excerpt from Lesson Plan for Teaching "Heart to Heart"
1. Divide students into groups and ask them to discuss the following questions: Why does giving your heart away feel so dangerous? Why do we equate hearts with love? How can we use our hearts and our vulnerability to create authentic writing?
2. Ask each group to summarize their responses to the questions for the whole class.
3. Tell students that authors have written about the heart for hundreds of years. The heart even figures in popular songs.
4. Play Bruce Springsteen’s, “Everybody’s Got a Hungry Heart,”
video and song
.
5. In their groups, ask students to answer these questions:
What do you think Springsteen means when he says that “everybody’s got a hungry heart?”
Do you agree with him?
6. Write the word
synecdoche
on the board and offer this definition:
a literary device in which the part stands in for the whole.
7. Ask students if they can think of any examples of synecdoche. One example; “Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears” from
Julius Caesar
. In this line, Marc Antony doesn’t want only ears but the attention of the people. Another example:
The White House issued a decree.
The White House building didn’t actually do anything, but the sentence implies that the people who work inside the building issued the decree.
8. Read Rita Dove’s “Heart to Heart” aloud.
10. Lead a whole-class discussion of the poem: How does the last line of the poem relate to the idea of synecdoche? What does Dove mean when she says, “it’s all yours now, but you’ll have to take me too”