Teacher of the Year ’s hip-hop approach to literature,
Winner of Toronto Star’s Teacher of the Year Award uses hip-hop and other songs to teach poetry and literature
How do you get today’s teens to care about poetry?
Through their iPods, teacher Paul Andreacchi has discovered.
The popular English and history instructor at Toronto’s all-girl Loretto Abbey Catholic Secondary School uses playlists as a doorway to poetry appreciation.
“Most kids are disengaged about poetry, but they walk into class with 10,000 songs in their pocket — well, that’s actually 10,000 poems,” said Andreacchi, whose talent for making the curriculum relevant for students has won him this year’s Toronto Star Teacher of the Year Award.
“I use hip-hop, Jay Z songs, Tupac, Drake, Eminem (the ‘clean’ version of his song “Not Afraid” was used to teach poetic devices) because any good poetry tells a story. Even with Shakespeare, the themes are relevant.”
Emma Gazzolla remembers learning to analyze poems in his Grade 12 English class last year by picking one from a list — she chose the T.S. Eliot classroom staple “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” — and one of their own preference, which for her was the song “Rolling Stone” by British singer Passenger.
“Because the song meant something to me, looking at the significance of the literary devices came more naturally,” recalls Emma, now studying law in Scotland. “I could identify with the themes in it. By the time I got to T.S. Eliot, which was definitely a more challenging piece, I had already wrapped my mind around the pattern of analysis.”
Former student Olivia Panici calls Andreacchi a “professional Shakespeare decoder” who kicked off the study of King Lear last year by asking students: Should a parent love their child no matter what the child does? Should a child always be grateful to their parents no matter how they behave?
“Little did we know these are the same questions facing the characters in King Lear,” notes Olivia, now in first-year accounting at Ryerson University. “I was in awe at how many in the class had opinions on those themes. He made it so topical for 17- and 18-year-olds.” They were among several who nominated Andreacchi for the Toronto Star award, which he won in only his fifth year of teaching ahead of some 100 Ontario nominees.
“The way he taught was more connected to our lives and the situations we’re going through,” explains Olivia.
He does the same when he teaches American history, a course colleague Marisa Chiera says he has made popular again “because he’s driven by the kids; he meets them where they’re at. If kids can’t see you as human beings, they can’t connect to you.”
Chiera works with at-risk students who often ask if they can be in Andreacchi’s class.
He’s been known to play Bob Dylan’s protest song “Masters of War” for discussion, but uses a version by current star Ed Sheeran, whom the kids will know.
He took his students to Washington D.C. and brings the world to them through technology. He taught them about alliteration with a YouTube video of Jimmy Fallon and Harry Potter star Daniel Radcliffe doing hip hop.
“You can make any topic relevant,” he says. “They’re teens. You’ve got to connect them to history. There’s so much knowledge they can access in 20 seconds these days, I don’t quiz them on the years things happened — it’s about what happened.”
At a time when schools are increasingly concerned about student stress, Andreacchi takes a healthy approach to the teams he coaches after school, from basketball and volleyball to a version of Harry Potter’s Quidditch (complete with brooms).
When Andreacchi’s team was getting trounced on the court last year by a school whose coach kept calling out plays, Andreacchi broke the tension by hollering imaginary plays of his own with silly names — “Pumpernickel!” “Magenta!” — which soon had the whole gym laughing.
Also a feminist, Andreacchi urges his all-female classes to think about how women are portrayed in literature, from Shakespeare’s Juliet, whom he calls a feminist because she defied her parents after “a life of men telling her what to do,” to the Twilight series, which he abhors because it’s about “a woman who yearns for someone who has violent tendencies towards her.”
A far better role model, he says, is Harry Potter’s independent friend Hermione Granger.
“I want to get them to think about these things with a critical eye. Do they ever see two women on TV who are having a conversation about something other than a guy? Always ask the questions.”