Ways to teach writing through poems and … Five ways to kill a man

Poems, being much shorter and more easily manageable than fiction, enable us to demonstrate some basic principles of writing to our students, and by writing I certainly do not mean literary writing but any kind of creative writing.

I mostly teach children and teenagers so I make a point of presenting my writing principles in an easily digestible form.

By no means do I claim originality in illustrating some principles of writing, but definitely the approach I suggest is of my own thinking and is made to suit the presentation of Edwin Brock’s poem Five Ways to Kill a Man.

There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man.
You can make him carry a plank of wood
to the top of a hill and nail him to it.
To do this properly you require a crowd of people
wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak
to dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one
man to hammer the nails home.

To do this properly you require a crowd of people a length of steel,
shaped and chased in a traditional way,
and attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears.
But for this you need white horses,
English trees, men with bows and arrows,
at least two flags, a prince, and a
castle to hold your banquet in.

Dispensing with nobility, you may, if the wind
allows, blow gas at him. But then you need
a mile of mud sliced through with ditches,
not to mention black boots, bomb craters,
more mud, a plague of rats, a dozen songs
and some round hats made of steel.

In an age of aeroplanes, you may fly
miles above your victim and dispose of him by
pressing one small switch. All you then
require is an ocean to separate you, two
systems of government, a nation's scientists,
several factories, a psychopath and
land that no-one needs for several years.

These are, as I began, cumbersome ways to kill a man.
Simpler, direct, and much more neat is to see
that he is living somewhere in the middle
of the twentieth century, and leave him there.

Principle 1

A piece of writing is made of a raw material like any finished product: words. Words, even when seen individually -- and not in relation to other words, are vehicles of meaning though the range and the depth will vary from individual to individual depending on their experience, exposure to texts, mentality, temperament, occupation and perhaps on many other factors which it would be pointless to go into here.

In order to demonstrate the weightiness of each and every word in this particular poem, I searched for images which would illustrate them in a more concrete and memorable manner, and divided the images on five slides of a slideshow presentation – as many as the stanzas in the poem.

The words that appear at the bottom of each slide are meant to be hidden from view when inviting the students to label the images in each slide. In fact, most students are puzzled by the apparent lack of connection between the images, but they are quite happy to play along, which brings me to my second principle:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1zHOL1dvlNsSNPEWssxYXwffbq1hDLD_EE_SXkar269Q/edit?usp=sharing

Principle 2

An element of suspense is essential in writing. By that I don’t mean that mystery is key to good writing; what I am saying is that building up a larger picture, which will only be visible by the end of your writing is a sign of craftsmanship. Parts of a whole can be organised by the same guiding principle. Accordingly, when the students reach the end of each stanza they should have established the method of killing and the person or people killed.  And of course, by the end of the poem they should be able to discern the poet’s message about the disastrous effects of hatred and intolerance on the human race.

Principle 3

I like to challenge my students or others might call it engaging the reader. The poet is at it all the time: on a micro level by not always supplying the obvious word for his meaning but by taking a fresh look at the object and redefining it in his own terms:

length of steel,
shaped and chased in a traditional way

the metal cage

round hats made of steel

It was easy for my students, who had first labelled the images on the slideshow, to connect the descriptions of the objects with the words and appreciate the literary device.

On a macro level, the students were asked to put together – bit by bit – the objects and construct the whole scene: Jesus’s crucifixion in the first stanza, medieval wars in the second, First World War in the third, Second World War in the fourth, and a final more abstract scene and also more open to interpretation, which might well be another writing principle:

Principle 4: allow the reader space and free scope

When the students had read the poem and constructed and established the various killings throughout history, I asked them to think of the style of writing as a whole and tell me whether it strongly reminded them of another register that they had  come across, pointing out the following ways of expression

To do this properly you require a crowd of people

But for this you need white horses

But then you need

All you then
require is an ocean

and the lists of objects in the first four stanzas. One of the students responded by replying that the poem did at times sound like a recipe in the sense that once you used the ingredients and followed the instructions, you got your “killing”.

It had sounded very much like this when I first read it,  but I was in two minds about eliciting this response from my students. However, I was prepared in case someone did think along the same lines and I handed out the following text encouraging all the students to have a look and possibly hear the undertones.

To make the flatbreads, tip the flour into a large bowl with 1 tsp salt and the cumin seeds. Make a well in the centre and pour in the oil and 150ml warm water. Mix together well. Turn out onto a floured surface and knead for a few mins until smooth. Leave to rest in a lightly floured bowl for 15 mins. Meanwhile, mix together the yogurt and dill. Season and set aside.

That could be the next principle in writing.

Principle 5: be adventurous and daring when you create a text; some readers, but perhaps the ones you care most for, might make the connection.

A final note in this analysis is the irony or sarcasm underlying the poem. Many experts have discussed these issues with regard to the poem, and I would have very little to add to this literature. Nevertheless, I do feel tempted to add

Principle 6:  do use –sparingly-- the element of surprise by juxtaposing apparently dissimilar concepts (several factories, a psychopath) and/or under/overstatement (All you then require is an ocean to separate you) in order to create humour.

How to build an active vocabulary: Part 1

What I often mull over is how to invent new ways of practising vocabulary and motivating students to go beyond the basics, which is a challenge for teachers themselves.

Understanding and explaining new words is fine, but safely storing words in the long-term memory or coming up with the right word in the right context is a different kettle of fish.

Personally, I am constantly reviewing my methods of anchoring words and eliciting them from my students and therefore eternally struggling to devise more effective activities in order to achieve my goal.

In the present and the next few posts, I will provide a hodgepodge of ideas about how to render words more memorable and in effect build an active vocabulary.

The guiding principle is flipping the multiple-choice questions typically used in EFL exams and consequently in most course books across the spectrum.

By way of illustration, I will quote a paragraph from Eduardo Mendoza’s novel An Englishman in Madrid:

Still stunned, and with an anguished look on his face not dissimilar to that of the Christ that gave the church its name, Anthony Whitelands stumbled out into the street, pushing his way through the endless flow of the faithful. Beyond the entrance to the church the snow was coming down hard, and he was soon lost in a whirling mass of heavy snowflakes so thick and white they seemed to leave the rest of the world in impenetrable darkness. This phenomenon seemed to him to reflect his state of mind, now the scene of a desperate battle. No sooner did he decide to surrender his will to Paquita’s disconcerting entreaty than part of him rebelled against such cruel imposition. There was no doubt that the daring if tacit way she had offered herself to him aroused his desire, but he thought it might be too high a price to pay. Did he have to give up on worldwide recognition just when it was within his grasp? And she had not even offered him an explanation, simply appealing to his weakness for her. It was outrageous!

I have picked the nouns which I intend to explore with my students, (highlighted in the extract) and those are:

·       flow

·       darkness

·       battle

Here are the sets of collocating adjectives or participles used as adjectives:

·       steady, continuous, constant, smooth

·       thick, total, partial, gathering

·       difficult, losing, legal, constant

The students are given the groups of adjectives and asked to find the nouns in the text which can collocate with all the items of each group. They could then be asked to make their own examples using the different adjectives with the same noun.

The lights suddenly went off leaving us in total darkness.

The gathering darkness began to envelop the forest making it eerie and frightening.

I find this approach much easier and more meaningful for my students. Rather than having to explain the context for each of the four different items of the multiple-choice question, you focus on one and explore the denotative and connotative potential of each noun by looking at the collocating adjectives.

Context shifting and Sunflakes!

Activating the mind is an issue that constantly preoccupies me as a teacher in general and, evidently, as a language teacher.

It is understood that we can’t make a brainteaser out of everything we intend to teach to our students, but we can definitely capitalise on anything that helps us get the students to think, compare, contrast and tease out meaning rather than spoon-feeding them incessantly.

I find it hard to keep replenishing the stock of activities borrowed or of my own invention which will stimulate and compel the students to engage in any given task.

As I have often claimed before, poetry and literature   -- in the right balance and carefully chosen for the right level of students -- possess this power to get them to puzzle out meaning from context and spend this extra time over lexis that we would rather they saved in their memory.

While trying to think of a way of presenting a poem called Sunflakes to my students, I coined a term for the task which I devised for it to refer to the thinking process involved: context-shifting. It might work for a limited number of texts, but with a modicum of resourcefulness and imagination one could find other texts – literary or not -- in which to use a similar technique.

Before I suggest my way of presenting the poem, let me just point out that it would work fine with intermediate-level groups –both children and adult.

Here is the task and the poem in PDF form:

Read the following poem and try to find the missing item in the compound nouns in the poem. Some, but not all, of the blank spaces are to be filled with the same item.  

I have highlighted in red the items to be left blank for the students to supply the answers:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-JgIA9pNw-KM0U5UUVDSkluV1U/view?usp=sharing

A further suggestion is that depending on the students’ mastery of relevant vocabulary, one could create fewer or more gaps to be filled. For instance, I knew my students were not acquainted with compound words such as “snowdrifts” or “snowbanks” so I just left them intact. They would make the task to gather the missing word too difficult when it was already quite a bit of a challenge.    

I hope you have fun!