Teach This Poem, though developed with a classroom in mind, can be easily adapted for remote-learning, hybrid-learning models, or in-person classes. Please see our suggestions for how to adapt this lesson for remote or blended learning. We have also noted suggestions when applicable and will continue to add to these suggestions online.
Listen to “Weary Blues” played by Duke Ellington and Johnny Hodges.
The following activities and questions are designed to help your students use their noticing skills to move through the poem and develop their thinking about its meaning with confidence, using what they’ve noticed as evidence for their interpretations. Read more about the framework upon which these activities are based.
“‘An artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he must choose.’ Freedom of creative expression, whether personal or collective, is one of the many legacies of Hughes, who has been called ‘the architect’ of the black poetic tradition.” Read an introduction to Langston Hughes.
Enjambment: the continuation of a sentence or clause across one poetic line break. Read more.