Welcome to Teach This, Asymptote for Educators’ answer to the current issue’s Banned Countries Special Feature. We believe that the classroom is the perfect setting for young people to be exposed to diverse, contemporary voices, both allowing them to challenge their assumptions and to engage them with living literature… a conversation in which their own voices matter. To that end, Asymptote for Educators has launched this weekly blog series in which global educators share how and why they would teach the feature’s articles. We hope you and your students enjoy!
Are you an educator with your own lesson plan ideas? Teach This – Banned Countries Special Feature is currently open for submissions. Email education@asymptotejournal.com for more information.
Technology is changing the way we think about information. We not only collect data, but we collect data about that data, i.e. meta-data. By thinking about the patterns, concerns, images and word choices that we find not only in one poem but across several, we can use the language of information technology and meta-data as an intriguing and topical portal through which to access poetry. What does poetry or a poem become when we subject it to the kinds of processes we use to organize other kinds of data? Do we learn more about the poets or poems by comparing them to other poets and poems in this way? And what (if anything) is lost when we do so?
Underlying these questions is the more fundamental fact that all our thinking and talking and writing about poetry is itself a kind of meta poem: a new thing we construct with our insights, our speculations, our assumptions, and yes, the words and contexts of the poems. This exercise is an attempt to make this fact clear and accessible to students in a way that also touches on our current digital concerns about anonymity, technology, and data.
This assignment serves both as an introduction to a body of poetry and to the current concept of data-mining. Through this assignment, students should be able to engage with the poetry fluidly, creatively and using language and techniques that mirror relevant notions about the use of data and technology in literary analysis.
Genre: Poetry
Course Level: High school / undergraduate
Student Difficulty: Moderate
Teacher Preparation: Low
Class Size: Small / medium
Semester Time: Following a more general introduction to poetry
Writing Component: Moderate
Close Reading: Moderate
Estimated Time: 50-80 min
Materials: Printed packets of the pieces from the Banned Countries Special Feature
Exercise:
In this assignment, students will look for common themes, images, and patterns across the selected poems. Have students separate into groups of three or four. Then, distribute to each group a packet containing the selected poems. Each group may receive the same poems, or you may distribute different packets to different groups. If you choose the latter, consider the following groupings:
- Negar Emrani’s Three Poems and Lauren Camp’s Given A Continuous Function, We Define a New Function
- Osama Alomar’s The Teeth of The Comb, Ubah Cristina Ali Farah’s A Dhow Crosses the Sea, and Mohamed Abd-Alhai’s Al-Samandel at the Edge of Absence
- Omar Youssef Souleimane’s Away From Damascus and Edil Hassan’s Two Poems
Students will read the poems and data-mine them by identifying images, nouns, adjectives and verbs that are repeated multiple times in each poem. Once they have collected this “cloud” of data, or meta poem, students will, with their groups, discuss what themes they think these frequently used words represent or mean. Ask them to consider the following questions during their discussions:
- What common concerns, loves, fears, etc. do the meta poems seem to have?
- Is each meta poem a happy or a sad one?
- What does each meta poem seem to favor, nature or civilization?
- What happens if you combine all the meta poems into one? How do your answers change?
After a few minutes of discussion, have students rearrange these frequently used words into new poems, adding whatever words they would like. Make sure to emphasize that each of the “mined” words must be used at least once, and that the poems to not have to be “good” or make sense. Make sure the students know they are allowed to have fun!
Then have each group share their rearranged creations with the class. While each group is sharing, the rest of the class should be data-mining the new poems, compiling a list of common words in each. The students can then discuss whether or not there is a meta poem uniting each of the groups and what they think this signifies about the original poems or about themselves.
Gabriel Mamola has taught English Composition and Literature for the past five years. He is currently a Graduate Teaching Assistant and a PhD student at the University of Texas at Arlington, where he teaches English Composition. He received his BA in Liberal Arts from Thomas Aquinas College, CA and his MA in English from the University of Dallas. His research interests include Digital Rhetoric and Writing, Classical Rhetoric, Romantic and Modernist literature, and Science Fiction Studies.
Asymptote for Educators wants to see your students’ creations! Submit them to education@asymptotejournal.com for the opportunity have them published in a follow-up to this blog post.