V4B 17-3-2025 45 min

• Engels
• Middelbare school
• vwo
• Leerjaar 4

Please sit with your group!

You need: reader, pen, notebook, laptop

Welcome! 

Lesson goals

- Understand the poem "My Lai" and its background

- Can start preparing for the orals

Today's lesson

1. Discussing "My Lai" and task 9 together  (15 mins)
2. Work with your group (5-10 mins)
3. Last info (10 mins)
4. Round off together

Vietnam War - My Lai

What do you remember about the Vietnam War and My Lai?

The Vietnam War 1955-1975

- Started as a struggle for independence from French colonial rule and escalated into a Cold War confrontation.

- North Vietnam and their allies (communist) against South Vietnam and their allies (anti-communist). 

- More than 3 million people (including over 58,000 Americans) were killed, more than half of the dead were Vietnamese civilians. 

- The war ended with the fall of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam.

- Started as a struggle for independence from French colonial rule and escalated into a Cold War confrontation between international communism and free-market democracy. 

My Lai Massacre

- 16 March 1968

- More than 500 villagers were brutally killed by American soldiers

- 'Most notorious war crime in modern American military history'

- First pictures published end of 1969, spurred on anti-war movement

- Keith Bosley, British poet, wrote his poem 'My Lai' as a reaction to a picture in Newsweek in November 1969

The poem & task 9 

Discussing together

Poems to choose from:

• Five ways to kill a man
• Anthem for Doomed Youth
• Suicide in the trenches
• In Flanders Fields
• Sunday Bloody Sunday
• My Lai

Every group member a different poem!

You choose 1 poem, however:

Everyone should know the content of the reader!

Glossary: I will send you a list

Alliteration

Allusion

Blank verse

Cliché

Extended metaphor + metaphor

Haiku

Hyperbole

Imagery

Irony

Onomatopoeia

Paradox

Personification

Quatrain

Refrain

(Repetition)

Rhetorical Question

Rhyming couplet

Simile

Sonnet

Speaker

Stanza

Symbol

To do now:

1. Make sure you have set a date and time for your oral exam

2. Discuss who does what (choose a poem)

3. Go through your readers and help each other make it complete

4. Read your poems out loud and give each other feedback on pronunciation and fluency (I will give them to you)

5. Start studying the reader

Group conversation

- Round 1: your own poem / Round 2: the poem you chose from the reader

- Make sure you understand everything you say...

- Practise reading your own poem and bring it to the exam

- Also bring your reader

- As a group, make sure everyone gets the same amount of time

- Practise your own part at home and time it! (approx. 4 minutes in total)

Well done! You...

- Understand the poem "My Lai" and its background

- Can start preparing for the orals

Any burning questions? Thursday 20 March, lunch break, classroom 118-121

Group conversation: practicalities

- groups of 4: 20 minutes

- groups of 3: 15 minutes

- schedule: Thursday or Friday during test week, discuss with your group and make a choice today

- individual grade

- you need to hand in all the assignments and tasks from the Poetry reader when you take your oral exam, it will be part of your final grade

- you cannot use your reader and/or bring notes

Group conversation: what is expected 

Each student:

1. recites their own poem and explains which style figures they used & why
2. explains what the message is of their poem and how that becomes clear in the actual poem
3. discusses one of the poems from the reader, gives their opinion and mentions 2 style figures + explanation (not the last poem)
4. can get additional questions from the teacher (anything from  the reader!)