Agenda: Week 13

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Agenda Week 13

• Reminders Poetry Instruction
• What are we teaching?
• What do we hope to accomplish?
• John Ciardi How Does a Poem Mean?
• What Good Poems Are For
• Strategy 3 Questioning a Poem
• Strategy 4 Dialogue Journal
• Imagism The Aesthetic Foundation of Contemporary
  Poetry
• Strategy 5 Progression and the Poetic Turn

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Introduction to Poetry Instruction
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Instructional Goals
Literary Pleasure
Developing Independent Readers
Developing Student Ownership
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Poetry Instruction An Introduction

• Teaching several explicit reading strategies can
  help students develop both confidence and
  competence.

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John Ciardi How Does a Poem Mean?

• What greater violence can be done to the poets
  experience than to drag it into an early morning
  classroom and to go after it as an item on its
  way to a Final Examination?
• -John Ciardi

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John Ciardi How Does a Poem Mean?

• O body swayed to music, O quickening glance,
• How shall I tell the dancer from the dance?
• -William Butler Yeats
• What the poem is, is inseparable from its own
  performance of itself. The dance is in the dancer
  and the dancer is in the dance.
• -John Ciardi

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John Ciardi How Does a Poem Mean?

• Learning to experience poetry is not a radically
  different process from that of learning any other
  kind of play. The way to develop a poetic sense
  is by using it. And one of the real joys of the
  play-impulse is in the sudden discovery that one
  is getting better at it than he had thought he
  would be.
• -John Ciardi

Aesthetic Reading vs. Efferent Reading Figurative
Reading vs. Literal Reading
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John Ciardi How Does a Poem Mean?

• Discussion of article
• 5 minutes to review it
• Identify two important or puzzling passages
• Write one question for discussion
• Why did I give you time in class to prepare for
  this discussion?

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What Good Poems Are ForTom Wyman

• To sit on a shelf in the cabin across the lake
• where the young man and the young woman
• have come to livethere are only a few books
• in this dwelling, and one of them
• is this book of poems.
• To be like plants
• on a sunlit window sill
• of a city apartmentall the hours of care
• that go into them, the tending and watering,
• and yet to the casual eye they are just present
• a brief moment of enjoyment

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• Only those who work on the plant know how slowly
• it grows
• and changes, almost dies from its own causes
• or neglect, or how other plants
• can be started from this one
• and used elsewhere in the house
• or given to friends.
• But everyone notices the absence of plants
• in a residence
• even those who dont have plants themselves.

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• There is also (though this is more rare)
• a man in his 50s taking a poem from a new book
  Bob showed him
• around from table to table, reading it aloud
• to each group of drinkers because, he kept
  saying,
• the poem was about work he did, what he knew
  about,
• written by somebody like himself.
• But where could he take it
• except from table to table, past the Fuck offs
• and the Hey, thats pretty goods? Over the noise
• of the jukebox and the bars TV,
• past the silence of the lake,
• a person is speaking
• in a world full of people talking.

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• Out of all that is said, these particular words
• put down roots in someones mind
• so that he or she likes to have them here
• these words no one was paid to write
• that live with us for a while
• in a small container
• on the ledge where the light enters.

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Conversational Focus

• How can we connect what Wayman says about poetry
  to what Ciardi says?
• What are the implications of these messages for
  us as literature teachers?

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Strategy 3Questioning the Text

• Read poem once aloud.
• Have students read and mark/ comment on text for
  3-5 minutes.

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Strategy 3Questioning the Text

• Ask students to turn paper over and write in
  response to the prompt at the bottom of the page.
• In groups WITHOUT TURNING BACK TO THE POEM use
  your writing to discuss things you noticed and
  questions that remain.

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The Process Unpacked

• Repeated patterns from earlier instruction
• first reading by skilled reader
• additional readings and markings by students
• writing to clarify thinking and make questions
  concrete
• peer or small group discussion
• full class discussion
• Introduction of new process concept the
  importance of the questions we ask about a text.

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The Importance of Our Questions

• What we are capable of noticing in a text, of
  understanding about a text, and of saying about a
  text is both generated by, and limited by, the
  questions we are capable of asking of the text.

What are the implications of this for us as
teachers?
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RESPONSE, ANALYSIS, REFLECTION
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Strategy 4

• The Dialogue Journal

I say
The text says

• Another way to help students into the language of
  the poem, to help them engage in a
  non-threatening way.
• Encourages, accepts and validates the VALUE of
  their words, their voices by positioning them in
  a position of equality with the text.

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Imagism The Aesthetic Foundation of Contemporary
Poetry (1912)

• Make it new! (Ezra Pound)
• Language common speech exact word
• Topics absolute freedom in choice of topic.
• Forms free verse. A new cadence means a new
  idea.
• Aesthetic rejected the sentiment and artifice of
  Romantic and Victorian poets. Concentration is
  the essence of poetry.

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Ezra Pound

• In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the
crowd Petals on a wet black bough.
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Amy Lowell

• Peace

Perched upon the muzzle of a cannon A yellow
butterfly is slowly opening and shutting its
wings.
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Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)Pear Tree

• Silver dustlifted from the earth,higher than my
  arms reach,you have mounted,O silver,higher
  than my arms reachyou front us with great mass
• no flower ever openedso staunch a white leaf,no
  flower ever parted silverfrom such rare silver

• O white pear,your flower-tuftsthick on the
  branchbring summer and ripe fruitsin their
  purple hearts.

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Influenced By Imagism

• Wallace Stevens
• D.H. Lawrence
• Marianne Moore
• T.S. Eliot

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William Carlos Williams

• "No meaning but in things!

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William Carlos Williams

• The Red Wheelbarrow

so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed
with rain water beside the white chickens.
No meaning but in things!
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(No Transcript)
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Strategy 5 Progression and the Poetic Turn

• Poems typically present readers with one or more
  progressions from beginning to end. Look for
  changes in time, location, or increased
  understanding on the part of the narrative voice.
• Ronald Wallace Grandmother Grace
• Richard Wilber The Pardon

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Strategy 5 Progression and the Poetic Turn

• Many poems have a turn somewhere after the
  halfway point that leads to a change or
  development in meaning. Readers aware of this
  convention and alert to the possibility of this
  change are less likely to miss the extension of
  meanings presented by the text.
• Elizabeth Bishop One Art
• Adrianne Rich Aunt Jennifers Tigers

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Strategy 5 Progression and the Poetic Turn

• Explicit instruction
• Lots of practice identifying progressions and
  turns
• Lots of discussion about the implications in
  terms of the development of meaning in particular
  poems.

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Wise Words from William Glasser

• WE LEARN
• 10 of what we read,
• 20 of what we hear,
• 30 of what we see,
• 50 of what we both see and hear
• AND
• 70 of what we discuss with others,
• 80 what we experience personally,
• 95 of what we TEACH someone else.

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NCTE

• Anne Ruggles Gere, Leila Christenbury, and Kelly
  Sassi. Successful On-Demand Writers What
  Teachers Can Learn From Them
• Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey. Graphic Novels NOT
  Your Fathers Comic Books
• Jerry Harste. What Do We Mean by Literacy Now?
• Laura Rodriguez. Presidents Award

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Doug Fisher and Nancy Frey. Graphic Novels Not
Your Fathers Comic Books

• Wide readership
• Use to build background knowledge
• Excellent for teaching many literary devices,
  especially inferencing
• Keep their minds in the gutter!

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Jerry Harste. What Do We Mean by Literacy Now?

• Recognition of multiple literacies
• Different cultures, different literacies
• Multiple ways of knowing
• Critical Literacies
• Literacies should be understood as social
  practices.
• Literate methods are social practices.
• In order to change literacies, we must change the
  social practices that hold existing literacies in
  place.

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Jerry Harste. What Do We Mean by Literacy Now?

• What kinds of literacy are needed to read
  critically?
• Instrumental literacy
• Ability to access text
• Understanding of what text is doing to reader
• Subtext strategies
• Two sticky notes
• Character thinking
• Character saying
• Lingering in a text focus on a single passage
  that students unpack.

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Jerry Harste. What Do We Mean by Literacy Now?

• Subtext strategies continued
• Key questions
• Who wrote this text?
• Why was this text writtten?
• Who was the text written for?
• Whose voices, points of view, are NOT included?
• What do you find problematic about the story
  being told?
• From a language or discourse point of view, how
  is this message presented?

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Laura Rodriguez