How to Transform A Ballad In Class

As an English teacher I have despaired of how to get students to write a ballad in the correct way. A ballad is a good tool to teach the structure of narrative writing because it has the same structure in a more visible format. This is a process that I used while teaching Foreign Lit to a 10th grade class.

Instructions

Difficulty: Moderate

Things You’ll Need:

• Class set of ballads
• Overhead Projector
• Transparencies
• OHT Pen

1. 1. Hand out copies of the type of ballad to your students
2. 2. Read the poem together, pointing out devices, allegory, meaning, theme etc as you go through the poem.
3. 3. Model the task. Writing a ballad may seem a daunting task, so a teacher should model the task before asking students to do it as well. I found an excellent way to do this. Make a transparency of the poem you have studied. Use a larger font (20) and space the lines further apart so that you can write the new line in between the existing lines.
4. 4. Write the first line to show students the direction to go in with the narrative. Change the poem line by line according to where you want the story to go. For example, I was teaching Australian Ballads to American students and I used THE GEEBUNG POLO CLUB by Banjo Patterson as my template. You could use any form of narrative as a template for this purpose. As you write the transformed ballad, ask for input and ideas from the students as well, and this will let them know that the task is not so daunting.
5. 5. Give the students this task over a few weeks with handouts especially designed with the original poem and a blank line in between each line of the original ballad. Students used the original as a template and filled in the blanks. The students then took their new lines and wrote them together into a new ballad. The one I wrote with the class became an American ballad, THE ROBESON BASEBALL CLUB, transformed from the original Australian classic, THE GEEBUNG POLO CLUB.
6. 6. Publish the students’ work in the local newspapers as an incentive for them to participate in the exercise. Most local papers will be happy to showcase this work. Who knows, you may have the next Dickinson or Whitman in your class.

Tips & Warnings

• The ballad needn't rhyme, but a rhyming ballad means that more thought has gone into its composition. (refer to my quote)
• Making lines rhyme gives students the practice of varying their word choices to ensure that rhyming words end the lines.
• while I allowed some use of original themes in my transformations, be careful not to allow plagiarism of someone elses intellectual property.