What if we stopped teaching poetry?

Great Debates
1

Here’s the debate: Stop teaching poetry in Jr High (middle school) and high school. I see no point it ramming it down student’s throats. They gain nothing from it, and few enjoy it. I believe that any student that does enjoy it would do so without having it as part of the school curriculum. Time spent in English glass could be better spent covering more basic and important topics in preparation for life.

I would like to present myself as a case study. I needed more grammar and writing skills (as well as spelling) but instead learned about iambic pentameter and stuff like that.

Can anyone justify keeping it in the school curriculum, WITHOUT making a list of things they’d like to see removed (ie “we should remove algebra because kids don’t like it…”)?

2

This is where a bunch of people will chime in talking about being well rounded and all that. I can tell you this, I remember nothing about any poetry I red in school, nor did it teach me anything. It wasn’t until college when I OPTED to take a Lit class that I actually learned to appreaciate that kid of stuff.

I think, with out current system, kids would be better served having grammar, spelling, and tryping rammed down their throats. If they want peotry, take an elective.

3

Hrm… As someone who had some very intense poetry education in high school, I… I can’t think of a single reason why it was good for me, except to help me pass the IB exam.

By intense, I mean, every English class for a year, we had to analyze a poem. Structure (iambic pentameter, sonnet, ABAB, all that) was equally as important as symbolism (colors, alienation, nature).

I’m not sure it even gave me a deeper appreciation for poetry–Oh sure, it did give me an appreciation for poets I was forced to read that I didn’t previously like, such as T.S. and Robert Frost, but when it comes to picking up new poetry, I think I have reverted back to my old habits.

I’m saying this based on the assumption that I got a very good education in poetry. I believe I did. I got a 6 out of 7 on the English portion of the International Baccalaureate exam, after all. Gave my teacher a heart attack (I was a C-student). That was worth something.

I don’t think poetry is fundamental to understanding grammar by itself, though poetry might be a key choice for advanced study of diagraming sentences.

Then again, poetry was not part of my English education until I was in an uber-extreme English class. Grammar, punctuation, spelling, composition, comprehension, letter-writing, resumes, and keyboarding had already been covered. I chose to take a high-level English course, so it was not rammed down my throat.

Beyond poetry, fiction is probably good for teaching people how to think for themselves–we had to read a lot of “banned” fiction in class, and political literature. Perhaps using poetry to teach symbolism and subtle metaphor is a way of teaching people to understand subversion.

Though, that could be my adoption of symbolic interactionism, which I learned in a sociology class in college, not in an English class in high school. Or did my background in being able to pick apart a sonnet, word by bloody word, give me the ability to pick apart more complex social theory?

Oh drat, now I’m all confused.

Thanks for the brain food, emacknight.

And, sghoul, :stuck_out_tongue:

4

emacknight, what do you see as the duty of the public school system? Are they:

  1. Teaching you job skills;
  2. Teaching you to be a good citizen;
  3. Teaching you about the culture you live in;
  4. A combination of the above?

I generally think that public education ought to teach a combination of the above, and that learning about poetry is a part of learning about your culture.

Daniel

5

While I agree that early education should be a combination of of your options (along with a few others), I disagree that poety actually fits in with any of them.

Based on personal experience, having “local culture” rammed down my throat was also overdone, and having local poetry thrown into the mix made it even worse. The other problem is that the generic poety most taught has nothing to do with the culture we live in. So perhaps you could elaborate on where poetry fits into your options.

6

Would this count as an act of Gaudere’s Law?

Are we just taking poetry out of this hypothetical new way of teaching English, or are we also abolishing the study of plays, short stories, and novels? Does this mean that we are doing away with the traditional 11th grade American lit and 12th grade English lit courses?

While I agree that grammar and spelling should be taught and emphasized, kids hate studying grammar. Grammar is no fun at all. Ram it down their throats non-stop, and you run the risk of them totally rejecting the concept. Exposing them to works of literature, however, shows them grammar in action, thus reinforcing all those tedious rules. Kids need to learn to read for comprehension; the best way to do that is to have them read as many different styles of works possible–including poetry. Kids need to learn how to organize their thoughts into writing; the best way to do that is to have them write as many different kinds of models possible–research papers, persuasive papers, journals, letters, short storys, reviews, short essay answers, and, yes, poems.

Literature, including poetry, also can be a history lesson. A poem can tell a lot about the culture in which it was created.

7

OK I’ll chime in with an opposite view, but only so much of one.

I found English to be one of the hardest subjects for me at School (dyslexia…) I especially found writing prose difficult, but I found writing poetry much easier. For me then poetry writing was of value as a stepping stone towards better prose writing skills. It also helped that I could write poetry that I could be proud of, and was of a level equal to those far better at English than I was, and so gave me a little more confidence than I otherwise might have had.

8

When I was in university, I had a much easier time of it than many because, in my IB English class, we had to write a lot of essays–more, apparently, than most high school students. I had a facility with the form, because of practice, that put me ahead of just about everyone in my first and second year classes.

I think that poetry could be safely replaced with more practical reading and writing assignments–essays, creative writing, expository writing–with more relevant subject matter to students. Don’t drop novels and plays. Students should be exposed to some difficult literature. But Shakespeare is far more accessible than a lot of poetry, especially when a reading of Hamlet is complemented with viewing a couple of recent film adaptations.

9

Poetry says so much with so little.

Prose says so little with so much.

That is reason alone not to discard poetry offhand.

10

Sounds nice capacitor but since merely removing the word structuring, and a few changes of synonyms will change Poetry to prose I must argue that your logic is false.
That said, poetry does seem to be able to say the same thing as prose in a prettier fashion.

11

**

What makes you say they gain nothing from it? At the very least they get to exercise their minds by interpreting poetry, learning new ways of expressing ideas, and discussing the poetry with other students and the teacher. English lit is about more then just grammar.

Marc

12

I wouldn’t eliminate it entirely, but I think English classes should drastically cut down on the amount of poetry and literature, and start teaching some damn English.

I can’t recall a single grammar lesson from high school, but I sure remember being required to read a lot of dumb books. Even books that I had read and enjoyed became tedious, when I had to fill out worksheets and tests about every single plot point or character detail.

13

I should explain that I loved poetry, whether taught in foreign languages or English. Part of the problem might be how it’s taught. This layman guesses that the following methods would be best:

  • Reading poems aloud and dramatically before discussing them. Much poetry is aural, and hearing the rhythms, the alliteration, the flow of the words can make the art come alive.
    *Have students present readings/recitations of poems. Very important in teaching memorization techniques as well as public speaking and rhetoric.
  • Choose topic matter appropriate for adolescents, not for middle-aged English teachers. Let the Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock wait: now’s the time for e.e. cummings’s viciously biting misanthropic romantic sonnets.

Discard the worksheets. You want to be looking at what the poet is achieving and how: you want the students to understand how metaphors, analogies, imagery can be used to reinforce a point or make a difficult or dry or trite concept seem fresh and alive and persuasive.

Look at poetry from modern times, to understand what’s going on in the world now. Look at poetry from last century and before, to understand historical attitudes. Look at ancient poetry to understand both their attitudes and their aesthetics. Use poetry as an emotional, visceral conduit into other ages, other lands.

Poetry is too often taught like the dissection of a dog. Too often English teachers kill the poem in the process of teaching it, and students, unaware of the beauty of a poem alive, think the whole process is useless.

It’s a shame.
Daniel

14

IS dumbing-down education good?

That’s the question being asked here, IMO.

Poetry is, sort of by definition, the most perceptive form of writing as practiced by human beings. You’re arguing that this is often too damned difficult to appreciate, so we should teach instead the second- or maybe the fifth-most perceptive form of writing that humans engage in.

That said, I agree that most teaching of poetry in middle schools is awful.(It’s a miracle that, after being exposed to Robert Frost in 8th grade by someone who didn’t understand his work but who insisted on shoving it down our throats, I ever became a teacher of 20th Century American poetry, but I did.) The answer, in my view, is to train Jr Hi teachers better, not to give up the struggle.

15

I completely agree with Mr2001. I have taken English for nine years or so, and I learned almost no grammar. In eighth grade, we did diagramming sentences for a few days, and in 9th grade, we took a quiz on various bits of grammar, but it was never actually taught.

All the grammar I know, I learned from studying Latin. Learning a foreign language really makes you learn sentence structure in your own.

16

The problem I see with poetry in school is that by high school, most teens could care less. As such, they aren’t actually going to learn or retain anything. On top of that, teaching poetry well enough to get people interested seems to be beyond the average high school english teacher. In every class I had, and in all the ones I discussed with friends, their teacher didn’t teach them to think, they simply asked “what did this poem mean?” and if the response didn’t match the teacher’s guide, the student is corrected, and everyone is expected to write down what it REALLY means. It simply becomes memorization.

To me, poetry either needs to be taught when children are young enough that they may actually care, or wait until they get to college where (hopefully) the teaching is better.

But, to be honest, half of my junior/high school career was wasted on me (have used and retained very little). So poetry isn’t alone.

17

Poetry is useful for many reasons.

First off, it is easy to teach. You can look deeply at one or two poems a day. You can rest assured that the students actually read what you are discussing. Things like being unclear on the plot won’t get in the way of their understanding.

It’s a great way to teach about sound and meaning, how to interpret symbolism, and how to write concisely. Poetry is not just short thin prose. Poetry is like a puzzle- a perfect meeting of sound, word, and meaning that says what it has to say without too much fuss. Most good poetry has several layers of meaning, and can provide a good class’s worth of discussion (which encourages students to form their own original thought about their readings- very important in college).

If you can write good poetry, you are on your way to being able to write good essays. Poetry teaches you to choose your words wisely, pack your prose with meaning and to keep in mind what you are evoking in the reader. Analyzing poetry teaches you to be able to extract deep meaning and form not-so-obvious hypothesis about texts. These are the exact things that will turn a “C” college essay into an “A” one.

Even academic writing is a creative act. It takes a lot more than good grammer (which lord knows I don’t have) to truely write a good paper. Sadly, schools don’t really teach kids how to be compelling, sucessful writers. I was just given variations of the five-paragraph structure for four years. I think the answer lies in higher expectation and more individual attention to students’ writing, not in taking out chunks of the cirrculum.

18

I agree that this is a real problem, but it’s not a problem with poetry in schools – it’s a problem with schools themselves. In a good class, poetry is a great subject; in a bad class, nothing is a good subject.

Daniel

19

Not at all.

This is about the increasingly seen phenomena of replacing artifacts of what in classical times was seen as a good education with the more modern perception of what is a good education, largely inflenced by changing views of exactly what the hell the purpose of an education is.

Poetry is interesting in that it is an example as to how knowledge was conveyed in pre-literate societies. That is where poetry comes from. That is why so much of poetry is structured in rigid ways. That is why poetry exists.

It originally had nothing to do with individual creativity and everything to do with the strength and reliability of the poets memory; metre and all other poetic structures are nothing more than mechanisms to facilitate/enhance accurate reproduction of the knowledge contained in/imparted by the poem. Basically, to make every poem more easy to remember, and thus more reliably the same and accurate each time it was spoken.

Now, since I personally think that an education is the teaching of tools that individuals can use to better perceive and pursue their own self interest(s) (all other so called educational imperatives being merely varying shades of cultural/social elitism), and since I think those tools can largely be reduced to the broad categories of speaking, writing, reading, and analytical/critical thinking (mathematics/science), I think the OPs question boils down to whether the original practical purposes behind mans creation of poetry are still purposes that could be of practical use by individuals in the pursuit of their self interest today in the modern world.

And my answer to that is that its up to the individual.

I do think that everyone should be taught ~about~ poetry, maybe in biology or anthropology class when it comes to studying organisms/societies that are capable of speach yet have not developed writing, and the various ways those organisms/societies create to transfer knowledge. Or perhaps in history class; much the same thing, how did humans transfer knowledge before the creation of the written word.

As far as practical uses for learning poetry itself though, thats pretty much up to the individual, and in my opinion the study of poetry should be seen as a usefull sort of study method, or memory improvement technique. After all, thats why it exists in the first place.

Since there are no one size fits all study techniques or learning habits, poetry as such should not be required, but as an elective it could prove to be very useful for some people to, say, remember important theorems or sequences of numbers or historical dates or what-have-you.

20

Have you poetry naysayers gone mad?!

Look around at your favorite television and movies. References to poetry abound!

Mystery Science Theater and the oft quoted “Whose Woods are These” (Frost). Fight Club and the dying not in a Tibetian, Sylvia Plath sort of way!

Ignorance will be your grave, you stupidly grinning viewer!