October 31, 2024
Education Adviser and former Director of English and Assistant Headteacher, Gemma Buchanan, muses on the poetry titles now available with myON
At the end of his life, whilst suffering with advanced dementia, my grandfather would regularly recite word perfect stanzas of poetry. ‘To Autumn’ by John Keats was one such poem and I, a fledgling secondary English teacher at the time, would scurry to find the poem he was reciting (titles often did elude him). I have always found it quite remarkable that a man who couldn’t remember who close family members were could still recite lines of verse that he had learnt at school some 70 years earlier. Not only this but he could use them to describe an October morning as he looked out of his window, better than he could master his own free vocabulary at that point in his life.
There are many recollections I could write about the wonders of poetry being taught to children but this example, from a 1930s UK school system that is far outmoded, is one that will always resonate with me. The effect those lines must have had on a 10-year-old boy were so profound that they remained with him right to the end of his life.
I have found during my years in the classroom, that poetry is one of the most effective ways of eliciting original and perceptive responses about a text with pupils. Take this Keats line for example, how many different mists are imagined in the room when discussing it with a class of thirty 14-year-olds? And what can we say about mist? Shrouding? Mysterious? Illuminating? Beautiful? These antithetic words alone support my favourite classroom refrain “there is no wrong answer when interpreting a poem.” And there it is. Perhaps the greatest leveller in the English curriculum, at both primary and secondary. There has been much noise about the volume of poetry that GCSE English Literature students have to study and also about the perceived challenge of the unseen poem they need to analyse in one of the exams, but I have always called this section of the syllabus ‘a gift’. An opportunity to allow their creative juices to combine with those of a poet: interpret and analyse, yes, but to be able to do this with imaginative freedom and the knowledge that they will be rewarded for original responses is a liberation not afforded in other parts of the English Literature GCSE syllabus.
With all of this in mind, it is with great excitement that Renaissance introduces new poetry content into myON this month. A carefully curated collection of poetry that supports both the primary and secondary curriculum. Alongside this Keats poem, you will also find the pre twentieth century GCSE Literature poems by, among others, Browning, Wordsworth, Brontë and Dickinson. Primary colleagues can take this opportunity to encourage their pupils to freely and imaginatively engage with the whimsical lines of Carroll or Lear.
As a digital teaching and learning platform, myON allows students to add notes to their own digital copies of a text, an extremely useful revision tool for GCSE, particularly once a teacher has modelled ways to do this using the built in journal or post it note functions. The new inclusion of these poetry texts means the ease and opportunity for discussion and oracy are assisted. Perhaps the greatest joy of all with poetry in the classroom is to share a poem with the class and just see where it takes them, reading lines aloud together, discussing the imagery that is created and allowing them to grow in confidence when analysing a text is one of the most magical experiences as a teacher.
Thirty-one poetry titles are now available from the myON Classic British English collection. They can also be found within a myON search on either ‘poem’ or ‘poetry’.