Poetry Analysis--Now with Rap Music

"And since we all came from a woman
Got our name from a woman and our game from a woman
I wonder why we take from our women
Why we rape our women, do we hate our women?
I think it's time to kill for our women
Time to heal our women, be real to our women"
"Keep Ya Head Up"--Tupac Shakur

Ah, poetry.  It's the unit that all students love to hate.  This has always confused me because the students (for the most part) listen to poetry on Spotify or the radio almost every day, and music is one of my hottest "selling" items during independent work time.

Back in Virginia, I used Bob Marley's "No Woman No Cry" to introduce John Donne's "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning" and it spread through the English department like wildfire.  Here in Nebraska, I'm working with a younger crowd on different goals.  According to the NSCAS, these are the major goals:  

AND

To get student buy-in (which is difficult with poetry), I started using popular music.  We start by analyzing the lyrics for literary devices and then move to summarizing the main idea and then finally conjuring up a theme. At first we do this worksheet together as a class analyzing "The Message" by Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five. 

Then, we move to independent analysis.  As always, this is a blended lesson where students can choose what they want to work on by genre.  The classes were asked to pick ONE of the songs to analyze.

Finally, they pick an individual assignment to work on independently (and then self-check answers in a peer group).   Finally, they work t to choose one of five poems/songs.  These become the basis for our comparison contrast essays.    

Link to Lesson Plans