Dear admirer
I am certain you know me. You and I have been associates for longer than the length of time. And lately, we have been quite a good bunch of companions too.

Your company has been comforting, I must admit. I love the way you sing me to sleep; your voice, though teared up at alternative seconds shall always remain as one of the most melodious voices amidst the stellars. The fireballs embedded in my blanket love to dance at your beats.

Your secrets are well safeguarded, enclosed in pockets made up of stars and tucked in each galaxy which knows your name.
I have in place, the childhood dreams you threw here and there in my skies; they remember their owner still, whispering your name in my ears ever so often.

Your loved ones lie gaurded and sheltered in my lap. They love to…

Ok: first of all an admission. The title of this post, with its impossibly bold claim to distil teaching poetry into a series of neatly packaged steps, is somewhat overzealous. In a manner somewhat, and unfavourably, all too familiar to the last year, I fear it will overpromise and underdeliver.

However, what it will do, hopefully, is offer up a kind of template, a broad horizon of possibilities, that will seek to capture and condense what a typical poetry lesson for me might look like. Of course, within this template any individual lesson may vary, dependent on class or poem, but it should indicate a certain sweep of what a poetry lesson may look like.

So let’s imagine the following scenario: the students have the lesson’s poem in front of them. They haven’t yet read the poem and have no prior knowledge of it. What could happen next?

Step 1:…

If you’ve ever analysed a novel in school, you probably know that reading a novel for analysis is different from reading a novel for pleasure. Especially as a literature student, you quickly have to get used to the fact that reading a novel isn’t the same as reading a novel well. The latter requires much more time and practice.

When analyzing a work of fiction, you should consider the following three steps:

1. First Reading: Comprehension

Read the full novel without dwelling for too long on single passages. Pay attention to things you notice about the text (e.g. reoccurring themes and motifs). Most importantly, block out distractions while you’re reading. If you want to understand the full meaning of a novel, you need to give your full attention to it.

It’s also helpful to write down a short summary of the main events of each chapter or part once you finish…