Project Goals

This project began as an attempt to improve the teaching of rhythm analysis in Poetry and Poetics, a sophomore level English class, taken by most majors and many non-majors. It has been a heavily over enrolled class for many years, making extensive one-on-one work with students very difficult. These enrollment issues have proven particularly difficult when it comes to teaching rhythm, which I see as central to the understanding of poetry in particular and language more generally. I believe the tutorial would be beneficial even if the enrollment pressures were not present because the tutorial allows students to move through the materials at their own speed; it requires less class time to explain the rules and processes for analysis so that more time can be spent in class discussing the interpretive results of their analysis; and it gives students immediate feedback on their work, allowing them to know either that they have understood the material or that they need to study the text, examples and exercises again before moving on.

In the past, using a more conventional approach to rhythm, students would sometimes think they had grasped the principles of phonology or meter only to discover when outside of class that the particular exercise stumped them. Rather than having to wait until they returned to class or to my office to have input on their work or completing exercises inadequately, they can now turn back to the tutorial. My aim has been to allow students to approach rhythm not simply as a technical aspect of poetry, an added or decorative dimension that merely supports questions of theme, speaker, figurative language and the like, but as the primary means of organizing our experience of temporality. Hence, I have sought means of teaching students the necessarily technical aspects of rhythm and meter in order to enable them to address larger questions having to do with the way rhythm organizes all aspects of poetry, from the syllable all the way up to the poem as a whole. 

Creating the Tutorial

The tutorial I designed consists of an explanatory text with integrated examples and interactive exercises. It also includes a glossary of terms using textual links that can be accessed at any point in the program, a bibliography and lists of sources for the examples and exercises. In addition, my student programmer has provided technical documentation on the Java script programming he used so that others can understand how the program is designed and how it might be improved in the future. The interactive exercises, which are the most innovative part of the program from a technical standpoint, work by giving the student a word, a phrase, a line or a group of lines to analyze by one of two methods (Attridge's beat-offbeat approach or generative metrics). The program displays the mark-up symbols with the material to be analyzed, including stress, syntax, meter and rhythm, and students choose the symbols they think represent the most appropriate answer. When they have completed the exercise they indicate they are finished and the computer tells them whether they have correctly answered; it will also display the correct answer.

To create the tutorial, I worked closely with two students, Nicholas Anderson, a sophomore English major, and Gretchen Pfeil, a junior linguistics major. Nick worked primarily on the technical, programming issues while Gretchen worked more on content, web page design and examples. Nick had major hurdles to overcome on the technical side because getting the computer to faithfully reproduce the mark-up symbols and to understand when an answer was correct took considerable wizardry.

In this past fall's Poetry and Poetics class, I provided students and the faculty member with a hard copy of the entire program and guest taught part of this section of the course. The introductory Linguistics class was interested in using the program in the phonology part of their class as well. Those students and Professor Zaring were able to use the program on-line although not all of the exercises were completely functional at the time. The feedback from that class, though minimal, was quite positive.

Evaluation of the Project

The basic version of the project is now entirely complete. While both Nick and I agree that there are further modifications we would like to make to the content and to the program, it is nonetheless quite usable and it accomplishes the goals I had set. I will be teaching Poetry and Poetics next fall and anticipate using the program then. I hope that other faculty teaching the course will also be willing to try it. Since it is available on-line through the Reed web, it can also be used by other individual students and faculty at any time. I anticipate that it may well be used again in the introductory Linguistics class. By the end of next fall, we will have a much more complete sense of how well the program works and which areas need further work. I can also imagine, perhaps after completing an enhanced version of the program, that it could be made available outside the Reed community.

Future Work

I would like to re-write a portion of the ending and add some exercises as well as extend the project in the enhanced version by completing another whole section (not in my original proposal) on free verse. On the technical side, there are some improvements that can be made in the way the interactive exercises run. For example, in the generative analysis, the symbols are situated on the screen at a considerable distance from the line being analyzed, making the process of moving back and forth rather cumbersome (and much slower than an analysis by hand). In addition, the generative exercises should be shown with angled brackets though we have been forced, through programming limitations, to represent them with square brackets. We want to look into the possibility of altering their representation.

Conclusion

I have enjoyed working on this project, especially two elements &endash;&endash; the opportunity to present something I have taught for years in the classroom in a form that makes sense on-line, and the collaborative work with students. There were times when the process was frustrating, especially when students could not finish work in a timely manner, but I think we all learned something about how to communicate effectively, how to work through the timeline of a project, the relationship between programming problems and the best representation of content, and how, pedagogically, to use the computer to ends that best serve students.