How to teach: English - Chris Curtis 2019

CH … CH … CH … choices
How to teach poetry

When you have established what the writer is saying, the next logical step is to look at how they are saying it. If there is one thing students can do with aplomb, it is spot techniques.

Teacher: What is interesting about how the poem is written?

Student: Well, it has alliteration, repetition and a simile.

Teacher: What is really interesting about how the poem is written?

Student: I’ve already told you — it has alliteration, repetition and a simile.

I call this ’technique vomiting’ and it tends to be the default setting for a lot of students. It isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it can be if other aspects of their powers of analysis are underdeveloped. If a student can’t explain a choice, then their technique spotting is worthless. Joining meaning with technique is paramount.

Offer students a choice, and then get them to explore the underlying reasoning. For example:

Why did Charles Dickens call Oliver Twist Oliver and not Olivia?

A simple choice can get students to begin to think like a writer. So, why didn’t Dickens make Oliver Olivia? Of course, it is down to Dickens being famously cruel to his characters. He couldn’t be as cruel to an Olivia as he could be to an Oliver. Or would the text have taken on a more darkly sinister undertone if a young female had been at the mercy of the cruel male adults?

Let’s take another poem by William Blake, into which I have thrown a few variations in wording.

London

I/we wander/walk/stroll through each chartered/narrow street,

Near where the chartered Thames does flow,

A mark in every face I/we meet,

Marks/scars of weakness, marks/scars of woe/misery.

In every cry of every man,

In every infant’s cry of fear/sadness,

In every voice, in every ban,

The mind-forged manacles I hear:

How the chimney-sweeper’s cry

Every blackening/gleaming church appals,

And the hapless soldier’s sigh

Runs in blood down palace-walls.

But most, through midnight streets I hear/see

How the youthful harlot’s curse

Blasts the new-born infant’s tear,

And blights with plagues the marriage-hearse.⁵

Often with texts I explicitly draw to a class the specific choices made by the writing. We know that there are lots of options available to a writer, but I like to place two choices together: the first, the writer’s original choice (the choice underlined in the poem); the second, an alternative option posed by me. Students then discuss why the writer chose one option over the other. Look at the verb ’wander’, for example. Why would the voice wander rather than gallop, walk, run or move in any other way? To wander is to walk quite slowly and take things at one’s own pace. This verb alone suggests that the voice is not rushing and is purposefully taking their time as to experience things and notice every sight and sound. It could also suggest a lack of urgency, which could hint at the relaxed nature of the voice’s approach to life.

As a generic approach, alternative comparisons work with all types of text. More able students tend to see the nuanced intention behind the choice. Offering students an alternative gives them a point of comparison. Take the difference between ’sob’ and ’cry’. They mean much the same thing, but there’s a slight difference; sobbing tends to be more physical and louder than crying, and a bit snottier too!

Boy A cried over the football match.

Boy B sobbed over the football match.

The use of ’sobbed’ suggests that Boy B was more upset than Boy A. They were both upset, yet B tangibly more so. A nuanced change but one that is incredibly important in the new English language GCSE. Understand the precise meaning of a word and you understand what is going on beneath the surface. More able students tend to have a greater appreciation of the options a writer has. They see the alternatives and can identify why a writer would use sob instead of cry. That’s why students should read as much as they can to develop their vocabulary and enable them to see these alternatives.

Experience refines our ability and potential. Providing alternative choices helps kick-start understanding by acknowledging experience gaps. Plus, it avoids the need for technical terminology to express complex thinking. A student can articulate the reason behind their choice in their own words.

Of course, giving students a choice also empowers them, putting them in a position where they have to make concrete decisions while touching upon abstract concepts.

Some further examples of choice could include:

✵ Suggest alternative titles for the poem — ’The City’/’Divide’/’The Industrial Revolution’/’A City of Contrasts’.

✵ Write your own version of the whole poem/a stanza/a line.

I do enjoy writing my own version of a poem. Students then have to decide which the genuine one is. Here’s my attempt with ’Futility’ by Wilfred Owen.

Futility

France 1915

He might not be dead;

there’s a chance that his soul’s not fled.

Maybe the Sun’s rays will wake

His spirit.

Snow’s claws clasp him tight

but the Sun’s fingers

caress

his cold body.

Basking in the Sun, there’s hope.

Maybe on this cold morning its power will awaken him.

The Sun knows.

The Sun’s power makes plants grow.

If it makes life, then surely it can coax this body back to us.

Are his limbs too cold to be warmed?

Why ever did the Sun warm this cold Earth and give it the breath of life?

And the vastly inferior original:

Futility

Move him into the sun—

Gently its touch awoke him once,

At home, whispering of fields unsown.

Always it woke him, even in France,

Until this morning and this snow.

If anything might rouse him now

The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds—

Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.

Are limbs so dear-achieved, are sides

Full-nerved,—still warm,—too hard to stir?

Was it for this the clay grew tall?

—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil

To break earth’s sleep at all?⁶

I don’t consider myself a poet, but doing this gives students the opportunity to consider what makes poetry poetry. Usually they spot the dud. But, every so often they don’t. In any case, they always have to justify their opinion.

The Sun’s power makes plants grow.

Think how it wakes the seeds—

This allows for comparisons on a linguistic and figurative level. My simplistic and reductive explanation doesn’t capture the humanised nurturing power of the sun. It is easier to explain the effect when you have a point of comparison. If you are very lucky, you may be able to find draft versions of certain poems. A starting point for draft copies of poems are biographies of the poets and the internet. The British Library has kindly digitised many draft manuscripts, which can be found by searching their website.⁷

I often take this further and offer choices to students explicitly. What do they think warrants exploration in a given text? Recently, with one group, we spent time looking at the way Roald Dahl, J. K. Rowling, Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson use characterisation in their writing. My students came to the opinion that Dickens was obsessed with appearance whereas Rowling was more bothered about personality and Dahl more concerned with character. Stevenson, however, based on Treasure Island, was interested in the physical flaws in a character and their actions. Choices are everywhere in the classroom, and in texts, and if we don’t offer them to students we are in danger of producing boring lessons.

Perspective

Some choices, such as perspective, are staring students in the face. Perspective is, to put it simply, the position we see things from. Whose voice is speaking to us? Whose glasses are we looking through? From what angle are we observing things? The choice between a male or female narrator has a massive implication for the meaning of a poem. So too can the narrator’s age; does the poet choose experience or innocence? I find it helpful to extend this questioning by looking at the impact or effect of perspective. Why does the writer use the first person perspective?

✵ First person — personal/relationship building/connecting/understanding/sharing/close.

✵ Second person — instructing/direct/showing.

✵ Third person — observing/distancing.

I have found that an emphasis on specific words relating to effect works better than a list of sentences or phrases. Students love a catchphrase and that’s why we get endless ’it makes the reader read on’ or ’it stands out’ answers. Precision with words supports precision with ideas. Let’s take ’connecting’ as an example. We know what the word means, but it isn’t one we employ when talking about poems. Yet it is a word that explains the effect of text. A student can then say that ’London’ is about connecting — connecting us to how the voice experiences London, connecting us to the inequality of the city and how it has been imposed by the state, and connecting us to the plight of the inhabitants. When students have this word at their disposal they can explore all the ways in which the poem connects with the reader. How is it connecting to the reader?

Offering choice allows students to see the way the text is built up, brick by brick. Students need just a few ’choice bricks’ to help them build a meaningful interpretation. The principle of chucking everything at them and seeing what sticks isn’t always the best one. I prefer to give students three or four precise words to explain an effect, impact or choice as a starting point. Time will allow them to do this automatically themselves, but in the meantime they need our guidance, support and instruction.

Verse and free verse

The form of poetry can be tricky to explain. Explain why the writer used a dramatic monologue. Umm … they wanted to make it dramatic, and they wanted to make it a monologue. It is sometimes hard to explore the use of form. That’s probably why we spend a lot of time telling students why the writer used a sonnet, a dramatic monologue or a haiku to express their love. I find it is often more meaningful to look at the distinctions between verse and free verse.

✵ Verse — organised/regular/planned/structured/trapped/concrete/systematic/thoughtful.

✵ Free verse — disorganised/irregular/spontaneous/unrestricted/abstract/unsystematic/thoughtless.

Relate this to the poem ’London’ and we see that the tight use of verse and the form of four-line stanzas could reflect the sense of entrapment. There is a rigid structure at the heart of London: people are manacled to one way of thinking, and misery is systematic; there is a higher power causing it.

On the alternative side, we have free verse and Walt Whitman’s ’After the Sea-Ship’.

After the Sea-Ship

After the sea-ship, after the whistling winds,

After the white-gray sails taut to their spars and ropes,

Below, a myriad myriad waves hastening, lifting up their necks,

Tending in ceaseless flow toward the track of the ship,

Waves of the ocean bubbling and gurgling, blithely prying,

Waves, undulating waves, liquid, uneven, emulous waves,

Toward that whirling current, laughing and buoyant, with curves,

Where the great vessel sailing and tacking displaced the surface,

Larger and smaller waves in the spread of the ocean yearnfully flowing,

The wake of the sea-ship after she passes, flashing and frolicsome under the sun,

A motley procession with many a fleck of foam and many fragments,

Following the stately and rapid ship, in the wake following.⁸

’After the Sea-Ship’ lacks the rigid structure and form of ’London’; the sea is unpredictable and the men on the ship are at its mercy. The poem presents the sea as playful and we might conclude that the use of free verse reflects that playfulness with its varying lines and false ending. ’Under the sun’ seems a natural end point, yet Whitman carries on.

Both poets present man as subject to some higher power: the playful sea and the manacles of the mind. The use of verse reflects the ideology. Man is in awe of nature in Whitman. He is at the mercy of societal control in Blake.

Rhyme

Students can have a complex relationship with rhyme. The younger ones tend to gravitate towards poetry that rhymes, yet analysis of the rhyme rarely features in their exploration.

✵ Rhyming — unnatural/planned/lyrical.

✵ Un-rhyming — natural/spontaneous.

The use of rhyme in ’London’ is slightly jarring for me. Rhyme is usually upbeat and melodic but here it details unpleasantness and is marginally unsettling, heightening the sadness of the themes. It is only in the last line of the first verse that we are introduced to the misery of the place and its ’woe’. Blake builds up to this with the harmless ’street’, ’flow’ and ’meet’ and then reveals the poem’s true intent in something of a bathetical manner. The next verse uses rhyme to stress negative words like ’ban’ and ’fear’. The third stanza takes this negativity further: ’cry’, ’appals’ and ’sigh’. Only one of the rhyming words isn’t negative. In the last stanza, we get ’curse’, ’tear’ and, finally, ’hearse’. The last word is a negative one.

Letting students see the choices the poet made is meaningful because it gives them the tools to analyse texts independently. Teaching students to analyse a simile allows them to talk about similes, but it doesn’t get them to explain the reasons behind the choice. Explaining why the poet used a metaphor instead of a simile reveals a more complex understanding and leads you to more detailed reasoning. In ’London’ simile wouldn’t be sufficiently committed, insufficiently totalitarian. Metaphor gives a more determined and dogmatic viewpoint so there’s no doubting Blake’s opinion. Metaphor provides clarity.