Pytash: Chapter 5- How Poems Work

Poetry is usually despised by students. Unless you're one of the fortunate ones, who understands it and can break the code, you probably wish that it would have never been thought of. This chapter brought a lot of things to the forefront that I think will help me in not only teaching poetry in the future, but help me understand a little clearer. She begins the chapter talking about how students recognize poetry in song lyrics. Everyone knows song lyrics, and it seems to me that I can listen to a song a few times and get part of the lyrics, but I can read a poem fifty times and not understand what they are talking about. Showing the link between poetry and lyrics might help students want to dive into understanding what the author is trying to say. 

I was surprised to see that Jago thinks the students will enjoy the poems. She said, "I begin the study of poetry with the assumption that students will love these rich texts..." (Jago 76). I would have thought she would go into the process thinking that the students would hate the poems, so she had a plan B to put into action in case they weren't enthused. Perhaps having an attitude like she does, shows the students how eager she is and they feed off of her energy.

I really hate classrooms where the only evaluations are tests of some sort. Not everyone is capable of passing those types of assessments. Some students may be geniuses at the subject, but tests and quizzes just aren't their cup of tea. For this reason, I like that Jago had the word wall of literary terms and made students write down the words themselves. I, too, agree that writing it in your own handwriting processes it in  your brain better. Her metaphor seemed to resonate with me, "Like water dripping onto earth, the definitions become part of students' working vocabulary" (Jago 77). It's like the words just sink into them; they are immersed in the literary language. 

A lot of times that we read poems in class, the teacher gave us background information first. Sometimes it worked and other times I spent daydreaming. Jago wrote, "The problem is that young readers don't have a place to store this information until they have made some sense of the text for themselves" (77). From that I agree with her way of reading the poem and then reading about the background information. It might make students pay attention more; if they know what the poem was about and could apply some of the background information back to why he or she wrote the way they did.

One question that I had was about her comment on teachers stopping instruction after a personal response has been made. I'm not one-hundred percent sure I know what she was talking about. I'm assuming that a lot of teachers just want you to be able to connect with the text and respond yourself, and after that they think the lesson is through. I wish she would have explained more about what to do afterward because it seems that she just jumped right to having a discussion, which from my understanding was still on  their reactions to the poem.