Poetry: Thanks for the Annotations

Annotating things in English is the equivalent of breathing. We do it all the time and it is almost second nature to what we do when teaching. It even bites us on the bum when the copy of a short story we want to use again and again with classes is stribbled with annotations because a student thought that was what we’d be doing.

Annotations on a text are not a good proxy for learning. I can tell you of loads of examples of students who had brilliantly annotated copies of the texts, but that didn’t translate into grades. Equally, I have seen students with slim annotations exceeding my expectations. Just because a student has a page full of scribbles, it doesn’t mean they know or understand the poem. Annotation gives us false security and hope. Phew, I have done my job because I have evidence of it. Nobody can criticise my teaching, because look - it is all there for you to see it.  

Overteaching is something we need to be mindful about with English teaching. The beauty of English Literature is you can study a novel over a term or for months. Yet, we often have a worry of letting go of texts. I just need another week with the poem and then I will be satisfied that they have learnt it well. Poetry is the one area where I think there’s a lot of overteaching of the poems. Why spend two lessons looking at the poem when you can spend two weeks on it and ensure they really know the poem. 

When you look at any GCSE or A Level essay, the amount of techniques and terminology needed to form a strong essay is quite small, yet when teaching we ensure that students are aware of every technique or device employed by the writer. The cognitive load for each poem, then, is phenomenal. Students focus on learning the techniques rather than focus on ideas and meaning behind the poem. That is why students continuously write and crowbar techniques into their essays. Not because of a weakness on their part, but because when teaching a poem we have placed emphasis on this knowledge. Yes, we might have done some lovely stuff about context and intent, but that space in their brains is eaten up by the knowledge of seven similes and something interesting about the volta. 

The problem is poetry. Now before you start throwing poems at me. Hear me out. A poem is a dense piece of writing. Like a fine piece of art, you can look at a small aspect and spend ages exploring how it relates to the rest. When looking at art, you don’t pick up on every brushstroke. You spot interestings things and explore them further. Yet, for poetry, we obsess about every brushstroke. In fact, annotating is ‘brushstroke thinking’. It isn’t meaningful exploration, but an obsession of the components rather than the ideas. When we are asking students to explore the idea of glory in war, they can tell me about some techniques, but they can’t tell me why and what the poet is saying. Without the key idea of the poem, techniques are just brushstrokes. They don’t relate to the whole. Or what’s hidden behind. 

I think we have to be realistic about what we want students to learn from and about a poem. If we want students to learn the fifteen named poems in the anthology, then we need to think about it in a clever way and think about the cognitive overload. The mental entropy of knowledge happens so quickly with poetry. How many times have we heard - ‘which poem was that one, again’’?  Newsflash, I have to remind myself of the fifteen poems before I teach them and I have taught them for years. Why do we think a student can retain those fifteen techniques you highlighted in the first stanza in Term 1 of Year 10 at the end of Year 11? What is the benefit over annotating every line and stanza when they only need four or five techniques to form a strong discussion? 

Over the years, I have withdrawn from annotating poems heavily and focused on a few key devices in the poems. Enough to form ideas but not too many to drown their own thinking, which is a tough one to gauge. Instead, I have worked on developing key ideas and explanations of the writer’s choices. I’d rather have a student explain why a poem uses repetition effectively than seven techniques spotted and not explained. 

Explanation of devices is what students need more knowledge of and that’s what I have been doing recently. With each poem, I pick one device to explore the reason for using said device alongside some examples from the poem. Therefore, the knowledge worked on is beneficial to more than one text and I am not spending two weeks on knowledge that might or might not be used once in a 45 minute essay in the final exam. We are working on knowledge that connects to other texts.  

Effect is something we, as teachers, need to put higher in the student’s minds and in our teaching, yet it is largely overly simplified or rushed. That’s why I have created a few PowerPoints around the choice of certain literary devices. I am using them with a poem, when teaching, but when we, later, spot the device used in another text I will have the slide to hand, reminding them of the reasons behind a writer using a device with a timely reminder of where else they have seen the device before. I’d rather have a student see that Dickens, Shakespeare and Tennyson use repetition, but with differing effects, so that, when faced with repetition in other texts, they have that bank of knowledge to recall rather than disparate bits of knowledge. 

All the talk about knowledge has meant that we have largely focused on the what and not the how. How are we going to support and build knowledge in English? For a start, rethink how we annotate texts. Yes, annotate a poem, but not so you pindown every part of it. After all, nobody is asking students to reconstruct a poem line by line in an exam, so why do we insist on deconstructing a poem line by line.   

Thanks for reading, 

Xris 

P.S. This is a work in progress and I am slowly tweaking and creating as I go along.