From the Head of School

Sometimes simple questions are straightforward.  It doesn’t take much thinking to respond to ‘What’s a classroom’ with a clear definition like ‘a room where students are taught.’ Sometimes, simple questions are challenging: ‘what’s a poem?’ for example.  

Erm.  I’d be confident that if I saw one I could point it out to you.  If you ask students, they will tell you poems rhyme.  While it is certainly true some poems rhyme, and prose never (systematically) rhymes, the trouble is that many collections of words that we comfortably recognise as poems don’t.

Grade 5 are currently thinking about poems, using the concept of ‘form’.  What is it about the form of a poem that makes it a poem?  They have been looking at lots of different poems, and asking questions like, ‘do poems really need to rhyme’.  What kinds of rhythms do poems have?  When do poets use images and what type of images do they use?

Poets do odd things with words and get away with it. If WH Auden had been a prose writer, he would have written, ‘The Old Masters were never wrong about suffering’, but as a poet playing with form he in fact wrote, ‘About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters’.

Grade 5s, inspired by poets like Walter D Myers, have themselves been playing with words, asking questions such as, ‘Why write this way?  Why not write it like this?’  

Yesterday, they shared the joy of reading and making poems with their parents.  Janson read his own poem to his mum and dad; Nicole chose one her favourites to share with her mum, while Vince’s mum read him her Hungarian poem, which she had loved in childhood.

All ISA’s curriculums are informed by IB values.  Based on a concept (form) and led by inquiry, this unit allowed students to discover poetry for themselves, to find joy in their own and others’ creation; not just learn, but be inspired. And to share that inspiration with those around them.  

And, in case you are still wondering what a poem actually is, Britain’s leading literary critic, Terry Eagleton, offers this suggestion: it is where, “the author, rather than the printer or word processor, … decides where the lines should end."