PYTASH: How Poems Work

Once again, I love this book! I absolutely LOVE Figure 5.1 "Sensory Images" on page 91. This could be something that totally helps students "get" poetry. This is something I can totally see myself using in my future classroom. I feel that all too often, some teachers just assume the students understand the images in the text. By spelling it out in a way that students can see a physical list of images can really help make that connection. I really like how she started the chapter with showing how some students dislike poetry but love music. Using music in the classroom and analyzing lyrics as poetry can really help turn some students on to poetry.
Thinking of music got me thinking of multimodality. I think an interesting project would be to have the students make videos (even though this is a non-reading activity) to illustrate the meaning of a poem. It wouldn't have to be too elaborate but could be just acting it out or something. Another idea would be to have students, after reading a text or a poem, to turn it into a song or poem of their own design. It would kind of be like how MC Lars transforms some texts into a rap song. Personally in high school, I loved video projects because we were allowed to be creative but also demonstrate what we had learned in a fun way.



Below is one of the poems Jago talked about in the chapter too.