Hey everybody and welcome back to another, you guessed it, humanities blog post! Our most recent unit took a trip to the English side of our lessons as we studied poetry. At first I was not excited abut this at all because when I think of poetry, I think of people reading solemn things in a very monotone way. However after doing some investigation during our first class we learned that poetry is any piece of writing where the words are organized on the page in whatever way the poet chooses. This means songs are poetry as Ms Willemse pointed out to us by playing Eminem songs in class (and rapping along with them). We also looked at how poetry includes a speaker, like Eminem, a character, like Slim Shady, and an author, like Marshall Mathers. Our driving question was “How does our understanding of text help us understand an idea?” which is why we focused a lot on understanding and analyzing text, as well as training ourselves at seeing historical perspective.

So after having more of an understanding on what poetry was I was actually quite into it and I enjoyed learning the terms and discovering new poems. I even made posters for two poetry terms I was assigned using my friends Jordyn and Lennart as examples. This was all until we had a test……. just kidding the test actually seemed quite straight forward to me and was helpful because it forced me to study these terms and get them implanted in my brain. We continued to study poetry and then started a small social studies portion. We learned about what historical perspective is and how to use it. To do this we spent a class learning about the American Civil War. This exercise really got me understanding historical perspective from loads of different events in time and I even connected it back to my essay from the previous unit.

After all this learning and skill building it was time to begin the end product. The class was put into three groups and was told to find 4 poems and write 1 poem about a topic we chose. We also had to show, through these five poems, how society has perceived it over time. My group which was made up of Alex, Fraser, Ruby, and I decided to focus on how gender acceptance and roles have changed over time. It was a great topic to choose because there is such a difference today in how women are treated compared to before. Now looking for poems wasn’t easy but once we found the final ones it was time to get practicing. That’s right, not only did we have to write snd find poems, we also had to present them in front of an audience with our own analysis of what it meant, how it played into our topic, and explain some of the poetic aspects of it. Although reading poetry isn’t my favourite thing, I think my group did a very good job and I’m proud of all the work we put into it.

This unit was really good for me because it totally changed my perspective (hah get it) on poetry and I have a much greater respect for it now. I also found myself really getting historical perspective and understanding the importance of it. Now every single thing I learn about I try to think about what was happening at that time to understand why those choices were made. Even in something as small as a joke on a tv show can be traced back to historical perspective. I enjoyed this unit and had a lot of fun with it and am proud of my learning.