With only two weeks left of this term, I decided that I would let my students decided what materials we looked at next. So, on Friday I asked my Form 2 and Form 3 girls what they would be interested in reading next. My Form 2 girls said that they wanted to read more Edgar Allan Poe, after hearing him for the first time last week. Instead of reading another short story to them, I decided to bring in one of Poe's poems. So, in today's lesson we spent two class periods analyzing Poe's poem, "The Raven." We started class by discussing why poetry is often more difficult to comprehend than other reading materials. We talked about symbolism and inferring meaning as two of the biggest challenges that make understanding poetry difficult.
Since, "The Raven" is a narrative poem, we used our story elements (character, setting, plot, conflict, resolution) as a way to make comprehension easier. As we read the poem together we identified these elements. Because of the language and length of the poem, we looked at each stanza together as a class and talked about what was happening.
Since the girls are still having some trouble understanding my accent,
I read a stanza aloud and then had a student read the same stanza again so
that they could understand every word.
Rachel reading a few stanzas.
Students seemed confused as to why Poe selected a raven, when I explained that the raven is often a symbol of death or darkness in literature, students asked why he didn't use an owl. An owl? Now I was the one who was confused. I explained that an owl often is a symbol of knowledge and wisdom. The class thought that it was funny that an owl is seen as being wise because in their culture the owl is a symbol of death. That's one thing that I love about teaching here, I'm always learning something new!
After discussing most of the poem as a class, I had my students analyze the remaining stanzas independently. I asked them questions about certain phrases or lines in the poem and they had to summarize what was going on in the stanza as well as answer the questions. I stressed to them that they must use their own words as well as lines from the stanza when defending and supporting their answers. We then talked about the poem as a whole. Student's did an excellent job inferring and supporting their thoughts with evidence from the poem!
In the second to last stanza, I asked students to summarize what was happening.
Students busy analyzing the rest of the poem.
While Form 2 was easy to please, Form 3 girls were a bit more difficult since they said that they were only interested in music. They did not want to read poetry and the only topic they were interested in was music. I searched for an article about music but nothing seemed to be interesting enough. Then I realized that I could bring music into the classroom if we looked at the lyrics of a song. Now, the real hard part came when I had to find a song to use. I wanted a song that had good lyrics that we could look at and analyze. It also had to be a song that I had in my iTunes library. Even with a somewhat eclectic taste in music, I knew that Everclear, Owl City, Kesha, Matchbox 20, Gary Allan, or Enrique Iglesias just wouldn't do for a lesson. After searching through nearly every song, I finally decided on an 80's classic, "Ninety-Nine Red Balloons" by Nena.
I had to go into class early in order to put up all lyrics to the song.
I had to stand on a chair just to reach the top of the board.
I put the lyrics up on the board. I then had students copy the lyrics. I asked them what they were looking at and they said it was a poem. When I told them that they were looking at song lyrics, they were ecstatic. We read the lyrics and then I played them the song on my laptop! Then we looked back at the lyrics and began analyzing them. We looked at what was happening in each stanza. In the end, I asked students to answer the following questions: What is the tone of the lyrics? What do you think Nena's views on war are? What is the overall message that Nena is trying to get across in this song? Students had to defend their answers in their own words followed by specific evidence and lines from the lyrics. This is a real weakness for this class, over half the class was unable to do this on their Form 3 midterm. However, after modeling what I wanted students to do, nearly every single student in the class was able to answer the questions in their own words as well as provide specific evidence from the lyrics.
We had an awesome class discussion about the way that the military were portrayed as being ignorant and eager to go to war, how high tech machines designed to protect could be used to destroy if we were not careful, as well as discussing the power of imagery of the red balloons, as well as speculating what they symbolized. Many students agreed that the red balloons were effective because they are a child's toy and it makes the military look extremely ignorant to go to war over something so harmless. We discussed the tone of sarcasm in the lines "Everyone's a superhero/Everyone's a Captain Kirk." Students also inferred that the red balloons were a symbol of the narrator's dreams or ambitions and in the end the dreams were destroyed by war. I have never seen these girls so excited about reading comprehension and analyzing as they were today! At the end of class we listened to the song again. I asked the girls if the song seemed different to them the second time they listened to it, now that they looked at the lyrics and talked about it, and all the girls agreed that the song seemed much more serious to them.
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