Gangsta'S Paradise Meaning Movie Cars And

So prayers for him I brought home a ton of papers to grade and got none done yesterday, so thats my life today.

Every year, I try to open my sophomore poetry unit with music.

When I mention we are beginning poetry, the kids usually groan with dread, I think for a couple reasons: 1.

They are bored by it and feel they cant relate to any of these old white guys writing poetry; 2.

To try and contradict both of those pre-conceived notions, I try to show them other forms of poetry that contradict what their idea of poetry is and show them they may like poetry more than they think.

I first printed off this PDF that has a bunch of authors definitions of what poetry is.

My best teaching advice is to beg, borrow, and steal ideas instead of reinventing the wheel.

I searched What is poetry on Google Scholar to get more scholarly articles and resources coming up and this was the second result-perfect).

Then I had each group try and write their own definition of poetry.

Which I LOVED because I want to CHALLENGE their ideas of poetry in this unit.

So then I passed out a handout that had selection 1, 2, and 3 on it.

How do you think the author felt about this topic when writing (tone) 3.

What is the central message of this selection (them) I did not let on that I was going to play music, so they were pleasantly surprised when the first bars of Rascal Flatts Life is a Highway came out of my laptop.

Gangsta'S Paradise Meaning Movie Cars And

Plus they know it from the movie Cars and our school has a huge population of country music lovers.

A new song I added this year was Katy Perrys Firework for my pop selection.

I played most of that song and they answered those questions.

So I took a risk and used an older song that I wasnt sure if they would know or not: Gangstas Paradise by Coolio.

Plus it actually has a theme and life lesson, unlike many rap songs today.

To my pleasant surprise, a couple kids knew all the words, and at the very least, all had heard of it.

I felt super old when I saw this song was released in 95 and my students werent even born yet) They loved that I brought in music and had fun listening to the songs.

Then after we talked about things like Can music be poetry Does it fit our requirements How is it like poetry We ran out of time that day, but the next day I gave them a list of literary terms like metaphor, simile, etc., as well as printed out all these song lyrics and each group got one song to pick out as many literary devices as they could.

This is just one thing I do to try and make poetry more entertaining.

After we get through all the required poetry forms, I do a mini-unit on modern-day slam poetry as well and show some slam poem clips on YouTube (I will post those coming up), and we host our own poetry slam in class.

Its pretty fun. Poetry doesnt have to be the bane of your existence Well it has been a stressful weekend in the L household.

Good news is, he is improving and they are thinking it may be infection, not stroke.