Poetry Analysis: Gender Acceptance Over Time
This unit of humanities 10 was poetry. From learning about poetry in past grades I wasn’t especially fond of it, but I did understand it’s purpose in school. After finding out that we’d be analyzing other poems instead of writing our own, I loosened up a little because I felt like that was more valuable to my learning.
At first we were told a vague idea of what our final project would be, and then soon after received an outline that told us when the end of the project would be, and the steps we’d take to complete it.
For our first milestone we had to write two paragraphs about how we feel about poetry. One was written before an activity, and was was written after. The activity we did was called “Poetry Foreplay” where we all had to find as many people places or things that we saw, and write them on sticky notes to put on the board. After this we picked 15 of the words off of the board and sat back down. We were given phrases to make metaphors. And then we had to explain why they made sense (even if they didn’t). Below are my two paragraphs about how I see poetry
For the second milestone we began to learn about poetry terms, literary devices that’s used in poetry. We were given 2 terms to research definitions for, and then we had to write our own solid definition of each of them. After this we had to find an example of each term. My terms were Euphemism and Understatement. Then we were told to make a poster for our terms using Comic Life, with the definition, the example, and some soft of creative illustration. After making these posters we presented them to the class so the class could take notes, as we needed to learn each term. here are my posters
the main reason for this milestone was to prepare us for our POETRY TERM TEST ahhhh a test scary. I was not expecting a test considering everyone we told me about the PLP program said they only did projects and never did tests. It wasn’t too hard but I originally thought I did better than ended up doing. I was confused with a couple of the questions and this affected my outcome.
our next milestone, milestone 3, was a historical perspective paragraph. We had to take two love poems, one from modern times, and one from the past, and explain how historical perspective can be used to understand their themes. I chose the modern poem “First person demonstrative” and the poem “How Do I Love Thee” from the past. I explained how their themes were similar but from a different stance, as the poems were presented differently. I found that the main theme in the older poem was identity, and the main theme in the new poem was the need to overcome the fear of showing feelings.
As we near the end of our project we are put in groups and have to choose a topic of poems to analyze. My group consisted of myself, Alex, Fraser, and Izzy. We chose the topic “Gender Acceptance Over Time.” After getting in these groups and choosing a topic we had to find poems that fit. We researched for awhile and then eventually found 4 poems, and later, Fraser and Izzy wrote one themselves for our group. We picked the poems: “To The Ladies” by Lady Mary Chudleigh, “Manly Man” by Francis Duggan, “Dear Schools” by Written Raven, and “Every Girl, Every Boy” by Julie Tarney. Each of these poems gave us a good connection point to historical perspective.
The poem that Izzy and Fraser wrote is titled “Just Human” and it explains how the traditional gender “boxes” aren’t necessary and it doesn’t matter what gender you identify with, we are all human and that’s what really matters.
after choosing all our poems we had to individually choose which one we wanted to analyze and read for our presentation. I chose to analyze “To The Ladies” and read “Dear Schools.”
To present our project we used keynote. We made a slide for each poem and used images to represent the poem. We put our analysis in the presenters notes so we could read them while presenting without the audience seeing them. Here was my analysis for “To The Ladies”
For our final presentation we invited our parents to come and watch.
In the presentation we would each read a poem, and then read the analysis. The analysis consisted of the meaning of the poem, literary devices, connection to historical perspective, etc.
here is a video of my groups whole presentation!
As you can see, we each read a poem and analysis, and then read the poem our group wrote together. I think our presentation went quite well! I was nervous about this as I’m not very comfortable with presenting in class, but it turned out better than I thought it would.
Now, how can we answer our driving question? Well, throughout this project I’ve learned why poetry can be important to learn in school! In past years we studied poetry yet I never understood why and because of this I didn’t enjoy it very much. Poetry can help us understand almost any idea, but in a creative and more interesting way! When researching poems on gender acceptance, I realized how material like these poems could teach someone a complicated idea, in such a simple form. This is why I think that someone’s understanding of a text can help them understand an idea. If you can analyze and understand the poem itself, you can also grasp its meaning and significance.