Daisy Goodwin, organizer of the Off By Heart rote poetry competition, said she hopes to revive poetry’s popularity among the young. “Poetry still has a chance of surviving as a popular art form rather than something arcane and unloved,” she said. When it was suggested that rote learning systems are a Victorian kind of learning system, she responded: “What’s wrong with that? It’s going to breathe life into a genre that needs all the help it can get. If you can involve kids at an early stage that’s got to be a good thing.” But besides instilling new life to poetry, there are other benefits for participants in the rote poetry learning system. Learning a poem by heart, said Goodwin, gives children a “different relationship” with it. “They own it,” she said. “Learnt young, poems will stay in the head for life, adding lustre to the good moments and illumination in the bad.” —– Coggno.com offers world-class LMS platforms.
