Using Haiku to teach diction and tone

[Rob_Hugo@PortNW]

This year, I will be teaching the short story "Seventeen Syllables" to my 11th graders in English class. The story centers around a teenager whose mother becomes briefly obsessed with writing haiku. Since I will be teaching this at the beginning of the school year, I will be using the text as an avenue for teaching students to analyze diction and tone in texts. After they have mastered this form of analysis, I will be teaching them to use diction to create tone in their own writing.

I thought it would be useful to employ haiku in both teaching analysis and appliction. The brevity of the individual texts makes it easy to look at a wide number of them in class, but more importantly places additional emphasis on the specific words and connotations that are incorporated into the poetry. This website seems to provide a nice variety of examples of haikus and also provides a number of links to blogs and poets that students can look to for further study.

http://www.haiku.com/
edited by nguillen on 5/20/2013

[Anonymous]

I think I will have my students read this article, published by Stanford University's Program on International and Cross-Cultural Education, to gain some historical context on the background and origins of haiku. (Said practice will also allow me to mix narrative and expository texts to support the aims of common core standards.) This text also provides biographical information on Basho and makes suggestions for how to write Haiku with students. There is also a bibliography at the end that might be useful for future study.

http://spice.stanford.edu/docs/138

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