12.02 - Illustrated Stanzas

At the beginning of class today, I shared a mailer that I received from the Ayn Rand Institute to promote Rand's works. We reviewed the definition of Objectivism (the rational pursuit of one's own happiness). As a group we read over the mailer and then everyone responded to the following prompt question in their writer's journal:

Is this sort of promotion in keeping with the ideals of Objectivism or does it go against them? Explain your response.

Extra time: What do you think about this sort of promotion (fun contest? tacky ad? clever marketing?)

After everyone had a chance to respond to this prompt, we discussed students' responses.

Next, we transitioned to working with our Poetry Out Loud poems.

I talked a little about memorization and how a key to memorization is connecting with what you are memorizing in different ways. One way that people have found helpful in connecting to something they have to memorize is to clearly visualize what they are saying.

To engage this memorization technique I provided students with an illustrated stanza sheet for their poem. I described how to go about completing this sheet. It is important for drawings to be detailed so that each person is developing clear visual imagery to go with their poem. This does not mean someone has to be a good artist, they just have to have a drawing with plenty of detail. I used the first stanza of my poem "To a Mouse" as an example in class (see below).

(Click image to enlarge)

Illustrations should have more detail (be much fancier) than this illustration.
Due to time constraints, I sketched out the first few ideas for my illustration.

Everyone then had the next 25 minutes to write out and illustrate the stanzas/visual sections of their poem. At the end of class, we went around and everyone shared out what their poem was and what they felt it was about.

Homework:

If you did not do so in class, finish your illustrated stanza sheet for your poem.

Complete missing work and revise any assignment that scored below a 92.

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