Jackie Kay learning resources
Exploring Gap Year and Divorce with your pupils
Senior phase (ages 14-16)
Resources created by Gordon Fisher (PT English at Lochend High School) and Scottish Book Trust
Contents
Pre-reading activities 2
Comparing Jackie Kay with other poets 3
Comparing Jackie Kay’s poems 10
Approaching the final question in the critical reading paper 14
For a writing piece 16
About these resources
The following resources are designed to support both practitioners and learners. They aim to allow learners to apply and build on the skills they learn in English: Analysis and Evaluation (N5) and which are sampled by way of Section 2 Critical Reading Part 2 of the external assessment. To achieve this the resources are designed to encourage learners to work collaboratively and actively, but, taking into account the external assessment, also place emphasis on the importance of being able to work independently.
These resources are activity suggestions to help you explore Gap Year and Divroce by Jackie Kay. Feel free to adapt the activities and use them as you see fit. The resources have been developed to help you get the most out of our online Authors Live event with Jackie Kay, but you can use them at any point to engage pupils with the Jackie’s work and with poetry in general.
About Jackie Kay
Biographical information can be found at the following webpages:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackie_Kay
http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poets/jackie-kay
A whole host of other writing outlining her thoughts and feelings on a range of topics, themes and issues, many of which relate to subject matter raised in her poetry, can be found here:
http://www.theguardian.com/profile/jackiekay
Pre-reading activities
Find out about Jackie Kay
The ability to work independently is of course a prerequisite of the course. To that end, using the websites suggested above, pupils should be challenged to present individually biographical information about Jackie Kay. This could be in the form of a short piece of continuous prose, a timeline, an imaginary newspaper/magazine interview, a PowerPoint presentation, a photo and musical montage, or any other appropriate way.
Exploring pupils’ views of parenthood
Show your pupils some or all of the following videos, which should hopefully give them an idea of the experience of parenthood:
· Becoming a dad at 15: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auRURAbHJwM&feature=youtu.be
· One Born Every Minute – becoming a mum: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTfNBrX5jjE
· Musician Jed Milroy on becoming a dad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUiBTR_u7yI
These videos should hopefully give an impression that parenthood is hard work but rewarding. Ask your pupils to answer the following questions privately:
· Why do you think people want to become parents?
· What do you think are the challenges and rewards of being a parent?
· What do you think it’s like as a parent to watch your child grow up and leave home?
Once pupils have had a chance to think about the experience of being a parent, you could try using one of the following short writing tasks if you want to try and develop their emotional investment in the poem:
· Imagine you are writing a letter to your eight year old self. Explain the challenges that teenage years will bring and try to give advice on how to face them.
· Write about a time where you were responsible for caring for someone. How did you find this experience?
· Try to imagine yourself as a parent in years to come. Outline all the hopes you would have for your child.
· Think of a time you had to spend time away from someone you care about. What was the experience like? Was it difficult? Did time apart benefit your relationship?
Comparing Jackie Kay with other poets
This section will encourage pupils to look at Gap Year alongside work by other poets. There are two main learning aims for doing this:
· By comparing Jackie Kay’s work with another poet, pupils will become more confident at identifying Kay’s style and themes;
· Pupils will have a chance to look at different poems and say which they like better, giving them a greater feeling of personal engagement with Kay’s work and poetry in general.
Both of these aims spring from the hope that pupils will engage more actively as a result of doing the upcoming tasks.
Introducing the poems
Introduce your pupils to three poems:
· Gap Year by Jackie Kay: http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poetry/poems/gap-year
· My Son the Man by Sharon Olds: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178285
· Home Again, Home Again by Marilyn L. Taylor: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/241372
In groups, get your pupils to discuss which poem they liked best. Ask one person from each group to feed back to the class about their group’s likes and dislikes.
Next, get them to answer the following questions about each poem – you may want to modify the wording of the questions. We’ve provided notes for the two lesser known poems:
Gap Year
· Do you think that the speaker of the poem is happy that her son is travelling? Try and find two quotes which suggest that she feels positively about it, and two quotes which suggest that she is finding it hard. Explain how each quote shows the feelings of the speaker.
My Son the Man
Teacher’s notes: this poem seems to present a mostly negative perspective on the fact that the speaker’s son is growing up. The final three lines seem to suggest that the speaker feels her son no longer needs her. However, this is completely open to interpretation.
· How do you think the speaker of the poem feels about the fact that her son is becoming an adult?
· The last three lines of the poem are very unusual. Why do you think the speaker is making this comparison?
Home Again, Home Again
Teacher’s notes: in this poem a lively meter is used despite the misfortunes of the children, perhaps to convey the parents’ almost inappropriate happiness to see their children back in the house. Our view is that the poem almost trivialises the children’s misfortunes by reducing them to a list. But again, this is all open to interpretation from you and your pupils!
· How would you describe the rhythm and pace of this poem? In your opinion, what kind of mood is created by the rhythm and pace? Do you think this is the right mood for the poem?
· The line, ‘The children are back’ is constantly repeated. Why do you think this might be?
· Much of this poem is written as a list. What effect does this create for you?
After this, get pupils to answer the following questions (they can do so in groups, pairs or as individuals):
· What would you say are the major differences in each speaker’s attitude to parenthood and their children?
· Can you find words and phrases in each poem which illustrate these differences?
· Now you’ve got to know each poem a little better, what is your personal reaction to each of the three speakers and their descriptions of how they feel?
Jackie Kay’s style in Gap Year
This task will help hopefully help pupils to see the intimacy of Gap Year and how this is reflected in the tone of the poem. It should also help pupils to see that even small words which they might consider unimportant are often just as important as more “striking” words.
Ask pupils to use a highlighter to mark each time Kay uses the word “I” in the first section of the poem.
Then, ask them to read through the section a second time and, with a different colour, highlight each time she uses the word “You”.
Can they think of a reason or reasons why she has used these short simple words so often?
Taking into account what they have discovered so far, can they decide why Jackie Kay chose “Gap Year” as the title for this work? Can they detect a double-meaning?
Parents and Children
As your pupils now know, “Gap Year” focuses on the relationship between a mother and her son who is off travelling around the world.
The mood of the speaker changes as the poem develops. In groups, ask pupils to try to categorise the feeling of the mother at each stage.
They may wish to enter their findings on a table such as the one below.
Mateo really is a long way from home, which undoubtedly adds to his mother’s feeling of a ‘gap’, but probably also increases her sense of wonder at her son’s progress into adulthood. To help pupils appreciate this, you could ask them to research all the places Mateo visits and download images to produce an illustrated version of the poem.
Structural Stage/Event / Mother’s FeelingsBefore the birth / Longing, excitement, anticipation
The difficult birth
Mateo’s travels
Grandfather’s comments
His late homecoming
The photos at the end / Happiness, pride
Deconstructing the text
Ask your pupils to read the opening section of the poem and the annotations in the comment boxes.
I remember your Moses basket before you were born.
I’d stare at the fleecy white sheet for days, weeks,
willing you to arrive, hardly able to believe
I would ever have a real baby to put in the basket.
I’d feel the mound of my tight tub of a stomach,
and you moving there, foot against my heart,
elbow in my ribcage, turning, burping, awake, asleep.
One time I imagined I felt you laugh.
It’s the pupils’ turn!
In pairs, ask pupils to select a stanza from the poem – you might want to divide this up amongst the learners to ensure that the whole poem is being covered.
You can use a regular copy of the poem or perhaps create an enlargement so that the annotations are easy to see.
Alternatively you could create a word document that can be shared and discussed with your pupils. If you choose this method ask them to follow these simple steps.
1. Open a word document of the poem
2. Click on the Review tab at the top of the page
3. Highlight the part of the text you are selecting for annotation
4. Go to the toolbar at the top of the page and click New Comment
5. Add your annotations to the comment box on the poem’s right hand side.
Lines of poetry
Lines of poetry end in two ways: they finish with a punctuation mark (end-stopped lines) or they have no punctuation mark (run-on lines or enjambment).
Ask your pupils to look at the opening line of the poem which is of course end-stopped:
I remember your Moses basket before you were born.
This line sounds complete in itself, it is a statement that needs no other qualification to create its meaning. We could also comment on the tone that this opening end-stopped line creates. Ask your pupils, what is that tone or tones?
Now ask them to look at the third and fourth lines of the poem
Willing you to arrive, hardly be able to believe
I would ever have a real baby to put in the basket.
A run-on line often creates a sense of anticipation or expectation and forces the reader to ask some questions: what is going to happen next? What emotions are going to be revealed? Is the tone going to change? And so on.
In these lines the word “believe” is poisoned at the end of the line without a punctuation mark so we know that the meaning is not finished and we ask ourselves just what is it that she can hardly believe? Our curiosity is immediately satisfied by the revelation that the baby did indeed arrive. Ask your pupils, to what extent does the tone change at this point as a result of this run-on line?
It’s the pupils’ turn again!
On the next page is a table with six lines: some end-stopped and some run-on.
Ask them to complete the table in pairs, identifying which type of line they is used and commenting on its impact.
Line / End-stopped or run-on / Impactelbow in my ribcage, turning, burping, awake, asleep.
now I peek in your room and stare at your bed
hardly able to imagine you back in there sleeping.
Then on to Lima, to Cuzco. Your grandfather
rings:
Seeing you, shy, smiling, on the webcam reminds me
of the second scan at twenty weeks, how at that fuzzy
moment back then, you were lying cross-legged with
an index finger resting sophisticatedly on one cheek.
… you take a photograph of yourself with the statue
of the original Tupac.
I have a son out in the big wide world.
Write a poem from Mateo’s point of view
This activity should help pupils to understand better some of the techniques Kay has used in her poem by asking them to employ some of those techniques in a poem of their own.
Ask them to take a copy of Gap Year and imagine that they are Mateo and they can hear their mother talking to them (and their grandfather talking to her!). They can use the following for guidance when writing a poem from Mateo to his mother:
· Write down what you would say to your mother in each stanza of the poem.
· Would you try to reassure her? Tell her that she is worrying over nothing? Tell her that you love her for being so concerned and for being a great mum?