Jago chapter 5

Poetry is one of the hardest genres for me. When I was in high school I read a book about living in a Utopian society (I cant remember what it was called) and that was it. Needless to say the curricullum at my school was not very hard or challenging and when I got to college I understood nothing! When I read Wordsworth, Chaucer or Coleridge I had no clue what to make of the literature. I completely understand students wanting to give up and blame the poem for being too hard as the reason they don't understand it. Poems can be hard to understand! It is hard for students to understand authors like William Wordsworth becuase they do not understand the language. But, like Jago says, students spend hours a day listening to song lyrics that express the writer's feelings just like Wordsworth did with his poetry. If you don't understand the vocabulary the poem does not mean much. I like the idea on page 76 about the students coming up with their own vocabulary words to work on. I also agree with the statement on page 77 that "young readers don't have a place to store this information ((background of the poem) until they have made some sense of the text for themselves." Until students can relate the literature to their own lives they are unable to make a connection. I feel this is a huge part of making poetry work in the classroom.