How to teach: English - Chris Curtis 2019

What is the poem’s central question?
How to teach poetry

The ability to teach poetry is held up by many as the measuring stick of a good English teacher, and this is possibly why so many lesson observations or job interviews use poetry as the subject. If you can’t teach an aspect of the English curriculum with a poem, then you may not be up to the job.

A poem is a grenade of ideas and techniques in one small, perfectly formed unit, the impact of which can be far-reaching. Established teachers will have hundreds of poems in their arsenal, ready to teach as one-off lessons or as part of a scheme of work. They are often the go-to option when inspiration has packed its bags and slumped away. (Or you’ve had a late night!)

My advice to all new English teachers is to make a folder of poems you can use in lessons. Like push-ups in PE, the poem is a staple exercise: easily resourced and quickly done. ’Come on, give me five stanzas.’

My first attempts to teach poetry were comical. Once, as a student teacher, I attempted to cover three rather complex poems in a single lesson as the class’ established teacher looked on smiling. Another time, I spent the best part of three lessons trying to teach just one poem really well. Three lessons on a six-line acrostic about animals is probably not the most demanding for a GCSE class. Understanding poetry, in itself, is a fine art: an art that’s taken me years to perfect. Well, I say perfect; I really mean, be better than I originally was.

Here’s the poetry manifesto I’ve written to share with students:

You might not be a Victorian lady mourning the loss of a child. You might not be a famous playwright with an attraction to a woman who is not your wife. You might not be a poor young man who watches his friends die in a war. But each and every one of those experiences has connections to your life. You have loved and lost things. Poetry is about communicating experiences. Poetry teaches you how to deal with things. It might be a relative, a pet or a fluffy-ended pen you really liked to write with, but we can all recognise and identify with loss. Poetry shows you how others have dealt with a situation. Poetry is emotional and intelligent problem solving. Poetry teaches you that you have similar experiences to others in our society. Poetry explores how humans think and feel.

The job of an English teacher is sometimes just to make students see the relevance of what they are doing. Teenagers rightly question why we do certain things. Why do we study Shakespeare? Why do we have to do poetry? Our job is about building that relevance into the lesson. We need to make that connection. That building of connections has been misinterpreted as a ’hook’ or a ’starter’ — or, even more dangerously, as a ’fun’ activity. Fun is a word bandied about by parents, students and teachers. The danger comes when we seek simply to draw out the ’fun’ aspect of learning, because learning is tough. If we wrap it up in a nice, fluffy, pretty way, we create a false impression of what real work is. Focusing on the relevance is a much better starting point.

In the classroom, teachers have to work on that relevance and connection. Yes, students have varied and different lives to us, but we need to work on building up their experiences. There has been a relatively recent focus-shift in education to the concept of cultural capital; the particular sort of cultural knowledge that one generally obtains through having experiences. Experience-rich and experience-poor students are immediately evident in any classroom: one child might make frequent visits to London; another might never have been. A recent GCSE exam question featured a woman working in London and leaving Oxford Circus. One student in my class wrote that the woman had just left a circus. A simple assumption to make. What caused it? A lack of knowledge caused by a lack of experience. Knowledge and experience are closely linked and our role, as teachers, should be to increase the former by increasing the latter.

Take a poem like ’Dulce et Decorum est’ by Wilfred Owen. There are many different ways an English teacher might inform students’ experience of the poem.

1 Making a personal connection — perhaps a student’s relation is in the armed forces?

2 Making an intellectual connection — do you know what really happens on the battlefield?

3 Making an emotional connection — how would you feel about fighting in a war?

Before you start with anything whizzy, creative or ’fun’, think about the relevance of the poem to the students. Open their eyes. How does it feel to lose a child, for instance? Ben Jonson’s ’On My First Son’ explores this awful reality and, like much of the canon, we can use it to teach young people empathy with another’s tragedy.

Often, the first step is to ask what the ideas or questions in a poem are. In English, as I often say to my students, we develop our thinking and we explore how others think. Where better to see that than in poetry? A poem is pure, undiluted thinking or feeling. A poem is an idea. A poem is a thought. A poem is a feeling bottled.

Why is it that humans turn to poetry in the happiest, or the saddest, of times? Let’s get married — what poem shall we read? Tom has passed away — what poem shall we read? Our inability to express a thought or feeling is helped by poetry. I can’t possibly express how sad I am, but this poem does, so you can see how I am thinking and feeling at this exact moment. This writer expressed what I can’t possibly articulate. The emotional dimension of a poem is one we can easily ignore, but is hard to forget when you have been affected and moved. How many times do we ask students what a poem makes them feel? Not often enough, I’d venture. The fear is that students will default to the predictable ’it’s boring’ response. In a way, it sounds slightly unnatural. ’Eh, Jamal, Mr Curtis has gone a bit funny. He’s talking about feelings.’

Being a teenager is difficult. Over the years I have taught a fair few angry ones (regardless of gender) and what always strikes me as telling is how each and every one of them is usually struggling to articulate what they are thinking or feeling. As a result, they either fight the system or fly from the classroom. We know that many of our students are struggling with identity, pride, peers, sexuality, feelings, thoughts and life choices at this point. For this reason alone it is so important that we explore the articulation of emotions. I recall my own teenage years, and some adult ones, where I felt something, but couldn’t define it. The wider world doesn’t help either. Society seems to be telling young people that there are two valid categories of emotion: love and hate. We love things and so post them on Facebook with glee, or we hate things enough to raise a pitchfork and join a mob in protest. We have become binary. Things are either positive or negative, good or bad, joyous or depressing. There are no stages in between. Poetry can be a daily source of emotional literacy to help students understand that there are thousands of different emotions we might experience at different points in our lives. When teenagers are struggling, the English teacher provides an opportunity to articulate and name those feelings. It comes as no surprise that we are often fondly remembered.

We can teach students about the emotions at the heart of poetry by asking them questions:

✵ What does the poem make you feel?

✵ Which bits of the poem do you like?

✵ Which bits of the poem do you not like?

✵ Where do your emotions change in the poem?

✵ Why do your emotions change in the poem?

✵ Have you felt this emotion before?

✵ What does the poet want you to feel at the start of the poem?

✵ What does the poet want you to feel by the end of the poem?

Our relationship with literature has been affected by our society’s inability to express emotional nuance. We often allow students to dumb down emotional responses as well. How many times have we heard phases like, ’it makes the reader want to read on’ or, ’it stands out’? Students will easily spot techniques and maybe even the ideas at the heart of the text, yet they will rarely mention the emotional impact. They’d rather see the components than the whole and how it relates to them. So, teachers need to look at how students form relationships with texts. Those connections should be paramount, and they should be emotional. Students need to understand that a poem is an emotional journey.

Take one of the poems used in the recent AQA GCSE English literature exam: Carol Ann Duffy’s ’War Photographer’. It is primarily about emotions and is slightly ironic in the way it explores how people in England aren’t emotionally connected to terrible things happening to people in different countries. I spent a whole lesson with a group of less able boys talking about the emotions involved in being a war photographer before we even looked at the poem. We explored photojournalism¹ and several key images taken in different war zones. One featured a place called ’Sniper Alley’ in Bosnia and another was a photograph taken by João Silva who, when on assignment in Afghanistan, stepped on a mine and was severely injured — the whole incident was captured on film. Then we explored some writing by George Orwell describing his perspective of war. As a class, we built up an emotional picture of being a war photographer. Asking the students what this must be like as a quick starter is not enough. They need to see, hear, think and feel it. Between us, we saw the idea of guilt emerge from the pictures and extracts. One boy brought up the idea of moral disgust at how you could film or photograph someone dying, unable to save them. Another boy kept asking me how one becomes a war photographer. By the time we did actually read the poem, the group were articulate in the possible emotions experienced by a war photographer, which, in turn, gave them a profound understanding of how they might want to hide from the experience while being haunted by what they can recall and angry that nobody else feels the same way. I had simply scaffolded the emotions needed to understand the poem.

In some cases, students need a bit more than just the poem to get the emotional connection; in others, they don’t. The emotional dimension of a poem is one that we are quick to neglect but one that students can easily identify, extend and develop. Like the old chicken and egg scenario, which came first, the literary device or the impact? For students, it seems to be the literary device but, in reality, it is the impact. Start with the feelings and the emotions and it becomes easier to explain how the writer created them. So, what does it make us feel? How is it written to make us feel this emotion? Where it may be hard to decide if chicken or egg came first, it is easier to say that emotion comes first with poetry. The emotions are often what connects us to the poems.

Poetry as a form of text is arguably the strongest and most powerful. I’d go even further to say it is often one of the most easily accessible forms of writing. But its enigmatic quality can cause problems for students. Somehow, there’s nuanced meaning underneath the similes and metaphors; a secret initially hidden from the students’ view.

As a child, I felt I was broken. During the 1990s, it was common to have magic eye posters in your bedroom. These were a form of optical illusion with a picture hidden within a pattern. For the life of me, I could never find the hidden picture. This is how students can feel when presented with a poem: that they must find the single hidden meaning when there are actually several. The teacher’s job is to sift through those meanings, present all of them and let the student come to their own conclusion.

As a golden rule, I like to start with what the student thinks a poem is about:

✵ What do you think it is saying?

✵ What, in your opinion, is it teaching us?

✵ How do you see this differently to your partner?

Teach students that poetry is about multiple meanings and multiple feelings. All too easily a poem becomes a bag of techniques which are loosely linked together. Poems are about thoughts, feelings, ideas, knowledge and experience — and our job is to allow the students to own all of these.

1. What is the poem’s central question?

Take William Blake’s ’The Tiger’ (a poem I hold close to my heart as it was the first one I ever taught to a class).² On a simple level it is about a tiger, but it contains so many different meanings.

The Tiger

Tiger, tiger, burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder and what art

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And, when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? what dread grasp

Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,

And watered heaven with their tears,

Did He smile His work to see?

Did He who made the lamb make thee?

Tiger, tiger, burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?³

To simplify things, we could suggest that the poem is about three questions:

1 How impressive is the tiger?

2 How could somebody create a creature like the tiger?

3 Is the tiger stronger than God?

Informing the poem is the Romantic poets’ view of the sublime: the fear and awe evoked by nature and its power. Blake looks at the tiger with a thrill and excitement that is tinged with fear. This links to the frustration some Victorians felt with the Industrial Revolution, which seemed to present a dark and scary future, filled with smog and factories. Some mourned the loss of the natural world.

The ideas at the centre of the poem are universal: ideas, in fact, that all students can connect with.

✵ Have you ever seen an animal and been impressed by it?

✵ Have you ever seen something and felt that it was too perfect somehow?

✵ Have you seen something that has scared and excited you at the same time?

The teacher’s job is to light the fire of curiosity and to make those connections concrete. You have a wealth of thoughts and feelings you can tap into. Take some of the poems in the new AQA GCSE poetry anthology, for instance:

’London’ by William Blake — How do you react to the poor when you see them in the street?

’Ozymandias’ by Percy Bysshe Shelley — What do you think the prime minster will be remembered for in 100 years’ time?

’The Charge of the Light Brigade’ by Lord Alfred Tennyson — Is it a noble thing to sacrifice your life for the good of the country?

Never forget that poetry is about thinking. Start with thinking, and then build on the thinking to do some more thinking. Once you show students that poems can incorporate many different ideas and feelings, they are not limited to looking for a correct one. Teach students to see that there is no right or wrong, just better and even better readings of a poem. If Frank thinks that ’The Tiger’ is about little green men, get him to convince the rest of the class by providing evidence from the text.

Additionally, it is helpful to remember that coordinating conjunctions are your friends when talking about poetry, or indeed any text. As in life, there are normally several things going on at once. The poem is about X and Y. The poem explores A or B. That complexity needs reaffirming with the students.

Finally, students often fear committing to definitive answers. That is why questions are a really useful entry point; they aren’t concrete. Get students to think of the questions being asked in the poem. Even the shyest of students can give you a question.