Nishant Kumar
Started the club
No prior knowledge, no shame, and nobody quoting theory at you. Start here. This is a Chaptra house club — set up and moderated by us to get the conversation going. Open to everyone; jump in anywhere.
A poem arrives as a puzzle with a correct answer that the teacher already has. You guess at the symbolism, you get it wrong, you learn that poetry is a test you fail.
It takes most people twenty years to recover, and plenty never do.
What put you off — and if you came back, what brought you back?
Editorial, defending teachers slightly.
The problem isn't teaching poetry, it's assessing it. The moment a poem has to generate a mark, it needs a correct answer, and a poem with a correct answer isn't doing what poems do.
Blame the mark scheme rather than the classroom.
Book Desk: which is why people often come back through song lyrics — nobody ever made them write four hundred words on what a chorus symbolised.
"Blame the mark scheme" is the fairest version of this we've seen.