WHY POETRY UNITS FAIL BEFORE THEY BEGIN

Poetry units often fail before they begin.

The mistake that dooms them is that they are poorly planned and the marketing is terrible.

PLANNING

Many poetry units emphasize building students’ poetic terminology without putting as much attention on the experience of reading a poem. While vocabulary certainly helps to articulate things we identify in poems, that is not why we read them. Textbooks often adopt this structure. Typically, a unit offers a selection of poems, each matched to key terms. There are poems to teach imagery, figurative language, tone, structure, and the list goes on and on. They are built from devices up.

This method of planning subtly signals that the point of reading poetry is to apply vocabulary to it. And that is what crushes engagement. Because that is not what poetry is about.

I’ve seen this failure in another area, but the principle is the same.

Tesla estimated it would sell 250,000-500,000 Cybertrucks in its first year alone. The prototypes had created extraordinary buzz and intrigue when they were unveiled but Tesla failed to plan.

Truck buyers care about size, comfort, power, and name-brand trust. They don’t want a radically different truck, they want one that is a few steps up from the one they have.

Tesla never reached the quarter-million sales it projected in its first year. Not even close. It sold just 38,965 trucks. Sales fell even further, to about 20,237, nearly a 48% decline, the following year.

The mistake was poor planning. It didn’t understand the product or its audience. We would be wise not to make the same error. As English teachers, it is easy to confuse vocabulary acquisition with engagement.

Percy Shelley believed that “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.” He said nothing about a poem being a scavenger hunt for terms. A student may be able to say “That’s an example of personification,” but identification is not experience.

Students deserve to have meaningful experiences with the poems they read.

That’s why passion is paramount when planning.

The question to ask yourself when planning a poetry unit isn’t what term I want students to learn, it is do I adore this poem —and can I articulate why my students might find something in it worth loving, wrestling with, questioning, or remembering?

When you start with your passion for the poem, you begin to consider what students might experience when reading a poem rather than what terms they might acquire.

Now, you start to ask all sorts of interesting questions, like:

What might surprise them?
What might disturb them?
What tension might they feel?
What complexity can they unravel?
What might they struggle to understand?
What might they notice differently after reading it?

If you focus on creating a meaningful experience with the poems you love, skills and vocabulary can be incorporated to enhance the experience. But, if you focus on the skills and the vocabulary, a meaningful experience may never transpire.

MARKETING

The second reason why poetry units fail is poor marketing.

Early in my career I doomed myself before I began. As one unit was wrapping up, I’d announce to my classes that our next unit would be poetry.

You can probably hear the student groans in your head.

Besides the groans, my students would say things like, “I don’t do poetry.” Or, “Mr. Sztabnik, ANYTHING but poetry!!!

Simon Sinek, the thought leader and man behind the START WITH WHY viral TED Talk believes that “There are only two ways to influence human behavior: you can manipulate it or you can inspire it.”

I wasn’t inspiring anyone or anything with my casual announcement, I was manipulating dread.

I realized that I had been treating poetry as something students simply had to endure. I was asking them to follow me because I was their teacher. Sinek helped me see the difference between authority and leadership. I had the authority. I hadn’t given them a reason to follow.

After seeing his TED Talk, I changed my approach. I started saying things like, “My goodness, these poems that we will read, study, and know have lines that are so powerful you will want to tattoo them on your arms.”

Or, “You know, we pass by and through nature every day and think very little of it. But this next unit will open up its power, its mysticism, its beauty, and its tranquility, if you are willing to let it work its magic on you.”

Sometimes, I go on the offensive and say, “I know if I were to announce that our next unit is going to be poetry, many of you would groan and complain. So, I’m not going to do that. Instead I’m just going to tell you that this next unit has shaped who I am. It has given me words to live by, visions of the man I want to become, a view of the world that is beautiful, an understanding of love that is different from anything else I have read, and so much more. If it has done that for me, imagine what it might do for you.”

With this approach, no one groans, at least not audibly, And, I have had students get tattoos from the poems we have read…so there’s that.

What I have learned along the way, thanks to trial and error, is that great poetry units have three core elements.

PLAN THE EXPERIENCE

Find great poems that will challenge students in subtle ways without overwhelming them. Find the ones that offer a great reading experience.

SELL THE EXPERIENCE

Think long and hard about the ways in which you can generate interest, and even excitement, for the poetry unit. Instead of communicating what poems students will be reading, communicate why these poems are so valuable to one’s life.