English I Honors students finished the first poetry lesson, a two-and-a-half-day lesson (though only planned as a two-day lesson) covering the EQ “How is poetry different from other forms of writing?” We returned to Collins’s poem “Introduction to Poetry” to finish up our first interpretive efforts.

Fourth period’s analysis

Of course I covered the heavy lifting for the final stanzas: with students not being thoroughly versed in the world of literary criticism and its -isms, they can’t really understand what it might mean to tie a poem to a chair and beat a confession out of it to find what it “really means.”

Sixth period’s analysis

English 8 Strategies students took a quiz on sentence variety, focusing on type-two sentences, which begin with a participial phrase.

Creative writing students returned to sentence variety, catching up with English 8 Strategies students and looking at sentences beginning with present participles.