'For Better for Verse': Learning Meter Interactively

There's been so much great poetry and book news this week that I'm struggling a little to keep up with it all! First off, an essay of mine has appeared in the newest issue of the online arts journal, Escape Into Life. I've admired the work of the editors and artists at EIL for some time, and it was exciting for me to get a chance to write for them. The essay has to do with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and with how literary mash-ups are a new form of literary criticism.

Too much poetry news is never a bad thing, but it does mean that choices have to be made about what makes it to the blog and what gets put off for another week. Today's post, however, was a no-brainer. A new tool from the University of Virginia Department of English, in partnership with their tech-savvy library, allows users to interactively assign traditional markers of meter to poetry. The interface, wryly called For Better for Verse, then checks your work to see if you've correctly assigned the stress, feet, meter, and rhyme. Screenshot after the jump:

Technological Literacy: The Most Important Gift We Can Give to Children

Few things are as inspiring as watching a kid soak up information. They can process new ideas and concepts at a staggering velocity. From a young age, the children of the world are bombarded with things to learn. These learning experiences come from a wide range of sources: for starters there's the education system itself, the ubiquitous advertising industry, and the unparalleled influence of parents. Despite the positive or negative influence of these large-scale educational efforts, there's a much deeper education going on behind the scenes. Both implicitly and explicitly, kids learn on their own, and they teach each other what they know.

For the better part of the last three decades, that's the main way kids have learned about technology. Like sex education in the 1950s, technology in the 80s and 90s was a subject most parents hardly ever broached with their children, and was only taught in schools in the most broad, generic terms.

Middle School English Teacher Uses iPhones as Teaching Tools

There's an episode of Boy Meets World in which 'cool' English teacher Mr. Turner assigns hapless Cory Matthews to read an issue of X-Men along with The Odyssey. [I seem to be on a sitcom kick this week.] Besides establishing Mr. Turner as the kid-savvy anti-Feeny, the episode was a demonstration that learning can respect both long-honored traditions and new trends.

Well, it turns out that a North Carolinian schoolteacher is trying the same tack, updated for the 21st century.

"60 Second Recap" Pipes Classic Literature Directly to Teens

At one point or another, even the most scholarly among us has turned to Cliffs or Spark Notes to summarize or clarify a class reading assignment. As good as these resources are at clearing up the confusing plots and characters of the books we've all been forced to read, they are too often resorted to out of laziness. Jenny Sawyer's new site, 60 Second Recap, has found a way to clarify books while making them more appealing to teens, not less.

Poetry Competition Inspires Kids to Slam

Among the many things that the US government is doing to promote poetry, the National Endowment for the Arts, in partnership with the Poetry Foundation, has a great program for kids across the country known as Poetry Out Loud.

Many of you are educators who may already know about this program, which has been in operation since 2006. But for those of you aren't familiar with it, here's how they describe their mission:

Recitation and performance are major new trends in poetry. There has been a recent resurgence of poetry as an oral art form, as seen in the slam poetry movement and the immense popularity of hip-hop music. Poetry Out Loud builds on that momentum by inviting the dynamic aspects of slam poetry, spoken word, and theater into the English class.

The National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation have partnered with State Arts Agencies of the United States to support the expansion of Poetry Out Loud, which encourages the nation's youth to learn about great poetry through memorization and performance. This exciting program helps students master public speaking skills, build self-confidence, and learn about their literary heritage.

Not only is this program a fantastic way to get kids excited about poetry, its website is also chock full of additional resources for students and teachers. The site is a great destination for kids who want to know more about poetry: it features a poet of the day, a great audio guide to poetry, and a nice collection of classic poems for new poetry readers. The teachers' section of the site has an excellent set of lesson plans and writing activities to seamlessly incorporate the competition into the classroom.

Government often puts a lot of emphasis on science and math education, and while these subjects are important, a solid grounding in poetry can be just as essential: fun, illuminating, and empowering. The resources at the Poetry Out Loud website, and the competition itself, showcase the ways in which people across the US are taking a stand for poetry in the classroom.