Job Discussion Forums

[jrwhisky]

First of I fully acknowledge the folly of using poetry that's not even originally written in English as my first example but I was desperate for a lesson plan and grabbed Little Rose by Goethe a super simple classic. It was for my most advanced students, as in my High school boys in the supposed 2nd best school in Hiroshima. I translated this from German with my skills being no better than their English. Their grammar certainly exceeds my German in comparison.

My boss and teacher both had no idea what it meant although I thought the High school students did well enough with their explanations. It didn't take them 6 min each to come up with a sentence worth of words to describe it. I consider that a win haha, the next day I was about to try it again with a different pair of students and my teacher interrupted me to say it is much too difficult.

What do you think? there doesn't seem to be many words here that are difficult, Thee, *beep*, stick and abundant joy are all easily explainable. Is there a better poet to start with? maybe one with a less ambiguous writing style?

Here is the poem:
Once a boy saw a little rose standing,
Little rose of the field,
She was so young and beautiful,
He dashed there quickly to see her near,
Beholden with abundant joy,
Little rose, little rose, little rose red,
Little rose of the field.

The boy then said: "I shall pick thee,
Little rose of the field."
The little rose said: "I shall stick thee,
That you'll always think of me,
And, I'll not want to suffer it."
Little rose, little rose, little rose red,
Little rose of the field.

Still the rough boy picked the rose,
Little rose of the field.
The little rose fought thus and pricked,
No prose of pain could help her,
Alas, she must suffer it yet.
Little rose, little rose, little rose red,
Little rose of the field.

[Pitarou]

[marley'sghost]

I imagine the 2 brightest kids in Hiroshima could work through that, but I don't see it being a lot of fun. It's pretty hard to catch all that subtle, wonderful stuff poetry does to language when you are struggling to just understand what the words themselves mean.
I'd stick to Shel Silverstein and Dr. Suess.

[jrwhisky]

[kpjf]

[mitsui]

Probably too much.
Years ago in Tokyo I observed a teacher teaching a sonnet from Shakespeare. At first I thought no way. I think the students were in the 8th grade.
They were returnees though.
For them it was fine actually but they had spent time in the US as elementary students.

[hivans]

Your interesting story reminded me of a class I saw given on my CELTA training years ago.

A fellow-CELTA candidate took Shakespeare’s "Seven Ages of Man" as her text, and she opened the lesson by saying “I am sure you think Shakespeare is impossible, but I bet you’ll be talking about this poem by the end of the lesson”. That was a good way to get over the initial wall of skepticism from the students (which I had fully shared in). The class then went through the poem one part at a time, and she picked out a few key words at each point, saying “What do you think this means?”, “Why is he using this word?”, or “How old would this person be?” and so on. In the end, the students were discussing whether these seven ages were applicable to modern society, so she won her bet. I think she made it work partly by communicating her enthusiasm for the subject, and partly by setting very focused task-based questions so that the students did not get too bogged down on the meaning of each and every word. The students seemed to get quite a fillip as they gradually realized that something which had seemed totally beyond their reach was actually accessible.

I would love to have suggested a John Milton poem (not “Paradise Lost” in just one lesson!) – in the hope that the last lines of “Methought I saw my late espoused Saint” could get anyone thinking about blindness and bereavement. However, I reckon there might be a poem that works better for high school boys then anything by Milton or Goethe (or Shakespeare).
How about Shelly’s “Ozymandias”? I reckon that the vocabulary would be OK with a bit of pre-teaching, and there are some great audio-visual recordings of it on You Tube (How would Ben Kingsley’s version or one of many the Breaking Bad promo versions or both go over in class? They are all easy to find on YouTube). Throw in a task (it could even be drawing what they imagine from audio only before seeing the video) and some pointers for discussion, and you could be kicking metaphorical sand in your Goethe-spurning colleague’s face!

Anyway, sorry for rambling on. Good luck if you decide to try some poetry again; it’s got to be worth trying something different now and again!

[Cool Teacher]

Me tinks this is a bit of a musunderstaning because this is not a litereatre class is it?



But if you want to do literature poems then how about Robert Frost:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie2Mspukx14

[Cool Teacher]

Or Richared Burton reading Dulan Thomas;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgMRD84MTQY

[RustyShackleford]

I find narrative poems such as "First Frost" by Andrei Voznesensky or "Richard Cory" to be pretty effective because they are very descriptive and yet ambiguous enough that you can have a simple discussion on it. In the case of the former, you can even use different translations to show how you can use different English words to express the same thing in different ways.

[jrwhisky]

Thank you Hivans, yes I think my explanation went something alike to what you explained. I was using the poem to get some discussion going and I thought I did so successfully however, my boss and Japanese teaching colleague were not around to hear the simple explanation and yes metaphoric discussion. So they were directly opposed to me using it again.

I am swayed to believe that these teenagers are expected to use their English skills more for grammar practice relevant to their school's testing rather than inspiring or developing　thought ideas.

Since then I though perhaps I can continue to use poetry but at a more literal level because in that state I can get it passed my Japanese associates to use in class. Because they are certainly using far more complex stories in class that particular poem. the difference is the directness I the use of English I suppose.

[jrwhisky]

Thanks cool teacher and RustyShackleford for the excellent suggestions I will have them noted for a later time.