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Poetry Practice: Update

  By All Junior Classes (2016-2017), AP English Language & Composition (2016-2017), English 11 Regents (2016-2017)

Update: Google Form Resubmission

The poetry practice form had an error in it, so it wasn’t tabulating final scores properly. You and I can still see your correct and incorrect answers, but overall scores provide some important data. So an update:

  1. If your Poetry Practice assignment was originally due on May 24, but you did not meet that deadline, you should finish the work by June 1. This applies to RE11 students.
  2. If you already entered your answers for the Poetry Practice assignment, regardless of when you did, you must reload the form and resubmit your answers. This should tabulate your final score properly.

If you missed the original deadline in RE11, you can now complete the practice passages and required self-analysis to improve your GAP score1. Finish this work by June 1. The complete assignment is on Google Classroom. Here is the link to the form only:

Hard copies are available by the printer in our classroom. They are labeled.

The Poetry Part of It

One of our earlier posts asked you to consider the poetry in this practice packet not just as test prep, but as poetry worth reading and considering on its own. Depending on your progress so far, you’re going to use this post to discuss the study of poetry. If you still need to finish the practice packet, do that first, and then make sure you’ve submitted or resubmitted your data. Our discussion here should help you with the self-analysis and metacognition required after that.

Start with the end-of-year post for your course:

  1. Lights and Tunnels: AP11, Part 2
  2. Lights and Tunnels: RE11, Part 2

Remind yourself what the last paragraphs of that post tell you, which is that we’re meant to be doing makerspace work now, which is “work that is generated in the moment through questioning and observation and curiosity.” It won’t be work posted on Google Classroom, because it is meant to be folded into your focus on exploration and creativity, but I still want to point you in the right direction. Follow these steps:

  1. Scroll through your course’s post until you find the section labeled HOW TO STRIP POETRY OF ALL ITS BEAUTY.
  2. Consider the quoted metaphor about rose petals and spectrometers.
  3. Read the embedded Medium essay, “Splitting the Atom.”

What I want to know, especially from those of you who are putative 8s or 9s, is what you get out of reading poetry as part of Regents Exam prep. This isn’t like inviting you to read “God’s Grandeur” and think about how incredible the internal rhyme and sprung rhythm is, which you can appreciate without writing an essay or answering a multiple-choice question. It isn’t like inviting you to listen to “Hey Bobby,” which has so many rich allusions that identifying them is part of understanding the song’s purpose2. This is part of exam prep, which means our explicit goal is to get a lot of points. Are you able to compartmentalize and get something more out of the process? If so, what? How?

Talk to me about it below, and we’ll see how that conversation goes this week. Hopefully, a few of you got lost in the hyperlinks in that last paragraph and footnotes. I’d love to hear your thoughts on those poems and songs, too.

  1. And to improve your understanding of the exam and your strengths and weaknesses, etc. That stuff is important, too, even if we can’t always see past the looming threat of final averages. ↩

  2. Or inviting you to compare Sage Francis’ song to the Bob Dylan song that inspired it. That’s worth studying, too, and a comparison between the two as political protest songs would be a lot of fun. And if we’re going to study political poetry, I’d stick with songs long enough to invite you to listen to Brother Ali, even if that one’s a little too controversial to put it anywhere but in a footnote. That controversy is the point, though, isn’t it? Poetry ought to be alive and powerful, and studying it ought to be exhilarating. Brother Ali’s piece is made up of poetry and music and visuals that do something, and figuring out how he’s doing it makes it more powerful. It unlocks it. It’s hard to feel exhilarated by multiple-choice questions and five-paragraph essays, because there’s no life in that analysis. It’s dissection, but not even to figure out how to bring life to our own poetry. Instead, it seems sometimes like education drains poetry until it’s just a desiccated husk. But I digress. Sort of. ↩