[QUOTE]
In fact, I think we should do away with the Liberal Arts model of education and send everyone to Vo-Tech. Or better yet, just make every school some form of Vo-Tech. 6 hours of focused study on a job every day, and another 2-3 for the people who care about foo-foo stuff like art appreciation, the kind of stuff that makes you sound intelligent but very rarely gets you a job except as a teacher of art appreciation.QUOTE]
Just curious - where do scientists come into this picture? Or is science just another thing that needs to be made more productive and such?
And, presumably, then, there would be no study of history or such disciplines? Without a grasp on at least history and other liberal arts areas such as public policy and governing, can we have a decent government? Or, again, is every single job assigned a vocational cirriculum?
I’ve noticed a very interesting trend within this debate:
Those that loved and studied poetry, thereby gaining valuable critical thinking skills, seem unable to critically evaluate its role within our education system.
Those against poetry seem to lack the ability to express themselves clearly enough to form a cohesive argument.
Could this be an example of irony? Or more of a catch 22? If we teach poetry in school we will have a society of well versed individuals who can make enlightened posts on a messageboard; although our society will lack anyone with the skills to build a computer, internet service, or script a webpage…
In my opinion, poetry represents a very sloppy approach to expression. Don’t bother with sentences, don’t worry about paragraphs, and we could care less about punctuation; what’s important is that you expressed yourself…
I see this as a lot like painting. We could let everyone figure paint, and show them great works of 18th c finger paintings. Or we could teach the various technical aspects of painting. Learn the various types and techniques and stuff to do with painting. And on their own time, or when their ready, let them figure out if finger painting is right for them.
And rap as poetry cracks me up. I really feel bad for the kids in 100 years that a forced to recite Snoop for an hour a day… I swear, if my kid came home one day and told me his homework was to compare and contract 50 cent with Run DMC I’d seriously reconsider homeschooling.
This is exactly why I want poetry out of schools. That one statement summed it all up. We have a society of incredably obese individuals that can’t distiguish between an acid and a base let alone cloning and stem cells. That don’t realize the difference between keynesian and classical economics. A society of people that enjoy the rhythm in a politicians speach and respect that he used big words without realizing that his tax cut and spending increase would overshoot the budget by 400%.
(Sorry Gyrate, please don’t take any of that as directed towards you, its meant to be entirely a reflection of our society.)
Well, that depends a bit on the poetry, doesn’t it? Yeah, your average sixteen year-old’s angst-filled verse about blood, roses, and death is going to be sloppy and unfocused. However, if you’re writing more formal verse, such as a sonnet or a sestina or a haiku, or even just trying to make something that will please an audience (as opposed to expressing yourself), you’re going to have to make some aesthetic choices. You’re going to have to think about your words.
Really, if the pro-poetry camp were all about self-expression, and didn’t care about form, would our useless message board posts be as eloquent as you say? Or would it be more along the lines of “u r a natsi. u just wont to make the kids into robots. poetry rulez!!!1!” (Yeah, that was a pretty weak stab at teenybopper posting, but you get my point.)
And as for the rap hijack (sigh)… Look at it this way. Even really good pop/rock lyricists are more literary than lyric. I love Elvis Costello, and he puts some fantastic imagery and metaphor into his songs, but he doesn’t employ many poetic techniques apart from basic rhyme. “So in this almost empty gin palace/In a two-way looking glass, you see your Alice” is a fantastic line, but it’s more about the image it evokes than the sound of the words. Compare it to this line from “You Got Me” by the Roots - “She’s studying film - photo, flash, focus, record/She said she’s working on a flick and cut my clip to the score.” In that, you’ve got the string of four “F” sounds, a string of "K"s in “worKing on a fliK and Kut my Klip,” as well as the half-rhymes “flick” and “clip” and “record” and “score.” So there you go. Rap as poetry. End of hijack, and my sincerest apologies for being so damn long-winded.
Your analysis seems to be very unscientific. A handful of posters here represent the fruits of the educational system?
I suspect that Stephen Jay Gould read a whole lot of poetry when he was growing up.
Actually, poets are the ultimate nitpickers. Poets must put much more thought into each comma and line break (or lack thereof) then do prose writers. As look!ninjas points out, poetry that ignores the mechanics of writing is very bad poetry indeed.
Or we could do it all. Let the kids paint, show them great paintings, and teach them techniques. Kind of like how we teach them poetry: have them write it, as they read it, as we teach about symbolism and meters. Of course, we can’t show them the great finger paintings of the 1700s as none exist, since finger paints weren’t invented back then and it’s really a medium for small kids, not adult artists, so maybe you can’t really draw up an analogy between finger painting and poetry.
I don’t think kids will be reciting Snoop in 100 years, or studying rap outside of its cultural context, but showing how rap (or any type of song) itself is a form of poetry helps bridge the gap between what they know and what they are learning.
I read an interesting article that documented the successes of students suffering from dyslexia and other assorted learning or reading problems when they switched to alternative English classes.
Such classes switched the emphasis from reading novels and writng essays to reading and writing poetry and song lyrics – like rap. As a result of this change in curriculum, these same unmotivated, under-achieving high school students who couldn’t hack standard English classes, showed marked improvement in their classroom performance, mostly because they didn’t have to read complex and challenging novels, nor were they required to write essays of any sort.
All they did basically for their English classes was read short poems, muse about them, then write their own poems – most of which were invariably and unsurprisingly akin to popular rap songs (this was an inner city high school).
Apparently the “success” in these alternative classes was chalked up to the fact that poetry creation and appreciation is predominately a “right-brain” function, while analyzing literature and writing exposition is predominately a “left-brain” activity.
So poetry, however pretty and aesthetic-laden it may be, in my opinion, does little to develop higher order thinking and analytical skills, which are sorely lacking in today’s high schools.
Again, I’m not advocating the abandonment of other aspects of English in favor of more poetry, except in dire straights like the ones described in that article. I can see how students with written-language problems could thrive in a medium that is a throw-back to oral communication; on the other hand, in traditional poetry studies, analysis is included. Analyzing poetry=analyzing literature.
Throwing poetry out of the curriculum is as ridiculous as throwing novels out of the curriculum.
Isn’t learning to discern the meaning locked within a poem similiar to learning to discern the meaning locked within a speech?
And how would changing the English curriculum affect the science and social studies curriculum?
There’s been plenty of critical evaluation, right from even sven’s first reply to the OP.
The first, if it were true, could possibly be ironic; the second, certainly isn’t – in fact it could be seen as an example of cause and effect. And largely ditto for it being a “catch-22” (btw: do you know what the “original” catch-22 was?).
Er, I have a first class Honours degree in Mathematics and Economics, and, a Masters degree in Computer Science. I work as a software engineer. Where do I fit in?
When in fact poetry represents the complete opposite, it calls for a much greater discipline than plain prose (please disregard the doggerel I have posted here and elsewhere, which requires no discipline whatsoever).
Well,
Yes!
I guess you are advocating the teaching of “various types and techniques” of painting, but “finger painting” is a type and technique of painting. Hell, actually I can’t discern what you are arguing (is that ironic?).
Whatever, poetry is a “type and technique” of communication, to leave students without a grasp of this type and technique is to close the door to a world of information (whether it is a small or marginal “world” I’ll leave for another debate).
Well, that’s just silly – I don’t care too much for rap (though I will confess to ownership of a couple of Eminem CDs, I hardly think that makes me an afficionado), but if the purpose of the homework was to form critical evaluations of the said works then I’d be all for it.
Teaching poetry teaches young people to extract meaning from unfamiliar forms. When I started reading man pages, I relied on the skills I built up reading “My Last Duchess,” “To His Coy Mistress,” and “When Daisies Pied.” I learned in 11th grade that even students in the advanced classes did not pay attention to what they were reading, but rather relied on what they expected to be there. My teacher knew this as well and chose poems and stories were not as readily cracked. She helped to show me and others look at what something says and not what I think it should say. Read GD sometime and you will agree that it a much needed skill, and even I could stand to hone it. Poetry is particularly well suited to the task as it uses a variety of forms to communicate.
Maybe if you’d paid a bit more attention you’d have remembered that poetry is structured. Even if a poem doesn’t rhyme, a no a poem does not have to rhyme, it still has its own cadence.
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I don’t really care if poetry is right for any of the students or not. Just like I don’t really care if they like history, math, or biology.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Uh oh, if we eliminate poetry I guess nobody will know what that means.
I’m just in shock that a student wants to remove poetry from English classes in favor of more grammar lessons.
When I was in school, poetry was the joy and the fun and the creative part of English class. It was where we got to express ourselves, and play games (like figuring out riddle poems) and be immersed in strange new worlds (Poe’s mysticism, Longfellow’s historical epics). Doing grammar exercises was the deadly dull part that we couldn’t wait to escape. I remembering finishing the grammar lessons as quickly as possible, because then the teacher would let me go to the library, where I read all of the Star Trek novelizations.
Taking poetry and fingerpainting out of the classroom isn’t going to stop children from engaging in those activities. Very small children will take what’s at hand and use it to write their own creative stories and paint their own pictures. Yesterday I was shopping for pajamas and I overheard two little children talking. They were looking at the pj’s that have little ducks and birds on them, and the little girl was telling the little boy a story about the animals. That’s what poetry is – taking the everyday stuff of life and giving it your own interpretation and meaning. Classroom study of poetry is a way to take that innate ability and develop it – connecting your mind to the proper use of language. Ideally, the study of poetry should not only help you to write coherently and eloquently (because proper grammar and punctuation alone do not good writing make), but should also help you to see that sometimes a pair of pajamas isn’t just a pair of pajamas.
Of course, as an adult, you are perfectly free to live an unexamined life. But children should at least be given the chance to see that there is more to the world than getting a good job. I have the job I have today because of the quality of my writing. Not just because I completed all of those grammar exercises and know the difference between its and it’s, but because I am able to take a bunch of bullet points and semi-coherent sentence fragments and turn them into an interesting, readable narrative. That’s a skill that I credit in part to my education in poetry. And unless you’re talking strictly about manual labor, it’s a skill from which almost anyone could benefit on the job.
Incidentally, how much of this can you really pin on poetry? I’m not totally certain what your school district was like, but in our school, we had more classes than just English, and when I graduated, I knew more than how to tell the difference between an iamb and a trochee. I could write a research paper, perform basic calculus, balance a checkbook, use the scientific method to set up and perform an experiment and analyze the data, and even speak a little rudimentary Spanish. If people don’t understand economics, genetics, and chemistry, that may perhaps be the fault of the schools. However, I sincerely doubt that the small amount of time each school allots to poetry (or music, or any other art form) is to blame.
Poetry is also a great interdisciplinary subject. You can learn a hell of a lot about medieval philosophy, culture, and history from Dante’s Inferno. Want to know about life in the trenches during WWI? You can have students read history books written after the fact, or you can have them read Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce Et Decorum Est”:
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under I green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning…
Tell me that doesn’t give you chills. Tell me that’s not applicable to modern society, when young men and women are fighting and dying in the Middle East today. But, of course, history, like poetry, must be irrelevant, since it won’t help you get a job.
To be fair, I picked on chemistry because I had a crap HS chemistry teacher who taught me little and obviously didn’t want to be there in the first place. OTOH, I still believe there’s a special circle in Hell for high school gym teachers.
I didn’t mean to imply that the sciences should be thrown out in favor of seminars on Shakespearian sonnets and Imagist poets; on the contrary, I can lay claim to a broad education in many areas of study including both poetry and the hard sciences. And one can hardly lay the blame for the scientific ignorance of the general public at the feet of poetry; it’s not as if learning poetry knocks knowledge of acids and bases out of one’s head. The educational system has many problems indeed.
Science is one way of looking at the world, poetry is another, and the two are far from being mutually exclusive, something which both poets and scientists sometimes forget. When they remember it, however, the results are often spectacular:
Now: do you think Feynman studied poetry in school? And do you think it helped or hindered his approach to science? I think you can guess what my own answers would be.
As for your other comments, well… I must confess my own ignorance in terms of the difference between classical and Keynesian economics, but to imply as you did that studying poetry reduces people to going “Ooh, pretty words!” is as insulting as suggesting that studying chemistry reduces people to going “Ooh, pretty explosions!”. Chemistry teaches us to understand both what the fundamental principles at work are in the physical world, and how they affect the interactions of elemental objects and forces. Poetry does the same for the more nebulous world of words and ideas. If this seems faint praise, remember: words are powerful things. In this vein, I would go so far as to argue that it’s those members of society that don’t read poetry (or, in far too many cases, much of anything at all) who are most easily fooled by the silver tongues of the political sharps and their corporate kin; indeed, are the ones saying “Ooh, pretty words!”
Frankly, I’m not even sure why this is an issue. Teaching students how to read poetry is hardly something that overbalances the average school curriculum in the direction of the arts. Should it replace learning grammar, punctuation and composition? Of course not; Lord knows I would love for more young people to be able to express themselves clearly, without feeling the need to follow every utterance with “Gnome sane?” (because, increasingly, I don’t). But similarly, knowing how to put together a sentence is not the same thing as knowing how to effectively communicate an image or idea. This is where poetry comes into its own.
Poetry is merely a part of the English literary curriculum, and a small one at that. Not every student will “get” poetry, or will necessarily enjoy poetry even if they do. Not every teacher can properly convey a sense of how to approach poetry, and why one should even try. But for those that succeed, there is a significant qualitative benefit. Why begrudge the students this?
Having already cited a scientist, I feel obliged to leave the last word to a poet to defend his profession:
I think what the pro-poetry folks are missing is that the OP didn’t want Poetry aboloished in school. Just not manditory. There are tons of things that aren’t manditory in school. Shop, Band, Psychology, etc. Why should poetry be diferent?
As it stands, we have tons of kids graduating that can’t change a tire, balance a checkbook, do their taxes, cook a meal beyond microwaves, eat healthy, type, use a computer, etc. These are basic things in our society. Yet, they have had 4 years of lit/poetry, higher math, sciences, and history.
Is that the problem, that our system doesn’t prepair you for the basics, but stuffs the extra’s down your throat? All of the skills I needed to survive I learned after school. Why is this? Does the education system assume you are getting this knowledge outside of school. Perhaps the fault is that kids aren’t anymore.
Just pulling from my arse, maybe the issue is that our system hasn’t changed much even though our culture has. Back in the day, you learned your basic life skills from Ma and Pa, and school was fancy book learnin’. Many kids didn’t even make it to high school. And high school and college were far from a nessessity to survive in the world and do well. But as technology moved on and parenting changed, school was seen as more and more of a nessesity and parents taught less and less of the nessessary life skills (sometimes simply because they couldn’t…computers still elude my mother).
My mother, a teacher for over 30 years, feels that in the next 20 years, people that can change oil, build something from wood, or do plumbing will be in great demand. These skills are being taught less and less. Kids get a ton of math and science and reading, but no practical knowledge. They may take algebra, but it is rarely realted to how it could be used in life. School is just a stepping stone for college, and college is a way to get a piece of paper so you can get a job, where your employer will teach you how to do your job.
there is nothing wrong with poetry, but why is it nessessary for 4+ years of doing it, when auto shop, typing, or band aren’t nessessarily even taught once (unless as an elective).
No one has said anything even close to either of these two assertions. If you truly feel this way, can you please quote the offending lines?
That’s an entirely different topic. Is it the school’s responsibility to teach non-academic basic life skills? Why? And if it is, when are they supposed to work in language and math skills, not to mention science and history?
Schools are, in fact, teaching more non-academic life skills than they ever have before. Sex ed? Health? Mandatory keyboarding classes, home ec, and shop classes in junior high? All life skills.
Health is a mandatory class in all high schools, so students are taught how to eat healthy (whether this is taught well or the student bothers to learn and retain this knowledge is, of course, a different matter). A computer class is, I believe, almost always mandatory, but differs from school to school depending on what resources are available. I myself filled out my first mock tax form in 6th grade math class. Home ec, keyboarding, and business math are all available as electives, as you wish poetry to be.
I agree with you that those skills are necessary, but they are being taught. Vo-tech programs are available. But many kids who go into the programs won’t end up going into the field, and that’s fine. No one should have to decide what their life’s work is going to be at age fourteen. In the meantime, while they learn plumbing or cosmetology, teach them a bunch of other stuff–including poetry.
Sorry, I meant to address this point. Poetry, along with a whole bunch of other language related stuff, is taught for four years because English is taught for four years. English is taught for four years because, frankly, reading and writing are two of the most valuable skills to have in this day and age. Even if your job doesn’t require you read a single letter of the alphabet, your life does. Exposing kids to every possible use of the English language improves their reading and writing skills.