Depth & Complexity & Frost & Styles
Turning a TikTok Song Sensation into Literary Analysis
This summer, I learned something about myself: I am a Harry Styles fan. At some point you have probably heard his summer hit “As It Was” coming from your radio or layered over a TikTok video. (Listen to the whole album, Harry’s House—it’s great.)
I’m drawing on the popularity of this song with teens, plus the growing popularity of depth & complexity icons with educators, to create a lesson that you can use to help students conduct some poetry analysis and compare and contrast two texts—the aforementioned “As It Was” and Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay.”
Side note: If you aren’t familiar with Depth & Complexity icons, no worries! Ian Byrd over at www.byrdseed.com has some great resources to help you get acquainted and start using them in your classroom. Click here to access them!
Side note to the side note: I’ve been trained on Depth & Complexity icons, and for years tried to make them harder than they are instead of accepting them for the fairly simple, easy-to-use tool that they are. So don’t be like me and get overwhelmed trying to make them into something more complex than needed!
Back to this week’s resource. It’s an opportunity to have your kids annotate the two pieces and then use depth & complexity icons to dig deeper into them. I will note that you may want to preview the lyrics to “As It Was” to make sure it’s a good fit for your class. If not, feel free to create another poetry/song pairing that works!
Click here to access the resource.
Hope the year is continuing off to a great start!
-Jonda