Describing myself...Who am I?

Love – Indifference – Devotion

Love – Indifference – Devotion
How much do you give for love?

Twenty’s Century has been an important period within literature. Novels, short stories, poems and essays have marked this period in writing. British literature has a rich variety of authors and in this course we have studied the most important ones, such as Keats, Woolf, Dickens, Lawrence and Auden. We mainly worked on poems and throughout them, we discovered how rich British Literature is. There are several interesting topics and we had fascinating discussions thanks to them.

What called my attention was the delicate use of words in poems and the impact of them in people’s life. Last term I wrote about how to appreciate poetry and one of the most important things is assuming it as a way of expression. For that reason poetry is an interesting manner to bring literature inside our EFL classroom. As we saw in classes, poems are much shorter than novels and short stories. Hence, they can be read completely to understand them better. Furthermore, there are lots of topics inside of them as those ones seen in classes such as death, industrialization, desolation, loneliness, within others. But, from all the writers studied, I really liked Auden’s way of writing, because he showed extremely current; for instance society, oppression, loneliness, love and revenge.

Wystan Hugh Auden is an Anglo-American poet, who born in England and then he received the American nationality. His poems were mainly focus on society’s issues and treated with psychological point of view. Irony, psychology, lyric and consciousness were part of his style. After reading September 1, 1939 I was engaged with him. But, in this opportunity I have chosen another Auden’s poem calls “The More Loving One”

I personally believe that this poem is an excellent work to bring literature into the classroom. First of all, The More Loving One talks about devotion, indifference and love, even if you do not receive it in return. Second, we can highlight the idea of losing someone to make her/ him happy. When you love, you give everything even the idea of loosing all. Finally, it is short and it has a comprehensible language, that allows students to get the idea quickly.

After showing the advantages of The More Loving One by W.H, you need to know how to deal with it in an EFL classroom. Possibly, love is seen as a simple theme in our life and in some way it is. But, when we think that there are so many people in love and they do not receive it in return, this simplicity is not understood by these “thinkers”. So, you start to notice different bitter loving issues, not just the rose color side. Therefore, as you can see in this poem, there are a variety of topics to be seen in classes just by talking about love. For me, that is the marvellous characteristic of literature. It allows us to discuss, think, reflect, know, learn and select. Penny Ur suggests the idea of showing literature as window of knowing cultures, religions, beliefs, folklore and language itself.

One of the best approaches to bring literature in the classroom is the Reader-Centered Approach. Shortly, this approach emphasizes the individual as a reader responder. It argues that collaboration between authors, the reader is the best way to reach an appropriate understanding and use of literary texts. The main objective in this case of showing The More Loving One is to encourage interpretation, personal responses from the reader and applicability of students’ own contexts. As themes are not easy to talk about them, the activity is ideally for 11th graders.

As the objective of the reading is personal responses and applicability in own contexts. The teacher can promote book discussions by asking interpretation and application question. For example:
• Select the main topics of the poem. (In this case love, indifference, devotion)
• Relate the topics with your own life: Have you ever been in love? Have you ever suffered for love?
• What do you think about the writer’s opinion?

Also, we can work with oral interpretation and oral presentations. As my style of teaching is very dynamic and I like moving, dancing and I use lot of body language. I would like to see students working on reader’s theater, puppet thetaer and role plays. Students pick up one or two important and appealing topic from the poem and they create one of these possible representations. In these activities, it is important students’ creativity, voices, expressive language, gesture and a good development of the conflict. Learners need to use their understanding and interpretation of the literary text.

If the class is divided in groups and there are few students who do not want to make these presentations, they can analyze the poem and tell us what they understand from it. They can make questions about it for the rest of the class. They can write a short paper with their own experiences about love or write about what they think about one specific theme from the poem.
Having in mind all these activities from the Reader-Centered approach, bringing literature to the classroom should not be as complicated as it was some years ago. Even though most of the poems are short, it does not mean that they are easier to work with. Poets use very complex words. However, The More Loving One has a clear language and a clear narrator to be understood easier than others. But, we do not have to judge and work with the complexity or simplicity of the literary texts. We need to work with them, because they help students to understand their society better, specially with W.H Auden. He wrote about current issues, hence I chose him to work with my high-school students.

In short, during this term I have learned lots of techniques to bring literature to the classroom, not matters if the work is long or short. The most important issue is paying attention of our students. In other words, what they need, what appropriate for their ages is, what proficiency they have and what objectives I have from showing them literature. As a future English teacher, I must know that I am not just a teacher of one specific language. Moreover, the language is not grammar and syntax only. Language is culture and culture is in literature. Thus… Do you put literature away from your classes?








Bibliography
• Ur, Penny. A Course in Language Teaching. Part III: Teaching the Language. Cambrigde: Cambridge University Press. 2007
• Ur, Penny. Language Activities for Teenagers. Cambridge university Press. Cambridge. 2007
• Chi-Fen Emily Chen. Department of English, National Kaohsiung First University of Science and Technology. Children’s Literature. 15 Nov 2009.

• House, Random. Academy of American Poets. The More Loving One. 1960. 25 Nov 2009
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15550

Outline

Intro:
- W.H Auden's way of writing
- Why did I choose him?
- The More Loving One

Body:
- What the poem is about
- Main topics
- How to bring them in a ESL classroom
- Activities

Conclu

W.H Auden (September 1, 1939)

I did not have idea about W.H Auden and his way of writing. Therefore, when my teacher brought his poetry to the class, it was y first time to face him and I really liked him. I appreciate his honesty in September 1, 1939. I like him because he writes about social and political issues that impact our lives. The most interesting issue is seeing that the problems highlited by him still happen, which make the poem more meaningful for me. Nationalism, Imperialism and Power are still present and make people passive. People do not want to change because they think that what the mass is doing is okay.
"Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return"

These two lines called my attention and probably most of my classmates attention, because the idea of receiving and doing is so strong in our society. If someone lives bad experiences, he or she will act in the same way. Thus, our profession is so important. Teachers must be very carefull with words and acts, because we are models and students are imitating us all the time. If we do something bad, they will do so as well. Lack of assertiveness is a common issue in people's personality. Sometimes we tend to act spontaneously and avoid cynicism,however we arenot assertive and we hurt someone else's feelings easily.
What makes me think from the poem is Auden's thoughts about society and about people's own worlds. As we have learned during our life at the university at least, a society is constructed by us and we need to share ideas and struggle for the same goal.

Daniela's post (T.S Eliot The Waste Land)

I think Daniela's comments about The Waste Land by T.S Eliot need more development. I did not understand her comment about language mixture. She could develop this idea a little bit more just by telling us why she thinks that. I agree when she stated that the poem is difficult to understand. In fact the poem is complex, perhaps because of its different narrators and episodes.
Daniela used a beautiful quote from the poem and maybe the most memorable one "April is the cruellest month". She thinks that the author uses nature to touch our feelings and emotions and I completely agree with this possible issue. However, I think she could give us a better explanation about the quote. She could take more advantages of it.For instance, what kinds of feelings and emotions the quote emphasizes according to her owns. Sometimes the comment of the poem is not so easy to follow, but it could be because it needs more work.

The Waste Land (T.S Eliot)

T.S Eliot is an important writer in our world; his new way of writing was a contribution to contemporary literature. What called my attention immediately were the subtitles of the poem, which ones were analysed in classes.
In my opinion the poem is very complex because it is too long and with different episodes. Even though, there is a connexion between them, there are different narrators who make the plot a little bit confusing, specially for beginner in these kinds of poems. If we consider that the poem is situated in Europe during the War we can understand its darkness. Throughout the five episodes there is a relation between death, confusion, pain, nothingness, suffering and modernity. The author makes an excellent job and he situates us in people’s feelings during those times. People did not know what they can do to survive in that waste land. There were not motivations for them. They were in a completely nothingness, meanwhile Europe seemed to walk towards modernity and it continues happening. Meanwhile some people enjoy, other ones suffer in the same context and situation.

D.H Lawrence

I really enjoyed reading these two short stories from H.D Lawrence. I had not idea about him and his way of writing.

Personally, I like his way of showing us strong topics such as greed, luck, family conflicts and so on, because he develops these issues in a very strong main story. I also like the end of “The Rocking Horse Winner”, because it is completely unexpected. Naturally, after reading the short stories I reflected on them and both let us think forwards. How much money do we need? How much family support do we need? How much abuse are we able to bear?

What called my attention was that both stories end with a death. Perhaps, this is a Lawrence way of putting problems out. In other words, in his style he cut the main issue with death, because it is a way of saying that another story will be written after this matter.