How TP-CASTT helps students get poetry

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TP-CASTT (for Title, Paraphrase, Connotation, Attitude, Shift, Title and Theme) is a popular way to teach poetry analysis especially to older students. AP classes use the method frequently. (You can find a TP-CASTT worksheet here.)

I was curious about how my 9th graders would react to the method, which requires a fair bit of digging, certainly more than they did in middle school. We first used "Hay for the Horses," by Gary Snyder about a morning spent toiling in a barn:

He had driven half the night From far down San Joaquin Through Mariposa, up the Dangerous Mountain roads, And pulled in at eight a.m. With his big truckload of hay behind the barn. With winch and ropes and hooks We stacked the bales up clean To splintery redwood rafters High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa Whirling through shingle-cracks of light, Itch of haydust in the sweaty shirt and shoes. At lunchtime under Black oak Out in the hot corral, ---The old mare nosing lunchpails, Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds--- "I'm sixty-eight" he said, "I first bucked hay when I was seventeen. I thought, that day I started, I sure would hate to do this all my life. And dammit, that's just what I've gone and done."

The initial reaction was about what you'd expect: "This is so obvious, Mr. Matters. There's nothing to it. It's about working in the barn." Ok, but let's give this a try. By the time we got through paraphrasing I could see the lights start to flicker, one by one. Then we started connotation and I had the class dig into the first four lines and articulate the picture created in their heads. The discussion went on for at least three minutes. "And he did all that in 20 words," I said. One of the chief complainers then piped up, "Actually, it took him only 18." From that point on they were hooked, and discussion got deeper as we got to attitude and shift. One of the nice things about TP-CASTT is that its structure allows for ranging pretty far afield in discussions yet makes it easy to return to a lesson plan too.

Now I read them a poem every day to end class. The first day everybody talked, By the fourth day they had figured out how to pack up quietly and...listen.