How to teach: English - Chris Curtis 2019
Poetic structure
How to teach novels
Decluttering is helpful when getting students to see the explicit choices a writer makes. I do this by simply reducing the text so that it looks like poetry.
fog and frost hung
about the black old gateway of the house
a knocker
impenetrable shadow
dismal light
like a bad lobster in a dark cellar
sound resounded through the house like thunder.
Every room
above
every cask
below
echoes
echoes1
As a rule, I never add any words. I will only ever remove and then attempt to shape meaning by using a new line or indenting lines. What this does is help students to analyse the text more effectively by focusing on the words in finer detail. One of the big problems students have when analysing a prose text is the volume of information. They are simply swamped, and that’s why they tend to list ideas and techniques. But English is never about the number of observations but the quality of the response.
Some of things students might notice about the ’poetrified’ extract from A Christmas Carol include:
✵ The sense of size of the building is conveyed by its ’echo’ and the use of ’above’ and ’below’.
✵ The unpleasant and unwelcoming atmosphere — ’impenetrable’, ’dismal’, ’thunder’.
✵ The sense of loneliness conveyed through the use of the lobster imagery and the echoes.
✵ The sense of wealth with the use of the word ’every’.
We then look at the full text and highlight the aspects we’ve identified in the poetic version. It allows them to see what is missing and if I have misinterpreted any aspect. The more we get students to engage with and interrogate the text, the better.
A further variation on this theme is ’blackout poetry’. Check it out on the Internet. Put simply, a student takes a page of text and blacks out words so the remaining ones form a poem. This tackles the idea from the opposite perspective. And we can get students to do the work we might otherwise be doing on a Sunday.