This is an example of a lesson I did with 11th graders. Jackdaw, a local rock band, has a song called Proofrock, that I thought would be a good tie-in for teaching the poem.
I taught the lesson over two days. I started off by asking the students to think about love songs, what a love song is, examples of love songs, etc. After the discussion, I gave them a bit of background on T.S. Eliot, and then we read the poem aloud in class. We talked about allusion and imagery, and when we finished the poem, we had a brief discussion about the character of Prufrock. I asked the students to tell whether they thought Prufrock was a pathetic whiner, or just a realist. We put some things up on the board, and then I asked the students to write down their own thoughts about Prufrock. I asked some of the students to share what they had written.
The next day, I played the song and had them listen. Then, I passed out sheets with the lyrics, talked about some of the references in the song, and passed out a sheet with these four questions:
- What do we know about the singer of the song Proofrock?
- What is the significance of the spelling of Proofrock?
- Why do you think the singer identifies with the character of Prufrock?
- Is this a love song? Why or why not?
I asked them to get into groups of four to answer the questions. I gave them some time to answer the questions, and then had one member of each group share the group’s answers with the rest of the class.
The students were asked to compare Prufrock with the singer of “Proofrock.†For homework, they were assigned a 3-paragraph essay comparing the two works.