The Beat Goes On

Yesterday's teaching experience was a tad disappointing. I should qualify this: the kids, generally, were energetic and active enough, but it was more than a bit frustrating that so few of the kids these days have 'good ears' for poetry. We spent the class talking --at great length-- about sound: about the implications of sound, stresses and unstresses, inflections and tonalities, and so on and so forth; really, basic scansion and poetic reading. Unfortunately, in a course where the kids are having beats and such emphasized so strongly, most of them have only vaguest ideas on where to put accents and where not to put them, and on and on. The sound lesson entirely eclipsed the material that we were supposed to do on Shakespeare's sonnets. I'm relatively sure in the end that the class was useful for the kids, and that they've now given at least some thought to the rudiments of sound to sense, but I felt in many ways like I was conducting a vaudeville show. At one point, I even forced three of my poor minions to say the words "I love you" to the class in as convincing a manner as possible; yes, this was a desperate attempt to get them to understand the difficulties of inflection and rhythm cadence, but it was desperate. Oy... Suffice it to say that I may have laid some important groundwork for the term, but it does not bode well for the rest of the course. If such elementary things have to be dealt with so exhaustively, I wonder how well we really progress with the pace of doing a play a week.

This leads me to a larger musing: the extent to which kids today read everything as if it were prose. Our culture has become so removed from the cadences of speech and poetic effect that there's an endemia of 'tin ear syndrome.' I don't really blame the kids. I have to give them credit: they were eager in approaching the subject, and they seemed to have some fun (and some intellectual profit) from the whole exercise. The class, though, lived up to the title I'd given it, but in entirely the opposite way than I'd expected. I had planned to use the Frostian notion of the line that 'scans itself' (that directs readers how to read it) in relation to a few sample lines-- from Dryden, Eliot, Frost, Leigh Hunt, and even (no kidding) Bart Simpson. The consideration of these lines, though, wound up consuming the class time; we never really did get much to Shakespeare. It's appropriate then that I called the class "Doing A Few Lines," which really did feel like a kind of drug-inflected experience. Oy vey.

But, people of the world: please, for the sake of English teachers if for nothing else civilizing or cultured, prick up your ears, both inner and outer! Remember the things you used to know about sound and rhythm and cadence, all the stuff you learned from jumping rope and bouncing children on your knees and singing nursery rhymes. I sometimes think the broad popularity of things like rap and hip-hop and so forth have so untuned our ears that we don't hear the music implicit in the way we speak and we way we read. The metrical monotonality of such forms of music seem to me have helped to dampen our alertness to such matters. Take back your ears, people! Take back the sound!

Now Dr J will step down from his soap-box and sulk about the end of civilization as we know it. ;-)