Usha Pandit's Blog
January 20, 2020
Teaching poetry to grade 12 interactively
This is an account of a teacher observation I did that I would like to share with senior school teachers.
The teacher was doing a poetry class with grade 12 – Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn. Her presence, voice and knowledge were excellent. I was making notes on her class, word wall good, great commandments on how to approach literary pieces from annotation to appraisal I wrote.
What’s an ode? she begins and I am thinking children should have done a number of odes by now most notably Pablo Neruda’s odes to the onion and other vegetables. They should have written a couple themselves on their sports shoes or mobile phones.
Children are now reading the poem, and when done, the teacher tells them there are 3 scenes depicted on the urn. I would have told them before we started, if I had to tell them, so that they know what to look for. I’d have asked them to find word clusters and label them as Nature, Time etc. and to examine what they meant in the poem. Instead she asks: What are the lines you like? Too subjective and too early for the kids to give her informed choices. I’m running my eyes through the poem and thinking the 3 scenes are on Love, Time, and Death, besides the iconic line Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty. She now begins to start at the start, and analyse. She asks them about the impact of the repeated questions in the first stanza.
” What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?”
They are not able to get it. I am thinking should I let her continue and write a report or should I demonstrate?
On impulse, I get up and say: May I? She happily gives me the opportunity.
15 pairs of eyes look startled and curious. I smile inwardly.
I read the rhetorical questions again in a tone of wonder… no response…
I say: What a sunrise! What beauty? Whose work is this? Wah! And bingo they get to the emotional impact. Wonder, awe, amazement….they say.
Can you find the lines describing – awe at the emotional state of lovers…. Ecstacy…. Junooon, bekhudi… If I had time (I had 20 minutes left in this period now) I would have done some sufi poetry. 😛
” That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.”
Is love eternal? Does it change with the times? Did the Neanderthal love differently from now? Did his heart beat? His tongue parch? Did his forehead burn in love? Oh yes!!! Love is universal – for all people and all times and in the future. Eternal truth called Love.
So, I go back to the 3 scenes. The first one is of the lovers prancing around the bough…. Is it more exciting to be in love or to finally end it with a kiss I ask… they are totally mesmerised! To be in love miss…. Why so? Anticipation they say. Yes, the thrill of anticipation being sharper than the culmination. Being in love is so much more exciting than being married, I wink. They laugh. I quote:
” Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! “
In the marble urn, he will love forever and she will always be fair. No aging and no death. So, what’s that called? We reach the words ‘immortality’ and ‘eternity’. Frozen in time. Forever young. Time stops. Time defeated. Time captured and defeated. Do we conquer time by stopping it with our intense experiences?
Their eyes are now shining.
Are heard melodies better than unheard ones? Yes miss. How? We hear them with our mind. Do we hear them with our feelings? I speak to them about how when we read books and imagine characters, we find they never match anyone in real quite as accurately. They are all nodding vigorously. Why is that? Our imagination knows no boundaries. If you were a brilliant artist and I asked you to draw what you imagine you wouldn’t be able to. You are feeling the image… not through your visual faculties but your mind’s endless imagination. An image that uses emotion as its medium and is defined not by strokes of the brush, but by feelings……How cool are we???
They are sitting forward now… almost salivating…
Let’s look at the next scene.
” Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest? “
Why is the heifer dressed in garlands? It’s going to be sacrificed miss. Why is it being sacrificed? Look at green altar. What does green stand for? Freshness. Fertility. What is the concept here in this sacrificial animal? If the first one was Love? We now reach the door of Death. The other big eternal truth. The people who have thronged for the sacrifice will never return home…. Is death too frozen in time? Is movement and life frozen? Is Death defeated by Time? Is Time defeated by Love? Yes. Wow!
I read the rest of the poem and there is barely any need for more questions or explanations. It’s clear as daylight.
So, what does this mean?
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
They struggle. I tell them we are so close to Indian philosophy here. What is ‘truth’ in Hindi? Sachaai…. another word please….. Satyam…
‘Satyam Shivam Sundaram!’ they chorus.
Yes. Truth, God (love) and Beauty… are all ye need to know.. they are the same. See how West and East meet. At the end of the day, there is just that one truth. What is Good is Beautiful; and what is Good is God; and what is God is Truth. They are almost clapping.
What does the urn stand for? I ask finally. What do we call a small thing that contains larger truths or speaks volumes? Starts with an ‘s’ and ends with an ‘l’.’
Chorus: Symbol.
So, what does the urn symbolize? Eternity. Frozen time. Frozen death. Frozen love. And yet it is but a dead thing….marble, cold, dead…. Eternal life and love contained in dead and lifeless marble.
.
The eyes are twinkling now. They are grinning…
” Cold Pastoral! “
An inanimate urn, used to keep the ashes of the dead…. And yet it becomes the canvas for containing the idea of eternity… Isn’t that paradoxical???? Isn’t that genius??? Life and death, the permanent and the transient…. two contradictions…entwined, eternal, containing one another …. Kya baat… kya baat…
Keats (1795 -1821) my dear friends … philosopher, thinker, poet who died at the tender age of 26!
Thank you, teacher, for allowing me to take your class.
———–——————-
Ode on a Grecian Urn
The teacher was doing a poetry class with grade 12 – Keats’ Ode on a Grecian Urn. Her presence, voice and knowledge were excellent. I was making notes on her class, word wall good, great commandments on how to approach literary pieces from annotation to appraisal I wrote.
What’s an ode? she begins and I am thinking children should have done a number of odes by now most notably Pablo Neruda’s odes to the onion and other vegetables. They should have written a couple themselves on their sports shoes or mobile phones.
Children are now reading the poem, and when done, the teacher tells them there are 3 scenes depicted on the urn. I would have told them before we started, if I had to tell them, so that they know what to look for. I’d have asked them to find word clusters and label them as Nature, Time etc. and to examine what they meant in the poem. Instead she asks: What are the lines you like? Too subjective and too early for the kids to give her informed choices. I’m running my eyes through the poem and thinking the 3 scenes are on Love, Time, and Death, besides the iconic line Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty. She now begins to start at the start, and analyse. She asks them about the impact of the repeated questions in the first stanza.
” What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?”
They are not able to get it. I am thinking should I let her continue and write a report or should I demonstrate?
On impulse, I get up and say: May I? She happily gives me the opportunity.
15 pairs of eyes look startled and curious. I smile inwardly.
I read the rhetorical questions again in a tone of wonder… no response…
I say: What a sunrise! What beauty? Whose work is this? Wah! And bingo they get to the emotional impact. Wonder, awe, amazement….they say.
Can you find the lines describing – awe at the emotional state of lovers…. Ecstacy…. Junooon, bekhudi… If I had time (I had 20 minutes left in this period now) I would have done some sufi poetry. 😛
” That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy’d,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.”
Is love eternal? Does it change with the times? Did the Neanderthal love differently from now? Did his heart beat? His tongue parch? Did his forehead burn in love? Oh yes!!! Love is universal – for all people and all times and in the future. Eternal truth called Love.
So, I go back to the 3 scenes. The first one is of the lovers prancing around the bough…. Is it more exciting to be in love or to finally end it with a kiss I ask… they are totally mesmerised! To be in love miss…. Why so? Anticipation they say. Yes, the thrill of anticipation being sharper than the culmination. Being in love is so much more exciting than being married, I wink. They laugh. I quote:
” Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! “
In the marble urn, he will love forever and she will always be fair. No aging and no death. So, what’s that called? We reach the words ‘immortality’ and ‘eternity’. Frozen in time. Forever young. Time stops. Time defeated. Time captured and defeated. Do we conquer time by stopping it with our intense experiences?
Their eyes are now shining.
Are heard melodies better than unheard ones? Yes miss. How? We hear them with our mind. Do we hear them with our feelings? I speak to them about how when we read books and imagine characters, we find they never match anyone in real quite as accurately. They are all nodding vigorously. Why is that? Our imagination knows no boundaries. If you were a brilliant artist and I asked you to draw what you imagine you wouldn’t be able to. You are feeling the image… not through your visual faculties but your mind’s endless imagination. An image that uses emotion as its medium and is defined not by strokes of the brush, but by feelings……How cool are we???
They are sitting forward now… almost salivating…
Let’s look at the next scene.
” Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead’st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest? “
Why is the heifer dressed in garlands? It’s going to be sacrificed miss. Why is it being sacrificed? Look at green altar. What does green stand for? Freshness. Fertility. What is the concept here in this sacrificial animal? If the first one was Love? We now reach the door of Death. The other big eternal truth. The people who have thronged for the sacrifice will never return home…. Is death too frozen in time? Is movement and life frozen? Is Death defeated by Time? Is Time defeated by Love? Yes. Wow!
I read the rest of the poem and there is barely any need for more questions or explanations. It’s clear as daylight.
So, what does this mean?
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
They struggle. I tell them we are so close to Indian philosophy here. What is ‘truth’ in Hindi? Sachaai…. another word please….. Satyam…
‘Satyam Shivam Sundaram!’ they chorus.
Yes. Truth, God (love) and Beauty… are all ye need to know.. they are the same. See how West and East meet. At the end of the day, there is just that one truth. What is Good is Beautiful; and what is Good is God; and what is God is Truth. They are almost clapping.
What does the urn stand for? I ask finally. What do we call a small thing that contains larger truths or speaks volumes? Starts with an ‘s’ and ends with an ‘l’.’
Chorus: Symbol.
So, what does the urn symbolize? Eternity. Frozen time. Frozen death. Frozen love. And yet it is but a dead thing….marble, cold, dead…. Eternal life and love contained in dead and lifeless marble.
.
The eyes are twinkling now. They are grinning…
” Cold Pastoral! “
An inanimate urn, used to keep the ashes of the dead…. And yet it becomes the canvas for containing the idea of eternity… Isn’t that paradoxical???? Isn’t that genius??? Life and death, the permanent and the transient…. two contradictions…entwined, eternal, containing one another …. Kya baat… kya baat…
Keats (1795 -1821) my dear friends … philosopher, thinker, poet who died at the tender age of 26!
Thank you, teacher, for allowing me to take your class.
———–——————-
Ode on a Grecian Urn
My experiments with teaching
A page from my continued experiments with teaching writing to children- the more disadvantaged the better. It tells me just how robust my theories are!!! Like I tell teachers the proof of the pudding is in the eating. If you do the right thing, it must give you instant results.
My 8th graders from the economically disadvantaged segment are keen learners. Subbing for a teacher I have 2 one hour periods on Monday and two days later with them. My target is to make them write better through grammar instruction.
So we begin with adverbs and use their own simple examples to understand it. Example: I write/ run how? They learn new words like meticulously,breathlessly and tirelessly.
If “how” was the question word for manner, I ask, then, what question words would they use to get adverbs of place and time? That’s easy.
Now ask these questions, and what answers do you get? Here,there, everywhere and now, then, immediately, tomorrow!
We then look at adverbs of condition, concession and reason. Children make tons of own sentences they are meant to roll off their tongues at speed! So we learn to repeat them at good speed.
So now they know questions what if? Although what? And why? I use the connectives ‘if’ , ‘although’ and ‘because’ to introduce the subordinate clauses.
I say:
Because I was tired…does it give complete info? No miss.
How about ‘although I was up early…? ‘ No miss it is incomplete.
How about ‘I was late to class’ ? That’s
complete miss. And ‘I went to sleep’ ? That is also complete. This is a main clause. It needs no help.
So we looked at all conjunctions that precede or signal the coming of a subordinate clause.
Then they made sentences with a main clause and two subordinate clauses and inserted compound adjectives and adverbs.
They create stunning sentences to read aloud.
Example: I went joyously swimming in the sapphire blue , deep and mighty Pacific Ocean where I saw multi-hued, miniature fish when I went leisurely for a long summer holiday. Hurrah.
Teachers, you give them vocabulary, and they will use them. Trust me.
They were so proud of their sentences.
Two days later, I made 8A teach 8B. The students of 8B had gone on a field trip and were not with me on Monday. They did the same lesson and I sat down comfortably and watched!!!
They asked questions on clauses. The simple definition was – it has a verb. A phrase does not. For example , in the morning, for a long time, after a huge breakfast.., are phrases. Then, they made their own phrases.
We looked at prepositional, noun and adjectival clauses sitting like a nest of boxes.
We connected descriptions they gave of the “tree” to genres and moods in settings in literature. An ‘old withered leafless tree’ vs a ‘bird filled, verdant, supple tree’ would tell different stories!!! Total alertness from all.
Before that, we had used a box to look at how the cat changes positions in, on, under, beside the box, when that teeny tiny word called the preposition changes. Powerful little word eh? I say.
In two hours, I had empowered my children to write, taught them some complicated grammar and introduced settings in literature! If I were their teacher I would revisit this theoretically in oral and in practical writing for the whole year so that they take it to their graves!
Regular teachers have 150 hours. So no excuses please. When you use my series ‘Language with Ease’ it allows you to do this blindly and mechanically over several years because I have laid it out for you. Schools who use the series report wild success like all the grade 2s picking out non finite verbs (Gerunds, participles infinitives) and telling you they are not verbs without labelling them. A mistake even textbooks make!
So, do take the leap of faith in the coming year and bask in the success of your kids. Change your system. Do Language with Ease. Write to: orders@mindsprings.in
My 8th graders from the economically disadvantaged segment are keen learners. Subbing for a teacher I have 2 one hour periods on Monday and two days later with them. My target is to make them write better through grammar instruction.
So we begin with adverbs and use their own simple examples to understand it. Example: I write/ run how? They learn new words like meticulously,breathlessly and tirelessly.
If “how” was the question word for manner, I ask, then, what question words would they use to get adverbs of place and time? That’s easy.
Now ask these questions, and what answers do you get? Here,there, everywhere and now, then, immediately, tomorrow!
We then look at adverbs of condition, concession and reason. Children make tons of own sentences they are meant to roll off their tongues at speed! So we learn to repeat them at good speed.
So now they know questions what if? Although what? And why? I use the connectives ‘if’ , ‘although’ and ‘because’ to introduce the subordinate clauses.
I say:
Because I was tired…does it give complete info? No miss.
How about ‘although I was up early…? ‘ No miss it is incomplete.
How about ‘I was late to class’ ? That’s
complete miss. And ‘I went to sleep’ ? That is also complete. This is a main clause. It needs no help.
So we looked at all conjunctions that precede or signal the coming of a subordinate clause.
Then they made sentences with a main clause and two subordinate clauses and inserted compound adjectives and adverbs.
They create stunning sentences to read aloud.
Example: I went joyously swimming in the sapphire blue , deep and mighty Pacific Ocean where I saw multi-hued, miniature fish when I went leisurely for a long summer holiday. Hurrah.
Teachers, you give them vocabulary, and they will use them. Trust me.
They were so proud of their sentences.
Two days later, I made 8A teach 8B. The students of 8B had gone on a field trip and were not with me on Monday. They did the same lesson and I sat down comfortably and watched!!!
They asked questions on clauses. The simple definition was – it has a verb. A phrase does not. For example , in the morning, for a long time, after a huge breakfast.., are phrases. Then, they made their own phrases.
We looked at prepositional, noun and adjectival clauses sitting like a nest of boxes.
We connected descriptions they gave of the “tree” to genres and moods in settings in literature. An ‘old withered leafless tree’ vs a ‘bird filled, verdant, supple tree’ would tell different stories!!! Total alertness from all.
Before that, we had used a box to look at how the cat changes positions in, on, under, beside the box, when that teeny tiny word called the preposition changes. Powerful little word eh? I say.
In two hours, I had empowered my children to write, taught them some complicated grammar and introduced settings in literature! If I were their teacher I would revisit this theoretically in oral and in practical writing for the whole year so that they take it to their graves!
Regular teachers have 150 hours. So no excuses please. When you use my series ‘Language with Ease’ it allows you to do this blindly and mechanically over several years because I have laid it out for you. Schools who use the series report wild success like all the grade 2s picking out non finite verbs (Gerunds, participles infinitives) and telling you they are not verbs without labelling them. A mistake even textbooks make!
So, do take the leap of faith in the coming year and bask in the success of your kids. Change your system. Do Language with Ease. Write to: orders@mindsprings.in
