The examples Sheridan Blau provides from his teaching experience, especially his teaching poetry are very clear and easy to follow. I especially enjoyed the case scenario in the introduction with Wordsworth’s “My heart Leaps Up.” In addition to the step by step process he had the students follow, his discussion on how much we need to to know about the author in order to understand the poem took me back to our class discussions on how much information do we need to know on the author. The case that Blau was presenting suggested that knowing about the author is not really necessary and can at times be misleading. I agree that students are capable of understanding a poem without knowing the background of the author or certain terms, but I also believe that knowing the definition of certain terms during the poet’s lifetime can actually help students with understanding a poem.

Blau does a nice job defining a poet’s task of simplifying complex matters into a few lines. The student/reader’s task is to decode the concepts within those lines. “Poetic difficulty” is universal, and students from every culture are forced to experience this difficulty. The art of the teacher is to help them understand that poetry is difficult, yet the students are capable of understanding them if they focus.

Blau’s discussion on page 23 on why teachers may skip difficult text reminded me of my own teachers. When learning poetry, many of my teachers would put so much emphasis on making the class memorize and learn the author’s biographical information, that it really took my focus away from possible deeper meanings within a poem. My understandings of poetry were limited to the penciled in translations above each line in a poem we were studying dictated to us by the teacher. Our essays about a poem only expanded on those definitions and meanings and explained why they work. I was content and felt safe when the teacher would give me the right answer, and when left alone I feared to think of deeper meanings in a poem. Although I agree with Laura on the matter of lecturing, in fact I believe students have to be lectured. But I believe that any form of lecturing should be short, say twenty minutes or so. Something that will not cause students to doze off and just write down anything they hear just to stay awake. In many of the lectures I would just write so many notes without understanding a word the teacher was saying. My plan was to go home and figure everything out on my own, and then compare it to the lectures.