Whatever anthology or collection you’re teaching, there will be thematic groups or common threads that will help in terms of basic organisation (more on that later in this series). There will also be, for you and for the students, high points and lows; poems you love and poems that bore or infuriate you. This blog post isn’t groundbreaking, but it has an emphatic message: it’s imperative that you genuinely love the first poem you choose to teach, and that you think your students might love it too.
The impact of teacher enthusiasm on students’ motivation and performance has been widely researched, and its positive effects are fairly well-documented. It is, of course, important to balance this with your students’ needs and interests too. Your adoration for Heaney’s complex, brooding verse probably isn’t going to carry a group of Year 10 poetry-sceptics through a first lesson, for example – save the challenging and longer poems for the later lessons, once they’ve built some analysis techniques and confidence. Instead, start with something easier but powerful.
If it’s part of your selection, Ozymandias is an obvious choice for students in Y9 and above. It has everything you’re looking for in a first poem: a powerful message, clear imagery, plenty to analyse but only fourteen lines. It’s easy to stretch and challenge students by talking about the sonnet form or the ambiguity of “The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed”, and easy to scaffold with pictures and key vocabulary. I always start by reading it aloud to students and asking them to draw the scene being described, then I show them this animation to check their drawings against, before finally giving them a printed copy of the poem and getting stuck into the analysis. Even if you’ve taught it a million times, try to mine that first-read energy for each new class, then let the students’ engagement carry the lesson forwards. It’s ubiquitous but it’s popular for a reason.
If you’re choosing your own selection of poems for your unit, hopefully you’ll already have an idea of a theme or direction that could steer your choice: we have a unit on The Evolution of Poetry that starts with some dramatic extracts from Homeric epics, for example – brilliant for getting students up to act and engage. Sophie Hannah’s Your Dad Did What has worked well with students across KS3 and KS4, with audible gasps when they realise what the child has been trying to write and then start to break down Hannah’s ideas about teachers and education. It’s also easy to steer the analysis for a thematic unit on anything from power and conflict to childhood and adolescence. With older students, I’ve also had brilliant responses to Amit Majmudar’s Ode to a Drone, which merges war with gaming in a terrifyingly unsettling way.
To return to the main point here, though: whatever you choose to start with, it absolutely must be a poem that you feel enthusiasm for. If Shelley leaves you cold, start with something that fires you up! As long as you like it and they can access it, they’ll engage – and if they engage with the first poem, they’ll be invested in (and excited for) what comes next.
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