Originally published in 2014*

Teachers who work with even moderate numbers of students can often quickly identify the students who write well and the students who struggle to write; students who read with solid or even good comprehension and students who struggle to understand what they read, students who might need to re-read a text or discuss each chapter in order to acquire and retain a sense of the whole. This early assessment is a good thing as identifying a student’s weakness lets the teacher meet each student where he is at and tailor the upcoming goals or even whole assignments to the student. For generally when a student has difficulty with the first book, one expects difficulty with the second and third books assigned.

But in my first years teaching for MODG I was taken aback time and again when my students read The Ballad of the White Horse in 11th Grade history. Seemingly bright students floundered, unable to grasp even basic events within the story and were too baffled by the language to even start their essays. Struggling students, while still awkward in their expression, were able to pound out essays with incredible insights. The first few times it happened I chalked it up to the individual students; this bright student had slacked off and gotten distracted, while that struggling student had a secret love of this text or author and had already read it many times. But when it kept happening year after year, I was genuinely curious and started digging into my students’ academic history. A pattern began to emerge. Without regard for native intellect, the students who had a firm grounding in poetry, who had been reading, memorizing and reciting poetry for years, had no difficulty reading The Ballad and apprehending the conflicts, while the students who had little to no exposure to poetry—no matter how academically gifted or formed in other areas—struggled. Poetry seemed to be key. Once stated this may not seem so surprising. The Ballad after all is a work written in varying poetic meter with an alternating rhyme scheme. While this may make it eminently recitable, it simply isn’t the same as reading traditional prose. Interestingly enough, many students can actually enjoy the experience of reading poetic works, but they are so distracted by the form of the language they can’t tell you about the matter that they read.

Consistent exposure to poetry helps to form and strengthen patterns of language in the brain that build on each other over time. Great works of literature, like
Shakespeare, Dante and Milton, will be more easily apprehended and enjoyed when they come on a foundation of Mother Goose, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Children’s poetry isn’t just something cute for recitals and grandparents; it is actually making connections within the brain and those few minutes a day can play a key role in reading comprehension down the road. The importance of reading aloud to one’s children
is stressed everywhere and good prose, of course, is vital in establishing these patterns of language. But good poetry has an important place. It allows rapid exposure to a variety of rich sound patterns; the rhyme schemes and meters make it more easily retained; the vocabulary generally conjures stronger and more vivid images.

I’ve read a lot of children’s rhymes to my son. He was beginning to memorize bits and pieces, but I wasn’t sure how much he was comprehending until he starting reciting phrases with purpose, the fog outside the window was “a misty, moisty morning”, his green soldier was a “slithering man”. Of course we have had our share of toy cars colliding in “explosions of flavor” (thanks to a Doritos commercial), indicating a partial understanding at best. But what matters is that adjectives, participles, alliteration, and dramatic turn of phrase become part of the everyday even though we are still a decade away from the formal study of those terms.

It only takes a few minutes a day, or when life is very busy, a few minutes a week, to lay a very rich foundation for the future study of literature!