TEACHING METHOD: English for Craft Students —5

The very mention of poetry, poems or verse immediately suggests to craft students something superior, something beyond their ken, something ‘soppy’. The reasons for this attitude are not hard to find, for the culture of our society has not been given to them in a natural way. With poetry, for example, there is no tradition of daily readings, followed, when the poems have become part of their mental make up, by any necessary explanations. There is rather this obtrusive, banal method of teaching in the most ham‐handed way a handful of poems, so that when a fifteen— or sixteen‐year‐old lad enters a craft course or a course preliminary to a craft course, any natural enthusiasm has long since waned, and an attitude of opposition or uninterestedness — it may be positive or negative — has taken its place and has to be dealt with.