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The odd thing is that in school they teach us to dissect poems, going specifically through some authors. Yet pretty much no poetry resonates with us as student

The odd thing is that in school they teach us to dissect poems, going specifically through some authors. Yet pretty much no poetry resonates with us as students. It's true that we're young, and we don't have enough life experience to find meaning in those words... but shouldn't the reality be that we should see the world through others eyes? Aren't we empathetic enough at that age, or is that analytical approach that ends up being pointless?

jfengel 7y ago
Literature teachers try, somewhat haphazardly, to expose students to material that they aren't really ready for. There's no one correct route that will connect with all students. Some will get it immediately; others will connect years later; others will never find it resonates with them at all. I think the most common approaches aren't very effective. They're taught to treat a poem as a puzzle to be decrypted, as if the poet could have spoken more plainly but chose not to. You're taught to look for "symbolism", because a one-to-one matching of symbols to the real world is easy to talk about. But it didn't help me connect with anything, and I suspect for many others. A better approach, at least for me, is to take a piece that already connects and then examine why it works. You already know, for example, that popular song lyrics are easy to memorize. Why? What is the structure they're using, and how does that pattern build up more than the same concept expressed in different words? Why did you like Film X and hate Film Y, even when they're superficially similar? There's no right answer, and that's hard to teach. Especially to students like me, who think of school as "Science and a bunch of classes for students not smart enough to take science." (I suspect that rings bells for many.) I eventually learned that I enjoyed things that were created by those "not smart enough for science", and became interested in how those things worked -- even though there's still no right answer. I just now have a way to talk about it, lessons that my English teachers tried and failed to get to me. I believe they could have done it better, though what would have worked for me would have failed other people differently.
pyuser583 7y ago
We don’t teach poetry very well. Students used to memorize poems starting in elementary school. That was a big part of early education- memorizing poems. Lots of older folks still remember them. How many older Americans can still recite “Ride of Paul Revere?” Lots. Many modern poems assume familiarity with the poetic “canon.” Poetry is getting more and more estranged from “common people.” Think of the role poetry played in the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s: Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Amiri Baracka, etc. Hard to find any recent poets with the same effect.

jfengel 7y ago

Literature teachers try, somewhat haphazardly, to expose students to material that they aren't really ready for. There's no one correct route that will connect with all students. Some will get it immediately; others will connect years later; others will never find it resonates with them at all. I think the most common approaches aren't very effective. They're taught to treat a poem as a puzzle to be decrypted, as if the poet could have spoken more plainly but chose not to. You're taught to look for "symbolism", because a one-to-one matching of symbols to the real world is easy to talk about. But it didn't help me connect with anything, and I suspect for many others. A better approach, at least for me, is to take a piece that already connects and then examine why it works. You already know, for example, that popular song lyrics are easy to memorize. Why? What is the structure they're using, and how does that pattern build up more than the same concept expressed in different words? Why did you like Film X and hate Film Y, even when they're superficially similar? There's no right answer, and that's hard to teach. Especially to students like me, who think of school as "Science and a bunch of classes for students not smart enough to take science." (I suspect that rings bells for many.) I eventually learned that I enjoyed things that were created by those "not smart enough for science", and became interested in how those things worked -- even though there's still no right answer. I just now have a way to talk about it, lessons that my English teachers tried and failed to get to me. I believe they could have done it better, though what would have worked for me would have failed other people differently.

pyuser583 7y ago

We don’t teach poetry very well. Students used to memorize poems starting in elementary school. That was a big part of early education- memorizing poems. Lots of older folks still remember them. How many older Americans can still recite “Ride of Paul Revere?” Lots. Many modern poems assume familiarity with the poetic “canon.” Poetry is getting more and more estranged from “common people.” Think of the role poetry played in the counterculture of the 1960s and 70s: Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Amiri Baracka, etc. Hard to find any recent poets with the same effect.