No matter what, it’s fairly essential that the parent/instructor doesn’t push for a particular interpretation. Criticism directed towards the student’s logic in the format of “Earlier you said X, but that contradicts Y doesn’t it?” works fine, but in my experience trying to angle a kid towards a particular view does absolute bollocks for their learning how to do analysis. They get frusterated when their intuitive interpretation/argument disagrees with yours, tend to assume that it’s their problem, and give up.
I had poems like this in college and, to be honest, it took several hours for me to understand them. What the hell does “Stroake” supposed to be? Stroke? Strike? Smite? Steak?
English instructors often give students these antiquated works and assume that knowledge of modern English translates to fluency in a language that barely resembles our own. It doesn’t. In order to fruitfully examine a piece of literature, the reader must be able to discern the meaning of the words used in the work.
In college, I easily understood poets like Frost or Tennyson but had severe difficulty with works from Shakespeare and the like. To cope, I would look up each word I didn’t understand and make a notation in the margin. It was long and tedious but it allowed me to at least put the work in “plain English”. Once the piece is in plain English, it is much easier to critically examine the work and be confident about it.
I don’t think so. The language of Shakespeare, for instance, wasn’t entirely an artifact of the period; many of his contemporaries wrote in a fashion much more comprehensible to modern readers. The archaic language and meter of his work were, to the extent of my knowledge, intentional and often farcical. He and his readers knew that what they were watching was hopelessly old-fashioned, and it was part of the image.
There are plenty of good annotated versions of shakespeare that contain margin notes explaining the archaic vocabulary. If you make your kid manually do a word-for-word analysis, all your kid’ll get for her trouble is a neutered classic and a justified aversion to the genre.
I’m a math and plot point man myself and critical thinking has never sunk in with me, even though throughout school I was considered good at that type of thing. In fact it only made my bullshitting skills better because I would write what I knew the teachers wanted to hear(another important skill, don’t deny).
As for poetry, I can honestly say I HATE it, (that is unless it’s being sung accompanied by an electric guitar, and even then I’m only half paying attention to the words). I feel as if it needs to be pondered over, then it need to be re-written.
And the idea of critical thinking is vague. Are you suppose to write a review. Is it one of those ‘do you or don’t you like and why?’ type things. I say that critical thinking upped my bullshitting because it always seemed to me like write whatever the heck you feel like, the more clever you are, the more the teacher will eat it up and the higher the grade you receive.
I decided late in high school that what learning is is just very good bullshitting.
People shouldn’t put themselves down by saying “I just bullshitted my way through the paper.” If they did well on the paper, then they learned the skill! You know how to do critical thinking (or whatever they’re calling it these days). You didn’t “fool” the teacher into thinking you knew something you didn’t–you showed you knew it, by writing the right kind of thing.
I don’t mean bullshiting as in not reading a peice of literature or a poem and pretending you did. That would absolutly not work. I’m talking about faking your level of understanding or interest by writing about the smallest details that only you would pick up on and spin it in a clever way. I’m talking about making it sound like you cared when you were really just trying to get your word/page count to the absolute minimum.
Not really a solution or anything , just an observation:
Poetry went well when I taught it in the class that is one level above Fresh. comp. or in Creative writing. Not so well in the classes below that, and I’m talking about college.
I have to keep reminding myself that many (certainly not all) h.s. students have not been taught how to think, don’t want to think because it’s “too hard,” have not been required to stretch. It doesn’t do them much good when they arrive in college without such skills.
I had to read through it a couple times, but I understood the poem- it’s about death thinking it’s all powerful, when it’s subject to chance/fate and things like murder and suicide… plus it’s not necessarily final, because there could be some kind of afterlife. And, also, that the author doesn’t fear death- death only has power over those who give it power and, without that fear, death isn’t so much of a threat. It’s just really long sleep, essentially.
oh, and I’m sixteen. Which is why I decided my understanding of the poem is relevant at all.
BUT- (this is going to sound SO conceited) I don’t think it’s abnormal for somebody my age (and certainly not someone in tenth grade- I’m finishing up eleventh) to not understand it. Poetry is really hard for a lot of people and things written in older-style English are too. Most of my friends struggle with stuff like that.
And I’ve found that, for the most part, teachers don’t even really expect you to totally understand it. They expect you to TRY and to be able to apply specific things you’ve been taught to it.
… and, with homework assignments, there are a lot of nights I take my math or history and stare at it and whine, “I don’t GET IT!!! this is stupid! it doesn’t even make sense!” … when it makes perfect sense, is not stupid, and I would understand it quite well if I weren’t so tired, bored, stressed and set on being petulant.
I don’t see anything difficult about “stroake” – it should be obvious from both the context and the pronunciation that it’s simply a variant spelling of “stroke.” Some of the other features of Donne’s language are a bit trickier – “then” where modern English would use “than,” for example, and the differences in the conventions of punctuation. Still, I don’t think the vocabulary should pose any real problems for a high school student.
That said, it is a difficult poem (in fact, this particular poem’s difficulty is a central point of Margaret Edson’s wonderful play Wit); I’d expect most fifteen-year-olds to struggle with it, although I’d also hope that most of them would eventually be able make some sense out of it. And I think there’s value in the struggle, and great value in exposing students to language and ideas that are bigger than they can grasp at the moment, but not if the student is merely frustrated without getting anywhere. I like what Manda JO says a lot:
Yeah, it’s a delicate balance. I’d be inclined, in this case, to give the students a few more clues than this teacher seems to have done – for example, it’s a hell of a lot easier to work out what’s going on in this poem if you know that Donne was a Christian and a clergyman, and if you have some sense that people in the seventeenth century lived much closer to death than we do now. But I can’t fault her for wanting to give the students a shot at working it out for themselves.
It depends on what the teacher is considering “A” work to be–she may not expect even close to perfect understanding–and there are kids that won’t really try to grapple with the poem at ALL until it is on something that “really” matters.
Did you see the link to “Evening Hawk” I posted earlier? That is what she has to be able to analyze in two years. It’s considerably more abstract than the Donne piece. She won’t get there if she isn’t working with actual literature starting now.
Sorry for the double post, the Edit timed out while I was reading the poem !
God that’s good stuff. I see what you mean- working through that poem would be rigorous work for anyone. I just wish my daughter had come home with the Donne piece in October, not June. Yanno? You take some time to develop the skills, and then use those skills on something huge like a Final. IMHO, that is.
The skills are paramount to being able to appreciate fine writing, I agree. I just disagree with the timing.
Well, presumably she was bringing home some poetry, and that poetry was increasingly complex. If this is the first time she’s been asked an analyze a poem, I see your point. If, on the other hand, there have been many poems but not this particular one, then I think that is how you insist that students learn skills, not works: by making them apply those skills to new works: exams for English should be practicals, not regurgitation. It’s what the AP exam does, and I would bet dollars to doughnuts that that is what the teacher is concerned with preparing her for.
Right, but assuming your daughter is in advanced English classes and not in an IB program, the teacher is thinking ahead to the AP exams at the end of junior and senior year. Because of the AP exams there is a lot of pressure on the idea of having to deal with a piece of unknown text in a fairly timely fashion.
I guess I am confused: are you upset that your daughter had never seen this particular poem before, or do you feel like she hasn’t ever seen poems of similar difficulty? Because unknown passages are the name of the game from here on out–SAT, ACT, AP, all that. But if she hasn’t had a chance to learn skills on the same sorts of thing, I see your point.
I just wanted to add that it amuses me that technically we’re helping you with your homework, which is against Board rules, I believe. Now back to your regularly scheduled debate.
The latter, not the former. I could hardly be upset that she hasn’t seen a piece of literature- that is what school and life are about !! No, I am unhappy that she is being asked to develop skills the day before a Final. Skill that have not been nurtured throughout the year.
Otherwise, I have no complaint about the teacher she’s got. Honest.
