Hello all, welcome back to another blog, today’s topic is the poetry unit that the PLP cohort and I embarked on in October of this year. I have never really been a fan of most traditional poems, and I can say this unit has sort of changed my opinion on it. For this unit we had to answer our driving question of “How does our understanding of text help us understand and idea” in this situation, the word “text” referred to poetry, the class was put into groups and we answered a modified version of this question in a presentation that showcased our understanding of historical perspective. Our groups modified this question to fit our topic, my group (consisting of Caleb, Izzy, and Ruby)  modified it to “how does our understanding of text help us understand gender acceptance over time” we presented 4 different poems and each of us analyzed and broke down our interpretations of them, mine was “The manly Man” by Francis Duggan.

This unit we learned about different types of strutted and unstructured poetry but more importantly we learned how to understand the many ideas that poems portray. Coming into this unit I thought poetry of nothing more than “fancy words” and this has been one of the few units that has changed my opinion on a topic. Since this unit I’ve been drawn towards more Philosophical poetry as I am very interested on how other people perceive the world, I think that played into this unit nicely because one of the main themes was historical perspective.

The biggest challenge in this project for me was getting over my preconceptions of poetry, there was no real “method” on how I overcame this as it was more of a conscious dilemma. Needless to say I did get over it and I think that my presentation went pretty well, another challenge would be handing in the more minor milestones during this project, including this blog post. I can’t honestly recall all the details of this unit as I am writing this 3 months after the project ended (I genuinely did think I had already written this post but in reality, I had written 173 words). The biggest success for this project was probably our final presentation, I have never been scared of public speaking and I have always been fairly decent at it, i was also pretty confident with my own and the rest of my groups analysis of the poems.

Overall this unit wasn’t my strongest but also not my weakest this year, I am happy that it got me into poetry. Moving forward, I know that I need to focus more on the little things, I do think that I am getting better but I’m no where near where I could be at currently, with all that being said, it is time for this post to come to a close, as always thanks for reading and have a great rest of your day/evening.