Lesson planning

[UffishThought]

Okay as part of the interview process, I have to give a 20 minute lesson to a classroom of 11th grade AP lit kids, on the subject of my choosing.

I'm thinking I might do this poem by Plath:

Metaphors
I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.

Did you get it? The narrator is pregnant. (And so was Plath, when she wrote it.)

But I am paralyzed by choices! Should we do a line-by-line analysis--talk about form, style, tone, figurative language? Historical background? Should we make it into a game and play Taboo? And if so, should we do the lines of the poem as the clues for the word "pregnancy," or should I make up a "pregnancy" card with off-limits words like "baby" and "birth" and "mother" and have them try to talk around those words first, and then introduce the poem as Plath's attempt to do the same thing? Should I have them draw the images? Come up with new metaphors?

I guess I should do it right with backwards design: start at the goals and then come up with the activities, not the other way around. But since my goals could be literally anything, it doesn't seem to matter as much.

[Whistler]

haha I totally didn't get that she was pregnant when we talked about this

[Yarjka]

This poem has really interesting images. I like the idea of having them illustrate the lines.

Note of course the nine lines and nine syllables in each line corresponding to the nine-month gestation period. But I'd probably move past the riddle aspect of the poem and look more closely at the construction of the metaphors, the juxtaposition of various images. For instance, I like how she begins by talking about the proverbial elephant in the room. "This loaf's big with its yeasty rising" is an excellent poetic play on the proverbial "bun in the oven". (A quick Google search confirms that both "the elephant in the room" and "a bun in the oven" are phrases that rose in prominence in the 1950s, so would be contemporaneous to this poem). Generate some discussion on how society naturally creates workarounds and alternative ways of saying what we mean, rather than being explicit about things.

[UffishThought]

And there's also interesting stuff there with the 4th line, where she talks about how the fruit is the important part of the melon plant and the ivory is all anyone cares about when killing the elephant (though it seems like a reversal when she says the timbers are fine, because what's really valued about a house is the family raised inside it). It starts so funny and cheerful, but there's an uncomfortable edge about feeling like she's going to be considered irrelevant in her own life now.

And the last line is continues the discomfort. Some quick research reveals that abortion generally wasn't legal in 1960, when this came out, so getting off the pregnancy train probably wasn't as common. Though it's rumored that she had a back-room abortion in the first year of her marriage, so perhaps she'd done it before?

[Portia]

And there's also interesting stuff there with the 4th line, where she talks about how the fruit is the important part of the melon plant and the ivory is all anyone cares about when killing the elephant (though it seems like a reversal when she says the timbers are fine, because what's really valued about a house is the family raised inside it). It starts so funny and cheerful, but there's an uncomfortable edge about feeling like she's going to be considered irrelevant in her own life now.

And the last line is continues the discomfort. Some quick research reveals that abortion generally wasn't legal in 1960, when this came out, so getting off the pregnancy train probably wasn't as common. Though it's rumored that she had a back-room abortion in the first year of her marriage, so perhaps she'd done it before?

A popular culture reference set in this time period is Peggy's illegitimate pregnancy in the show Mad Men. There are also references to abortions in works from the more-liberal 1920s and 1930s (for instance, I just read The Berlin Stories, and Sally Bowles gets an abortion, although the word is never mentioned.)