Funny, the ideas people get about poetry. As if there's not a million ways to teach, read, write it.
This realization came about, I hope, when one young woman admitted that her dislike for poetry --It doesn't speak to me, she said--derived simply from one teacher's approach to it. I told her we'd check in again in a few weeks.
She and the rest of my Sask Poetry crew have to (if they want the marks) attend a literary event and write it up. For many, this is a challenge. Would it help if they knew any poets? (That way, they'd find out what a broken path poetry and its pracficioners are.)
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Too often students are taught by people who really don't like poetry themselves, or who are just replicating the way they were taught. I've always liked Billy Collins' poem about how students want to tie a poem to a chair and beat a confession out of it. Too often that's what students think it's all about - just finding that "right" meaning.
Best of luck with the teaching this term.
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