image credit: kim eunji (me)
@Sapporo, Hokkaido
The high school students of today is really busy for getting higher grade to get in univercity. The education system of Korea pushes them to do so. They became smart within this system, but they lost their sensitivity. They got intelligence without warm heart. They learned the world of the survival of the fittest, but they hardly learn the world of love. It made Korean education system notice the needs of literature study in high school. But the poems and stories on the textbook is too complicated for the students of high school. Students need literature which are easy to understand and to know the love through it. I, therefore, recommend a poem “To a Daughter Leaving Home” to be taught in the classroom.
The poem is suitable to teach to high school students for it is talking about the love of parents. first, students can think of the feeling of their parents. Parents are trees. They are always there and staring their kids. Even if the kids are leave them, they keep watching their children with love and sadness. And they let the kids be move freely unless they get harmed. It is not because they do not care about their kids. It is because they believe that the kids learn from the failure. They are like shelter where the kids can go when they were hurt. Also, students can reflect themselves. High school students are adolescents. They do not want to stay with their parent. Reading this poem, they can reflect what they had done to their parents. And also notice that the parents is alway wait for them to look back with reading this poem.
Teaching this poem is nice for high school students because there are easy words to understand with usable expressions. first, students can learn some grammatical constructions. In the poem, It says “I Kept waiting”. In this sentence, students can see ‘keep -ing’ form and use it later. And It says “While you grew smaller, more breakable”. With this sentence, students can get the comparative degree form : -er and more -. Also, students can meet new creative expressions in the poem. There are some beautiful expression. One is “as you wobbled away on two round wheels, my own mouth rounding in surprise.” The speaker describes his/her own mouth’s shape like a wheel. And other one is “pumping, pumping for your life,”. The pedal of the bicycle is described the independence of the kid. These kind of metaphor make the reader feel excited.
To sum up, I recommend “To a Daughter Leaving Home” to be taught in high school for two main reason : The message and the linguistic usage of this poem. This poem is telling the love of parents. It can make student to think of their own parents and reflect themselves. By studying this poem, students can learn grammatical construct and creative expressions.
