conveyed in middle and high school classrooms. It never dawned on me at 15, for example, that Jimi Hendrix was a poet, but I worshipped him as one of my idols.
The problem as I see it begins when it is formally introduced in the school setting. Poetry is presented in a very objective fashion, with attention to devices such as similes, metaphors, and alliteration. Sound familiar? Four to seven years is spent on repetitive matching games that involve pairing lines of poetry with their appropriate devices.
I acknowledge that a high school curriculum needs to be accessible, and that worksheets make this possible. What frustrates me is the outcome. By structuring these lessons like science assignments, more art-minded students become bored and uninspired, and math and science-minded students are annoyed at having to continually match up definitions that don’t interest them.
At the same time, the personal interpretation and self-discovery that poetry awards is ignored in favour of this “poetic mapping out.” It is this personal interpretation and self discovery that should be lauded by English teachers, because it directly aligns with the critical thinking skills that high school curriculums endeavour to imbue students with.
But critical thinking doesn’t just end in high school — it continues at the post-secondary level and branches outward into our artistic culture at large. This means music, story-telling, film, theatre, and many more areas demanding thoughtful and critical analysis.
And what does this do for poetry itself? With free verse and avant-garde approaches dominating the contemporary scene, it doesn’t make sense that such a great emphasis should be placed on mere definitions. English itself is a subject characterized by discussion and debate, so shouldn’t poetry be taught in a much more open-ended way? It would attract more students to enjoy it, that’s for sure, and not leave them running the other way the instant the word “poetry” is uttered.
If I was a high school English teacher, I would hope to pique the interest of my students by making poetry a more intimate and personally involved subject. I would invite them to bring in poetry in any form to the classroom (song lyrics, movie dialogues, poetic prose from a novel, etc.) and encourage them to tell me what it means to them. This should be the case for any ninth grade English class, and would be a very foundational and engaging way of introducing poetry.
