This article really hit home with me for a couple reasons. The first is that as a child I was fascinated with poetry. I loved writing it, and I loved reading it. But as I read the same poems over and over in the poetry units in language arts and those poems were not really related to my experiences it was hard to keep that passion alive. The other is that in my placement I have actually experienced that this is still happening today. After specials one day, one of my students came in and slumped down. When I asked her what was wrong she said that specials were sooooo boring. When I asked her why she told me because all they did all day was read poems. When I said that poetry was awesome and asked her why she had disliked it so much I was surprised at her response. To paraphrase her, The poems are all really old and I don't understand them and it is just boring. I mean I like poetry but that was really boring. I mean its art class why are we reading stupid poems all day? Reading this article brought this back up, and I really believe that before we can get kids interested in poetry we have to take our foot off of the classic poems gas and look towards more child geared poetry that kids can relate too and get excited about and interested in. If we don't I fear that poetry will become a dying art.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Gill-The Forgotten Genre of Children's Poetry
In this selection Gill brings up the point that children's poetry is a very popular subject. However, much of the literature that is devoted to children's literature that is being published today focuses on teaching the different kinds and genres of poetry, and insists on exposing children to the so called "classics". In this article Gill wonders if there really is an actual genre of poetry that is explicitly devoted to children. In the article Gill states "I believe that central to helping students enjoy poetry is helping them to understand what poetry is" I think this is a great point. Just like every other subject, goals and standards are being reshaped and reworked to accommodate a new generation of students, so why should poetry be different. I agree that a study of classic poems can give students a great glimpse into the past and can be a meaningful exercise. However, for it to be the only way that students see and interact with poetry makes it hard for them to relate and become excited about poetry. Until we as get students to understand that poetry is "something people do...to share their experiences." When those experiences the students read about in classic poems are very un-relatable to their personal experiences it is hard to get that point across.
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Dean,
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed reading your response about poetry in the classroom. It is interesting that even today we are not reinventing how we approach poetry in the classroom. Although like you said, it is important to see the classics of poetry, we also need to be thinking of more creative ways to incorporate learning about poetry in the classroom. Because we are a forever changing society, we need to be able to connect with our children in ways that make it meaningful. Even today, poetry is different then it was back then. There are so many ways to express yourself through poetry and even take different forms of it. If we don’t expose our students to the possibilities, then they won’t make that meaningful connection to poetry that we had hoped for. I think it also important that we show them that poetry is not just about rhyming or having a certain number of lines, but a way of writing that expresses your thoughts and feelings without needed typical writing conventions like paragraphs and full sentences. It could also be a piece of art or drawing that the students do with a few words or ideas they connected with. I also agree with you that we need to find poetry that the students can relate to. If they are reading the poem and not understanding what it is about, they aren’t going to make a meaningful connection. First we need to know our students, so that we can better understand what types of poems they might connect to. Also incorporating poems into different subjects will help them see the cross-curricular advantage to writing and reading poems.
Thanks for the post, gave me something to think and reflect on!
Shannon
Dean-
ReplyDeleteThank you for the great post. As a student, my teacher would always have me read these classic poems that I could not understand or find a way to relate to. I would have to answer all of these questions, that were viewed as right or wrong. In doing so, I began to dislike poetry. Today, I still do not like it very much. I see where your student is coming from, with feeling as if it is boring.
However, I agree that in order to get kids interested we will have to use modern literature. Students need to understand what they are reading and be able to relate to it, in order to become excited about it. This is what we teach in our reading strategies, so it should be applied to our poetry as well.
Once the students have seen that poetry can be a like rap song or whatever you are comparing it to, I think this is when we need to work backwards to traditional literature. I think the students will develop a great appreciation for classic poetry, if they understand how they use or where they see it in their lives today. Then we can talk about the change over time within poetry.
Thanks for the great post.
Megan