Teach This Poem is a weekly series featuring a poem from our online poetry collection, accompanied by interdisciplinary resources and activities designed to help K-12 teachers quickly and easily bring poetry into the classroom.
Resource: “The Five Conflicts Driving the Bulk of the World’s Refugee Crisis” by Megan Specia. This article was published in The New York Times on June 19, 2018.
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.
In a lecture called “Tide of Voices: Why Poetry Matters Now,” Mark Doty speaks about the importance of poetry during crisis. He says, “The project of poetry, in a way, is to raise language to such a level that it can convey the precise nature of subjective experience. That the listener would envision not just a mouse but this particular one, in all its exact specificity, its perfect details. Such enchanted language could magically dissolve the barrier of skin and bone and separateness between us.” Read more.