Teaching how to think, not what to think - Total BS

[Two_and_a_Half_Inches_of_Fun]

In reading the Test anxiety: I call B.S. thread, I read this comment by Diogenes the Cynic on the high school curricula:

@Diogenes the Cynic

Curricula have been so dumbed down over the last couple of decades that I don’t trust the regular grades anymore.

When I read this I could not agree more, but it made me think of an approach to teaching I see used by teachers in high schools where they do not think they should teach students what to think, but instead how to think. I could have posted my comments in that thread, but I did not want to start a big hijack.

I think an example might help. I taught an honors English class for seniors the other day. This was at a school that is considered of the better high schools in the area. The teacher left behind an assignment where the students were supposed to read a group of poems and then write short responses on each poem. They were also supposed to read the first two poems out loud and do short discussions as examples.

The first student started reading the poem. His reading was awful. He could read all the words, but he was reading it in a monotone, rhythmless voice that showed no understanding of the form the poet was using. I told him to stop and read it correctly. I assumed he was like a lot of seniors at this point and just did not really care anymore. It turns out that was not the problem. He did not know how to read a poem. Hell, he did not even know how to scan a poem. He had never even heard of the concept of scanning a poem. It turns out the whole class did not know how to scan a poem. Why? Because they had never been taught scansion. There are so many little things like this that are just not considered important anymore.

This brings us to this phenomenon where teachers do not think it is their job to teach the students what to think, but instead how to think. This sounds nice until you actually find out what they mean. It basically means they do not think they should be teaching a basis of knowledge. By “how to think” they do not actually mean teaching rigorous methods of logical thinking. They are not teaching anything about identifying logical fallacies or error in premises.

The poetry exercise is good example of this thought process. Instead of reading the poems and examining the form (meter, rhyme, etc.), meaning, and context of the poems, the teacher just wants the students to read the poems and write how they felt about the poems. There is no real wrong answer, but the students are “thinking.”

History is another example of this thought process. There seems to be a real feeling that names, events, and dates are not that important. What is important is that the students are engaged and thinking about history. How a person can be engaged and thinking about things they do not know the most basic facts about is something I do not understand. Ask a high school which major power were engaged in the Peloponnesian War and get ready for a blank stare. Or ask, what were the Wars of the Roses?

Now, I do not know how wide spread this phenomenon is, but it seems pretty entrenched in the schools I have been in. I also do not want to say the teachers are not teaching any facts and basic knowledge, but the teachers seem to be much less concerned with teaching facts and basic knowledge than in engaging the students in projects designed to make them “think.” This not to say I did not have assignments like the poetry assignment described above when I was a student. I did, and I always hated when these projects (where there can be no wrong answer, no matter how illogical) were assigned so maybe I am oversensitive; however, these assignments seem to have taken over even in relatively objective subjects like history. I mean, who cares how a student feels about civil rights?

[phouka]

“Teach how to think, not what to think” is a philosophy that is supposed to avoid the indoctrinaire approach to knowledge that our schools have long been guilty of. It’s singularly more difficult to do well than it is to do half-assed.

The students you dealt with were not victims of “how to think” teaching. They were victims of poor teaching, period. They were victims of subject standards that give no weight to poetry analysis, or perhaps a their regular teacher’s ill prepared curriculum, or a literature book heavy on multicultural emphasis and light on theory, or a school districts insistence that standardized tests come before all other priorities.

If your students had been taught “how to think,” they’d have been equipped with the basics necessary for the analysis of both prose and poetry. They’d understand form, imagery, rhythm, and melody, and they would have practiced reading poetry aloud before dissecting it. All of that is part of the “how”.

[Two_and_a_Half_Inches_of_Fun]

phouka, your post points out what I think a is big part of the problem. Teachers seem to really be afraid of being accused of indoctrinating students or saying that a student’s opinion or interpretation is wrong or stupid. This is something that seems to have also taken hold in the larger culture as well. When Rosie O’Donnell made her ignorant claims about building seven and was called on the idiocy of her views, she responded that was her opinion of what happened and opinions cannot be wrong. That is crap. Opinions and interpretations can be wrong.

Teaching to think appears to end up not being so much a rigorous system of learning, but a code for not teaching anything at all.

[Odesio]

@Two and a Half Inches of Fun

The first student started reading the poem. His reading was awful. He could read all the words, but he was reading it in a monotone, rhythmless voice that showed no understanding of the form the poet was using. I told him to stop and read it correctly.

I don’t understand what the big deal is here. That’s typically how everything from plays to short stories, dramas, and passages from books were read when I was in school. I don’t think it’s very reasonable to expect students in an English class to put on a performance especially if it’s the first time they’ve seen the poem. Save the performance for the drama club or theater class.

This brings us to this phenomenon where teachers do not think it is their job to teach the students what to think, but instead how to think.

What is the primary purpose of education? Many people say we need an educated population in order to have a decent society. Do we get a better society from teaching people what to think or are we better off teaching them to think? That’s certainly what most math classes beyond basic arithmetic is all about. Geometry, algebra, and calculus aren’t going to be of much use to most students upon graduation but they will have learned how to think logically from taking those courses.

Instead of reading the poems and examining the form (meter, rhyme, etc.), meaning, and context of the poems, the teacher just wants the students to read the poems and write how they felt about the poems. There is no real wrong answer, but the students are “thinking.”

While I remember covering meter, rhyme, etc., in my English classes I still remember the primary focus being on analyzing what the poet was talking about.

There seems to be a real feeling that names, events, and dates are not that important. What is important is that the students are engaged and thinking about history.

That’s probably the most use students can get out of studying history. Using their critical thinking skills to figure out why event A happened is far more useful to them than knowing names and dates. A trained monkey can know names and dates --I’m living proof-- but it takes some skill to analyze why events occurred.

It’s been 14 years since I graduated from high school but I don’t remember the problem being that they were trying to get students to think. The problem was that they were more interested in rote memorization than teaching students how to think.

Marc

[RickJay]

@Two and a Half Inches of Fun

In The first student started reading the poem. His reading was awful. He could read all the words, but he was reading it in a monotone, rhythmless voice that showed no understanding of the form the poet was using. I told him to stop and read it correctly.

This is the way students have generally been reading poems in high school since before you were born.

[Hampshire]

@Two and a Half Inches of Fun

Hell, he did not even know how to scan a poem. He had never even heard of the concept of scanning a poem. It turns out the whole class did not know how to scan a poem. Why? Because they had never been taught scansion. There are so many little things like this that are just not considered important anymore.

I’ve never heard of scanning a poem and have never heard of the term scansion before. Can you give me any reason why it WOULD be considered important in a high school curricula?

[FinnAgain]

First, I will point out that learning is most effective when students can:
a) have a meaningful and genuine emotional reaction to it
b) link it to and integrate it with previous knowledge
c) use previous knowledge, current knowledge and their intellectual skills to synthesize a new understanding. In other words, Bloom’s Taxonomy.

@Two and a Half Inches of Fun

Teachers seem to really be afraid of being accused of indoctrinating students or saying that a student’s opinion or interpretation is wrong or stupid.

With damn good reason. My job is not to teach children what to like or what to think or politics to adopt or what type of literature is ‘best’. My job is to give students the tools they will need to be life-long learners and consumers of information rather than passive receptacles.

@Two and a Half Inches of Fun

That is crap. Opinions and interpretations can be wrong.

On factual matters, like structural physics. Not on subjective matters, like what people think an author was ‘getting at’ or what the emotional impact of a sonnet is. If you don’t grok that…

@Two and a Half Inches of Fun

Teaching to think appears to end up not being so much a rigorous system of learning, but a code for not teaching anything at all.

Challenge: craft a four-week set of lesson plans, designed to teach children critical and analytical skills and the ability to come to their own concusions and defend them robustly. Attempt to do this without implicitly structuring your lessons around teaching students how to think, and not simply what to say in response to your questions.

@Two and a Half Inches of Fun

This brings us to this phenomenon where teachers do not think it is their job to teach the students what to think, but instead how to think.

You mean… best practices?

@Two and a Half Inches of Fun

This sounds nice until you actually find out what they mean. It basically means they do not think they should be teaching a basis of knowledge. By “how to think” they do not actually mean teaching rigorous methods of logical thinking. They are not teaching anything about identifying logical fallacies or error in premises.

Quite frankly, that’s bull. How many teachers and journal articles, exactly, have you reviewed to come to such a sweeping conclusion? You say later that you’re only talking about a tiny subset of teachers, and yet you make sweeping claims of this sort. Why?
Moreover, not all English teachers focus on Media/Critical Literacy. Especially with NCLB based limits on their ability to design their own curriculum. Much more important than teaching a student the “right” interpretation of a novel, or “how to read poetry” :rolleyes:, is teaching students how to rely on text and their own analytical skills to craft a cohesive view, and defend it. No matter how ‘illogical’.

@Two and a Half Inches of Fun

The poetry exercise is good example of this thought process. Instead of reading the poems and examining the form (meter, rhyme, etc.), meaning, and context of the poems, the teacher just wants the students to read the poems and write how they felt about the poems. There is no real wrong answer, but the students are “thinking.”

The basic approach is quite sound. And, quite frankly, it sounds like you significantly dropped the ball. Your job as a sub is not to change the teacher’s lesson plans, much less deciding for yourself what their curriculum should be. If I had you sub for one of my classes and heard that you pulled a stunt like that, I’d make sure you never subbed for any of my classes ever, ever again.

I’m also not quite sure how you think that students can be practicing analysis, synthesis and persuasive/expository writing via talking about their personal reactions to a poem, and not be learning.

@Two and a Half Inches of Fun

History is another example of this thought process. There seems to be a real feeling that names, events, and dates are not that important. What is important is that the students are engaged and thinking about history.

Now, I don’t teach that subject, and didn’t focus on it in grad school… but I simply cannot credit your claims as being at all believable. History teachers don’t craft a curriculum around names, dates or events? And, as you yourself admit that it would be physically impossible to even begin to discuss how students felt about various people, events, and time periods… why do you claim that’s what’s going on?
Without knowing anything about facts, what do you think a history class is like?

“Um… those guys, a long time ago, I don’t like them, they were jerks.”
“Nuh unh!”

Have you ever sat in on these teachers while their classes are in session, rather than seeing students while they’re doing their best to get out of doing work by playing-dumb-for-the-sub?

@Two and a Half Inches of Fun

Ask a high school which major power were engaged in the Peloponnesian War and get ready for a blank stare. Or ask, what were the Wars of the Roses?

Which has nothing to do with anything. You, I’d wager, couldn’t rattle off the specific details of Shaka Zulu’s battle strategy, let alone why it was revolutionary. So? We’re given a relatively short number of roughly 40 minute periods, and you’re annoyed that some students don’t some comparatively minor details of western history?

@Two and a Half Inches of Fun

I also do not want to say the teachers are not teaching any facts and basic knowledge, but the teachers seem to be much less concerned with teaching facts and basic knowledge than in engaging the students in projects designed to make them “think.”

So, in other words, you’ve had the privilege of working with a lot of quality teachers.
There is, and always will be, more knowledge and factoids to cover in any scholastic program. But criticial skills will benefit a student for the rest of their years and, in turn, inform how they relate to bits of information in the future.

@Two and a Half Inches of Fun

I mean, who cares how a student feels about civil rights?

Any educator who understands that his/her job entails more than churning out adults able to vomit forth facts on cue but, instead, creating and raising consumers of information and citizens ready to take their place in the Body Politic.

@phouka

“Teach how to think, not what to think” is a philosophy that is supposed to avoid the indoctrinaire approach to knowledge that our schools have long been guilty of. It’s singularly more difficult to do well than it is to do half-assed.

Absolutely. Done right, it’s as much an art as a science. 2.5 also doesn’t even know if the approach works, as all he sees is student behavior when their teachers are away (and thus, aren’t there to drive/shape the discussion). Students are rather notorious for half-assing it when a sub is running a class.

@phouka

The students you dealt with were not victims of “how to think” teaching. They were victims of poor teaching, period.

I’m not even sure we have enough evidence to support such a conclusion. There are limited hours in a day, and quite frankly, if a student is able to identify emotional triggers and skillful wordplay in a poem, I couldn’t care less, as an educator, if they can differentate a spondee from a trochee or an iamb from iams cat food. For all we know, the teacher was only given two weeks for an entire “poetry unit”, and had to pick and choose what to focus on.

@Rick Jay

This is the way students have generally been reading poems in high school since before you were born.

Yeepers.
Along the continium of things I’d want my class to focus on (or my substitute to focus on when I’m away)? I’d put “dramatic reading of poetry/prose” at a level of all other public speaking. In short, not all that high. I’m primarily concerned as to whether or not my students can express and defend their ideas in written form, not if they’d win at a poetry slam.

[Two_and_a_Half_Inches_of_Fun]

@Hampshire

I’ve never heard of scanning a poem and have never heard of the term scansion before. Can you give me any reason why it WOULD be considered important in a high school curricula?

When you read a verse poetry (or something written in that style) the way the lines turn create different effects. For example, terameter lines create an effect of quickness or even turmoil which is not the case with pentameter lines. This effect can be increased by using trimeter lines. Now, for the most part reading a poem that uses iambs you do not really need to pay that much attention to this lines after a couple of lines because just reading the poem with a sense of the natural rhythm will cause the cause the person to internalize the rhythm. But when the poem is written in something like dactylic hexameter the rhythm is unnatural for English speakers―which is almost certainly why the poet chose that form.

Consider the differences in these examples :

@Shakespeare

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

@Shakespeare

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

@Longfellow

This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks,
Bearded with moss, and in garments green, indistinct in the twilight,
Stand like Druids of eld, with voices sad and prophetic,
Stand like harpers hoar, with beards that rest on their bosoms.
Loud from its rocky caverns, the deep-voiced neighboring ocean

All three examples use different forms to different effects that are lost if they are not read with understanding of their rhythms. And when those effects are lost, so it a true understanding of the poem (or play or whatever you are reading).

[Two_and_a_Half_Inches_of_Fun]

@FinnAgain

With damn good reason. My job is not to teach children what to like or what to think or politics to adopt or what type of literature is ‘best’. My job is to give students the tools they will need to be life-long learners and consumers of information rather than passive receptacles.

I agree that it is not a teacher’s job to teach the students what to like or what literature is best, but some teachers take this way too far. There is writing that is just bad. One teacher I subbed for had a copy of Tupac’s The Rose That Grew From Concrete on a poetry cart for the students. The poetry is awful. It has no place in any English class except as an example of truly terrible writing. Check this out:

@Tupac

They could never understand
what u set out 2 do
instead they chose 2
ridicule u
when u got weak
they loved the sight
of your dimming
and flickering starlight
How could they understand what was so intricate
2 be loved by so many, so intimate
they wanted 2 c your lifeless corpse
this way u could not alter the course
of ignorance that they have set
2 make my people forget
what they have done for much 2 long
2 just forget and carry on
I had loved u forever because of who u r
and now I mourn our fallen star

Quite frankly, that’s bull. How many teachers and journal articles, exactly, have you reviewed to come to such a sweeping conclusion? You say later that you’re only talking about a tiny subset of teachers, and yet you make sweeping claims of this sort. Why?

I admitted that I might be wrong because of my limited experiences, but have have some conversation with young people and you can see their ignorance about basic facts is startling.

Moreover, not all English teachers focus on Media/Critical Literacy. Especially with NCLB based limits on their ability to design their own curriculum. Much more important than teaching a student the “right” interpretation of a novel, or “how to read poetry” :rolleyes:, is teaching students how to rely on text and their own analytical skills to craft a cohesive view, and defend it. No matter how ‘illogical’.

Bullshit. The Great Gatsby is not about how you make yourself into anything you want and achieve your dreams, but that is a position that high school students are taking away. It is not an inspirational story about the ideals of the American dream; it is about the decline and death of the American dream. Seeing it as an inspirational tale is wrong and no matter how well the students try to defend this position.

Gatsby’s Green Light Beckons a New Set of Strivers (Published 2008)

The basic approach is quite sound. And, quite frankly, it sounds like you significantly dropped the ball. Your job as a sub is not to change the teacher’s lesson plans, much less deciding for yourself what their curriculum should be. If I had you sub for one of my classes and heard that you pulled a stunt like that, I’d make sure you never subbed for any of my classes ever, ever again.

Where are you getting that I changed the lesson plans? I asked the student to read the poem. After he read it incorrectly, I asked him to read it correctly. I then asked a few questions and determined that he and the class did not know how to read the poem correctly. Then I just let them read it incorrectly and finish their assignment.

I’m also not quite sure how you think that students can be practicing analysis, synthesis and persuasive/expository writing via talking about their personal reactions to a poem, and not be learning.

Because they are only getting a surface level understanding of the poem. They have no understanding of the form. They have no understanding of the sound―I doubt one of them could tell me what the difference between a letter that is an aspirate and a letter that is a liquid. Not one of the students was using a dictionary to analyze the word choice of the poets.

It is this kind of reading of poetry that causes people to think “The Road Not Taken” is advice to be independent and not follow the herd. It is not, and anyone who thinks that is wrong no matter how well they can argue.

Now, I don’t teach that subject, and didn’t focus on it in grad school… but I simply cannot credit your claims as being at all believable. History teachers don’t craft a curriculum around names, dates or events? And, as you yourself admit that it would be physically impossible to even begin to discuss how students felt about various people, events, and time periods… why do you claim that’s what’s going on?
Without knowing anything about facts, what do you think a history class is like?

“Um… those guys, a long time ago, I don’t like them, they were jerks.”
“Nuh unh!”

Have you ever sat in on these teachers while their classes are in session, rather than seeing students while they’re doing their best to get out of doing work by playing-dumb-for-the-sub?

I subbed for a class that had co-teachers. This basically meant I did nothing because the other teacher taught the whole day. The class had a discussion on how they felt about the civil rights movement. Most of their feeling were wrong because they getting the dates and order of events wrong.

[Jragon]

I always liked my old math teacher’s metaphor “you’re not lemmings, I’m not going to jump off a cliff and wait for you all to follow.”

This meant he’s not going to show us something and then make sure we always do the exact same thing. This especially meant that he’s going to put stuff on the test we’ve never seen as a possible application of the formulas/concepts before to see if we’ve actually grasped the material, and not just regurgitated information he spoonfed us (“follow him off the cliff”).

This isn’t bad teaching, it forced us to learn how to use logical thinking to apply old concepts to new information, something that even those who wouldn’t use Trig on a day to day basis in their chosen profession could take away similar problem solving skills “hey maybe if I use the same thing I did there here but apply it in this fashion…”

As for the poetry you mentioned, that’s just bad teaching. Now reading, isn’t that how every high school student not in drama (or reading something fun like The Bald Soprano) has read every line and poem for everything ever? But scanning poems, we had an entire one quarter unit on scanning and such, culminating ine a “comparative explication and three-dimensional representation” which basically meant we had to describe a poem (meter meaning and all) in terms of two other poems (the gist of it, kinda hard ot explain you weren’t totally limited). The “three-dimensional representation” just meant we had to make a mobile based on one of our poems, though I suspect that part was just for his sadistic amusement since he pretty much snerked when he told us we had to do that.

As for history, our school was recently (a few years ago) ranked #1 by the College Board in History, English, and Comparative Politics, now take that how you will, but from what I’ve experienced in my history classes, it’s good to have a balance of terms and atmosphere. Dates are great for sorting, and knowing exactly when a president’s administration begins and ends is nice, but the atmosphere helps a lot when looking at what ocurred. We tend to focus on politics (I could not tell you who participated in what battle, what tactics they used, or when they happened, short of big ones like Yorktown or Antietam), but it’s much more interesting to get into the people’s heads not just list off what happened when. I can say most classes that focus only on learning strict date-by-date events miss out on a lot (quick why is it called the “Gilded Age?”). Knowing things like that help with a big focus of history, knowing what, historically, was a good and bad decision and why/when we should or should not emulate it. That whole “doomed to repeat it” spiel sorta goes out the window when you only know WHAT Hitler did and WHEN he did it, not how he got it to work, or why, exactly, the times allowed it to happen.

Now this all goes out the window when going into government classes (I’m trying not to press the “emergency memory evacuation” button to vacate the myriad of* court cases and political terms I have memorized at the moment) but even then we look at “why was this a good/bad decision.” Or “how this set a precedent… and how said precedent will be shattered.” (Go Go Gadget Hand Advocacy Test!).

Overall though, it goes back to when I talked about math, analyzing why things happened is infinitely more useful, as it teaches skills, not just subject matter. Subject matter is great if I’m going to be a historian or calc major, but if I’m not I’ve wasted the subject matter, this way I can at least apply the style of reasoning to what I’m doing, even if what I learned the reasoning with isn’t applicable.

Anyway I’m tired, I probably just made an incoherent shamble of a post, my apologies if I didn’t make sense, just ask for clarification.

[RickJay]

@Two and a Half Inches of Fun

When you read a verse poetry (or something written in that style) the way the lines turn create different effects. For example, terameter lines create an effect of quickness or even turmoil which is not the case with pentameter lines. This effect can be increased by using trimeter lines. Now, for the most part reading a poem that uses iambs you do not really need to pay that much attention to this lines after a couple of lines because just reading the poem with a sense of the natural rhythm will cause the cause the person to internalize the rhythm. But when the poem is written in something like dactylic hexameter…

Oh, please. You know damned well high school students aren’t supposed to be versed in “dactylic hexameter.” Are you even a teacher?

[Two_and_a_Half_Inches_of_Fun]

@RickJay

Oh, please. You know damned well high school students aren’t supposed to be versed in “dactylic hexameter.” Are you even a teacher?

I was using that an example of why scansion is important. Dactylic hexameter is not used that often in English, so I would not expect that students would know off hand what it is called. But I would expect that they should be able to scan the poem and see what form the poem is taking even if they do not know what it is called. I would also expect that they should be able to recognize that it is not written in iambic pentameter like 90% of the verse poetry that have probably encountered. It is not like scanning a poem is some weird thing that only poetry nuts care about. It is something is so basic to reading verse poetry that to ignore it is to not read the poem. If these students had been taught how to think about poetry, they would understand how to look at the form of the poem even if they do not know exactly what it is called.

[DSYoungEsq]

@RickJay

Oh, please. You know damned well high school students aren’t supposed to be versed in “dactylic hexameter.” Are you even a teacher?

I knew what it was, when I was in 9th grade English. Happened to correspond neatly with the fact I had to learn how to read Latin poetry at about the same time.

And contrary to the opinions of some apparent English teachers here, a poem is NOT just the written word, it is also the way that sounds. That’s always been the case for poetry, and is what makes poetry poetry. And when I learned how to analyze poems, I learned how to read them, and that went back to the sixth grade, for goodness sake, when we all read out loud, one after the other, the poems “Ozymandius” (which I can STILL recite out loud from memory to this day) and “Jabberwocky.”

While I don’t agree with everything in the OP, I do agree that any English teacher that isn’t teaching how to read out loud (the phenomenom isn’t limited to poetry; it’s true of all efforts to read things) isn’t doing their job. Hell, as a mathematics teacher, I make kids read things out loud correctly, when necessary to make sure they understand the meaning. If you aren’t reading it right, you cannot POSSIBLY comprehend its meaning.

[JThunder]

@Two and a Half Inches of Fun

This brings us to this phenomenon where teachers do not think it is their job to teach the students what to think, but instead how to think. This sounds nice until you actually find out what they mean. It basically means they do not think they should be teaching a basis of knowledge.

Did you arrive at that conclusion yourself, or did someone teach it to you?

[flurb]

Good Lord, you made this poor teenager read poetry in anything other than a rhythmless monotone? Are you trying to get him beat up?

[MandaJo]

@Two and a Half Inches of Fun

I was using that an example of why scansion is important. Dactylic hexameter is not used that often in English, so I would not expect that students would know off hand what it is called. But I would expect that they should be able to scan the poem and see what form the poem is taking even if they do not know what it is called. I would also expect that they should be able to recognize that it is not written in iambic pentameter like 90% of the verse poetry that have probably encountered. It is not like scanning a poem is some weird thing that only poetry nuts care about. It is something is so basic to reading verse poetry that to ignore it is to not read the poem. If these students had been taught how to think about poetry, they would understand how to look at the form of the poem even if they do not know exactly what it is called.

It’s all about opportunity cost. I truly value and respect the sound qualities of poetry, lord knows. But teaching this to kids is an tremendous thing, and there is an awful lot you’d have to give up. For better or worse, the focus on English these days is not really on sound values at all. I suspect that the reason for this is the two AP English tests, neither of which emphasize the sound of poetry: the first (and the one I teach) is a test of rhetoric: we work on analyzing and constructing arguments. So no time or reason for sound values of poetry there: sure, it could be relevant, but less relevant than a lot of other things. The other AP test, AP Literature, emphasizes poetry more, but the key word is always “meaning”: sure, sound values matter there, but that’s the hardest part to teach and the part they are least likely to be able to write about effectively. It’s a very low-payout strategy.

As the AP tests have grown in importance over the last twenty years or so, high school courses have become more and more shaped by what gets 3s and 4s and 5s on them. I’m as guilty of it as anyone, because to tell you the truth I do think teaching argumentation and rhetorical analysis is more important than how to maximize your enjoyment of poetry.

I do agree that there is such a thing as a wrong answer in English, and I tell my kids they are wrong all the time. Hell, in preparation for today’s exam, I spent the last three weeks having hundreds of individual consultations with kids where we went over their old essays. Every single essay, I pointed out things that were misread, poorly stated, unclear, or unsupported. And in many cases I asked kids questions until they saw that the thesis they had started out to defend was so flawed that there was no way to be successful. That’s how you teach someone how to think.

[Two_and_a_Half_Inches_of_Fun]

@Manda JO

I do agree that there is such a thing as a wrong answer in English, and I tell my kids they are wrong all the time. Hell, in preparation for today’s exam, I spent the last three weeks having hundreds of individual consultations with kids where we went over their old essays. Every single essay, I pointed out things that were misread, poorly stated, unclear, or unsupported. And in many cases I asked kids questions until they saw that the thesis they had started out to defend was so flawed that there was no way to be successful. That’s how you teach someone how to think.

That sounds sounds like an excellent way to teach someone how to think as opposed to the methods I have seen.

[Miller]

@Two and a Half Inches of Fun

When you read a verse poetry (or something written in that style) the way the lines turn create different effects. For example, terameter lines create an effect of quickness or even turmoil which is not the case with pentameter lines. This effect can be increased by using trimeter lines. Now, for the most part reading a poem that uses iambs you do not really need to pay that much attention to this lines after a couple of lines because just reading the poem with a sense of the natural rhythm will cause the cause the person to internalize the rhythm. But when the poem is written in something like dactylic hexameter the rhythm is unnatural for English speakers―which is almost certainly why the poet chose that form.

The guy doesn’t know what “scansion” means, and you respond by throwing terms like “dactylic hexameter” at him? This, to you, is a good teaching method?

Thank God you’re only a sub.

[HazelNutCoffee]

@flurb

Good Lord, you made this poor teenager read poetry in anything other than a rhythmless monotone? Are you trying to get him beat up?

Seriously. Even in grad school classes, poetry read aloud was usually read in a monotone, more or less (although we did pay attention to stress and accents and stuff). The ones that did more than that always got funny looks.

There are plenty of other things wrong with our education system that I just can’t summon much outrage over high school students being unable to scan a poem correctly. So some of you were spouting Latin verse in your teenage years - that’s wonderful. Surely you also realize that’s not the norm, nor should it be expected to be such.

[Two_and_a_Half_Inches_of_Fun]

@Miller

The guy doesn’t know what “scansion” means, and you respond by throwing terms like “dactylic hexameter” at him? This, to you, is a good teaching method?

Thank God you’re only a sub.

I probably should have defined the terms in the post for Hamilton. Thank you for pointing this out.

But I do think dactylic hexameter is an excellent example because it sounds so different from something like iambic pentameter.

Here are the basics:

monometer - one-foot line
dimeter - two-foot line
trimeter - three-foot line
tetrameter - four-foot line
pentameter - five-foot line
hexameter - six foot line
heptameter- seven-foot line
octameter - eight-foot line

iamb - a light stress followed by a heavy stress
trochee - a heavy stress followed by a light stress
dactyl - a heavy stress followed by two light stresses
anapest - two light stresses followed by a heavy stress

So a dactylic hexameter is six-foot line with a heavy stress followed by a light stress in each foot (this probably will not be exact).

Back to the example:

THIS is the l FOR est pri l ME val. The l MUR mur ing l PINES and the l HEM locks

The last foot uses a trochee instead of a dactyl.