Poetry as a Lens: Alternative Ways of Seeing the Novel

Abstract

As a result of this kind of teaching, students often enter a poetry lesson resistant because of previous negative encounters. Inevitably, in trying to get them to analyze and understand a poem, poem becomes enemy-a force to struggle with and ultimately conquer. Unfortunately, what is left in end, for even most successful students, is an experience and a poem that are both limp and lifeless. Instead, over years I have redirected my teaching. I try to move students away from concept of poetry as an object that is taken examined, and reexamined and toward use of poetry as a critical or interpretive lens through which other literature may be experienced and understood. I use this approach with my seventh graders in our reading class, where I teach students a variety of reading strategies-making predictions, connecting and supporting ideas, understanding character, figuring out difficult vocabulary-to guide them through novel. I thought poetry could be another means to aid their understanding. Recently we read Gary Soto's Taking Sides, a novel that explores what happens to a Mexican American teenager, Lincoln Mendoza, when he moves from city to suburbs. Throughout book Lincoln struggles with internal and external conflicts. For example, he changes from ethnic majority to minority; he initially opposes his mother's white boyfriend; he grapples with changing perceptions of his best friend, who accuses him of becoming white; he confronts a prejudiced basketball coach; and he struggles to develop a relationship with Monica, a Mexican American girl. In our study of this book students responded in a journal to each chapter. I encouraged them to make observations, substantiating them with examples from text. I also asked them to jot down open-ended questions to which rest of class could respond that would bring us further into novel. Using this framework, we discussed many themes and kept an ongoing list of big ideas. Among ideas students found in Taking Sides were torn between different environments, the loss of something valued, friendship, racism, being different, starting new, love interests, growing apart, and finding a place in world. When we finished novel, I gave students a packet of poems taken primarily from book, Latino Poetry, but which also included several thematically related selections from our edition of Taking Sides. I wanted their work with poetry to be an extension of work we were doing with