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Don’t Hate! Annotate! How to REALLY Annotate a Poem

September 18, 2015 By David Rickert Leave a Comment

We all want students to know how to annotate and automatically do it when they are handed a piece of literature. The trouble is, for most students annotation is something they do for the teacher, and not for themselves. They don’t take any ownership of the process and don’t see any payout at the end.

I got a harsh lesson on the value of annotation this week. I was teaching “Ozymandias” and after I printed off the poem, I read it over, said to myself, “I got this,” and proceeded to teach a very mediocre lesson on a great poem. I thought I knew it, but I hadn’t internalized it. This is the value of annotation. If I had taken time to annotate, I would have extended my knowledge beyond what I thought. And I want my students to understand the value of this activity for reaching a deeper understanding of whatever they read. However, they need some strategies they can use since it’s not a natural task for them.

The next day I was teaching “I Wish I Could Remember That First Day” by Christina Rossetti and the night before, I annotated the heck out it. I thought that this would be an excellent time to think about what I do to annotate and help them with some strategies. The nice thing about poems is that they are short, so you can go over and over them in a short amount of time.

I threw down the gauntlet and took a picture of my annotations and projected them on the screen. I told them this is the amount they should strive for when they annotate (the picture was small enough that they couldn’t really see what I wrote.)

So here’s what I do when I annotate:

Read the poem a couple of times without doing anything. I’m just getting the lay of the land.
Recreate the poem in writing. This is when I start to write. Read the poem and retell it as best I can. There will be parts that don’t make sense, but I’ll leave them alone for now. With this reading I establish that the speaker is in love with someone and wishes they could remember the first time they had met. I also determine the tone: she is very regretful that she can’t remember this.
Ask questions. In this reading I begin to play devil’s advocate and see how far I can push the poem. I came up with questions such as these: Why does she want to remember this event? Will she be better off if she could? What were her options for preserving this memory at the time? I might also start to answer these questions.
Think about the larger significance. I pondered whether or not it was easier for us to remember all of the events of our lives because we are able to record so much and actively do so. At the time Rossetti was writing, you could write stuff down or hope you remembered it. Today, we actively curate our lives with photographs and social media. Or perhaps this puts more pressure on us if we miss something because we have so many ways to capture it?
This can be done at any time, but I like to find words or phrases that I find interesting. Sometimes they are phrases that are great description, or an interesting word choice, or something I can’t quite figure out because it seems so puzzling.
Finally, I go back and look for literary devices or the rhyme scheme and see if I notice anything that strikes me. I f I really want to analyze the use of them, I’ll dig a little deeper. I’ve got a good understanding by this point, so now I have a context for the use of them.

In my mind this seems like a better way to approach annotating a poem that the more pedantic approaches I find online. Most approaches start with identifying words you don’t know, looking at literary devices, finding things that stands out or confuses, and so forth. Content seems almost secondary – you’re just encouraged to label everything you can. But I find it helpful to just dig right in. You can look at the construction after you have analyzed the poem and have better luck finding out why the devices are used that way.

For some great comics about great poems that you could annotate, visit my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

What Makes a Book Great?

August 30, 2015 By David Rickert Leave a Comment

If you’re a high school English teacher – especially of the AP variety – it’s easy to get smug about books. We believe that some books are better than others and that every student should believe that Hemingway is a better author than Sparks or Rowling. We may not believe that “at least they’re reading something” holds true, and we look in horror at the proliferation of adults reading YA books. At one point or another, I’ve held all of these positions.

However, my view over time has softened quite a bit as my criteria for what makes a good book has changed and become more inclusive. My dad loves Clive Cussler novels. For him they are good books. Enough said. He’s not interested in me telling him he should read something better.

But how do we reconcile that view with our role as teachers? We want students to love to read, but we also want students to read important books that they wouldn’t otherwise, and we want them to think they are great books too. Is there a definition of a great book that teachers and students can both live with? I believe there is, and we can ask two questions to arrive at that answer.

How well does the book achieve its main goal?

According to Thomas Arp in Sound and Sense, the primary goal of all literature is to entertain. Personally, I would broaden that definition to say that the primary goal is to provide a significant experience, because I would never call a book like Elie Wiesel’s Night “entertaining.” But there are plenty of books whose main goal is to provide escape. If the book provides you with a respite from your otherwise boring life, then the author has done what he or she set out to do.

Of course, some books want to do more than just entertain, which brings up the second question:

How significant is that goal?

And it is at this point that we can distinguish between books that merely provide entertainment value and those that provide additional value through giving us a lens into human behavior. We can then claim that Huck Finn is a more significant book than The Hunger Games because Mark Twain has a more significant purpose in his story.

We don’t want to tell our students that the books we read in class are better than the ones they read outside of school (if they read at all) because they never respond well to that. But we can tell them that we are reading books that are more significant, and that will continue to enrich their lives in a second or third reading. As I’ve written in a previous post, Harry Potter has become that for a lot of our students – a series that is entertaining, but also provide a great deal of wisdom as well.

Some of this has been adapted from Thomas Arp’s book Sound and Sense.

For resources that make great works accessible for students, visit my Teachers Pay Teachers store.

What Should I Do On the Second Day of English Class? Read A Poem!

August 7, 2015 By David Rickert 2 Comments

There are a lot of suggestions floating around out there about what to do on the first day of school. But what should you do on the second day in Language Arts? I already did a post on using a short story to establish how you approach the task of reading. In this post I’m going to do a similar activity with a poem.

The poem I’m going to use for this activity is “Mindful” by Mary Oliver. It’s a pretty easy poem, but there’s just enough in there the students will find difficult that will get their brains working. Also, Oliver is a very inspirational poet, and I find that students like the positive, contemplative aspects of her work. Poetry can be a tough sell for kids anyway, so starting off with Sylvia Plath or John Donne is probably not the way to go. So let’s stick with Oliver.

Here’s a link to the poem.

This is what I plan to do with the poem:

1.Where do you get stuck?

This is a poem where kids will go along swimmingly until they get to the middle, I’m guessing right around the “nor.” A lot of poems work this way, and I find that I have to train kids not to bail out too quickly because the heart of the poem is often in the last few lines.

So the next question is: what tools do you have at your disposal for when you get stuck? Obviously you can reread, and that’s almost a requirement for any poem to be experienced fully. Are there any words that you don’t understand, like “acclamation” (which is different than “acclimation”)? Anything that’s worded in a strange way? Most importantly, do you need to know what that word or phrases means to understand the poem? Sometimes you don’t.

2. Who is the speaker?

Obviously it’s important to train kids not to assume the poet is the speaker, but in this case it doesn’t make much difference if they do. What we’re getting at with this question is not just inferences but textual support. If this were the only poem you read by Mary Oliver, what could you tell about her and how do you know? What are her character traits? What does she like to do? Where does she like to be? And where do you see it in the text?

3. What’s the main idea?

The dreaded question! Kids don’t like this one because it gives them the greatest chance of being wrong. But this poem has a pretty easy message to figure out: there is great wisdom to be found in everyday experiences if we simply allow ourselves the time to see them.

This is a great message in a world in which we are overly reliant on technology, but I think it’s a particularly important message for my seniors, many of whom have spend so much time chasing after grades and activities that them have left themselves very little time to pause and figure out who they are. I know several students from the past that graduated and found themselves adrift for this very reason.

A bonus activity!

I’m going to do a Mary Oliver unit later in the year and this will be one of the activities that I’ll do, but it would be a good second day activity as well. I would have them look at something they find for much longer than they would have to see what they notice and take a picture of it. It could be anything – a flower, the front yard, anything that you see on a daily basis that you don’t give much thought to. Here’s an article about how to take mindful photographs you could use. You could even have them write a poem that accompanies the photograph, or create a bulletin board from all the pictures that people have taken. What fun!

If you’re looking for a fun way to review the Parts of Speech during the first week of school, check out my set of comics and activities called Grammar Comics: Parts of Speech.

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So What Do I Do On The Second Day of English Class? Read A Story!

August 6, 2015 By David Rickert 7 Comments

There are a lot of posts out there on what to do on the first day of school: set expectations, go over the syllabus, do some icebreakers, go get textbooks, cry that your summer is officially over.

But what do you do on the second day when it’s time to start in with your subject matter? How as, language arts teachers, can we set the stage for what our students will do during the year, and how do we teach them how to interact with texts?

This year I’m going to try something new. I always like to use the first week to orient students to the way my class is run. Here’s how we discuss stories. Here’s how you annotate. Here’s what happens when you look at a story more than once. But I always struggle with what I want my students to read first.

For this purpose I’m going to use Tolstoy’s story “The Three Questions.” I won’t tell you the whole story; you can read it if you follow the link. It’s not terribly long, which means I can easily read it and discuss it in a class period. The gist of the story is that a king goes in search of the answer to three questions that he believes will make him a good ruler: what was the right time for every action, who were the most necessary people, and how he might know what was the most important thing to do. It’s a positive story, and very inspiring. Who doesn’t want to inspire their students on day two?

I have toyed with the idea of giving them the questions at the beginning of the period and seeing what they come up with as answers. I might do this.

After the students have read the story, I’ll do the following:

1. Ask questions.

A simple way to get students to respond to the story would be to have them ask three questions about the story. They aren’t trying to come up with a quiz. They should be things that they wondered about as they read. What did you find interesting? What did you find revealing? Those are some good questions to prompt responses.

A good way to accomplish this is with a second read, especially with a story of this length. Students will be able to see stuff that they didn’t see the first time now that they don’t have to worry about the plot.

One of the questions that I hope a student will ask is: Are these the only possible answers to these questions? If no one poses that question, I will ask them.

2. Examine how stories work.

I firmly believe that stories hold the wisdom of the world, and this is certainly true for this story. But it’s also a good way to examine how stories work their magic.

One question to ask is: why a story? Tolstoy could have just told us the answers to the questions. What’s the power of embedding it in a story, and a pretty common story structure at that?

Furthermore, Why not just have a guy come to the hermit, ask the question, get the answer and move on? Why does the story have to be told in this particular way? What do the all the details add to make it a more effective story?

3. Come up with a fourth question.

This last activity is a good “get to know you” type of question: if you could ask a fourth question, what would it be? And do you have any sense of what the answer might be? This questions could be done in groups as well. Pose a fourth question that you think will provide you some sort of significant insight into your life.

If you’re looking for a fun way to review the Parts of Speech during the first week of school, check out my set of comics and activities called Grammar Comics: Parts of Speech.

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