Hello, my name is Ms. Grant.

I'm so glad you've decided to learn with me today.

We're in the single poet study and we're looking at Maya Angelou.

Today we are going to be looking at what I think might be my favourite Maya Angelou poem, it's called "Woman Work." Now first things first, we need to get a copy of the poem "Woman Work." In order to aid our understanding of this poem "Woman Work" our focus for today, we're also going to look at the poem "Phenomenal Woman" also by Maya Angelou.

So I'd like you to pause the video and get a copy of "Woman Work" and "Phenomenal Woman", both published by Penguin Random House in 1978.

Pause the video and go and get a copy of "Woman Work" and "Phenomenal Woman" now.

Welcome back, well done.

Now you've got both of those poems, we are ready to get started with our lesson.

I'm gonna be your support and guide today.

I cannot wait to hear all of your fantastic ideas.

Let's get started.

So by the end of today's lesson, you are going to have explore Maya Angelou's "Woman Work" with a focus on its structure.

Now not only do I absolutely love this poem, I also really love exploring a poem's structure.

It can often seem a little bit complicated, but today in learning cycle two, we're going to look at a tip, a way of focusing on a poem structure that really yields a lot, a lot of answers and really yields a rich response.

So you don't need to worry if you think, ah, I'm not quite sure about structure.

We are going to go through what it looks like and how to explore it in today's lesson.

There are some key words which are gonna help us unlock our learning today.

They're gonna help us achieve our objective.

They're on the board now.

If you'd like to pause the video and read through each one, maybe make some notes, then please do.

Otherwise, they're gonna come up as and when in the lesson, and we will explore them together.

I'm gonna draw your attention to just one of the words.

It's the first word on the board and it is structure.

Now this means how something is put together, how it's organised, how it's arranged.

And today in learning cycle two, we're gonna see that really what that means is focusing on a poem's beginning and focusing on a poem's end.

So as I say, you don't need to be worried if you think, ah, a poem structure always seems to me are very complicated.

We are going to look today at the poem's beginning and the poem's end, and we're gonna explore why this is such a good thing to do if you want to understand a poem more deeply and explore its structure.

As I say, if you'd like to pause the video now and spend a bit more time with the rest of the keywords, then please do.

But otherwise they will come up in the lesson and we'll go through them together.

Our lesson outline for today, in our first learning cycle, we are going to be reading "Woman Work." As I say, I absolutely love this poem.

I think it's beautiful, beautifully written, and some really amazing ideas expressed.

And then in our second learning cycle, we're gonna look at the structure of "Woman Work." So let's get started with reading "Woman Work." Now both of these poems were published in Maya Angelou's third volume of poetry, "And Still I Rise." So we've got "Phenomenal Woman" and "Woman Work." They were published in that same volume.

Now I'd like you to discuss what are the similarities and differences between these two titles, "Phenomenal Woman" and "Woman Work." And what do you think "Woman Work" will be about and why? Pause the video and discuss these questions now.

Welcome back a really lovely discussion showing you know how to use a poem's title to give you a bit of insight into the poem, but also showing some fantastic knowledge of Maya Angelou as a whole.

So similarities and differences between the two titles.

Well of course they both have a similar, well, the same word, woman in their title.

So the focus is going to be a female speaker.

We do indeed have female speakers in both of these poems. But the big difference is that "Phenomenal Woman," phenomenal means extraordinary or remarkable.

So we think, okay, let's have a think about this speaker as someone who's incredibly powerful.

And those of you who have read "Phenomenal Woman" will know that the speaker is incredibly confident and tells us where that confidence comes from.

But work, work is a slightly more negative word than phenomenal.

It seems to suggest some sort of labour.

And indeed, in this poem "Woman Work" we do see a list, a list of all the things that this particular speaker has to do.

So that's sort of answered partly our second question as well, the idea that "Woman Work" is indeed about jobs, about chores that the female speaker has to do.

And Angelou does focus, as she often does in her poems on a female's experience.

So this poem is going to be looking specifically at the female experience of work.

Now celebrating women, particularly Black women was very important to Angelou.

A lot of you referenced that in your discussion.

And many of her poems explore sexist attitudes whilst also observing women's resilience and grace, despite this discrimination.

So resilience and grace, both key words for today.

So resilience, the idea of overcoming hardship, being able to keep going even when something is really, really difficult.

And grace, this idea of being dignified, of poise, of self composure even when something is really, really difficult.

So many of Angelou's poems balance this idea of resilience with this idea of grace.

And definitely in "Woman Work," I think that is one of the reasons why I enjoy it so much is because this balance is so beautifully put.

Now I'd like you to reread "Phenomenal Woman" before we look at "Woman Work," because we are going to think about these two poems side by side a little bit today.

So reread "Phenomenal Woman." It was published in the same volume of poetry as "Woman Work," so it's a good poem to look in comparison.

Reread "Phenomenal Woman" and then discuss how does this poem celebrate women? Okay, how does this poem celebrate women? Pause the video, enjoy the rereading out loud if you can, so that you can hear Angelou's fantastic rhythm and rhyme, and then discuss this question, how does this poem celebrate women? Pause the video and complete these tasks now.

Welcome back.

So lovely to hear people reading through that poem.

Oh, it's fantastic.

And hearing that rhythm and rhyme come through is brilliant.

And then this question, how does this poem celebrate women? Well, we have a female speaker who's incredibly confident and she lists all the reasons why she should be very confident.

The poem ends with this idea that we should be proud when we see her, but also that that pride should also help us to feel proud of ourselves.

So it's the kind of poem which when you finish reading, you feel very inspired.

You feel very, very positive.

And in some ways, Angelou was using this poem to fight back against her sexist ideas and racist ideas about what it means to be a Black woman and whether you should celebrate yourself or not.

She is saying, I am phenomenal.

And she puts forward that really confident view so beautifully in this poem.

So that is how this poem celebrates women, some of the ideas that I heard coming through.

Now we're gonna do a check for understanding before we read the next poem from that collection "And Still I Rise," which is called "Woman Work." That's the focus of today's lesson.

Now I'd like you to tell me which sentences use the word resilient or its forms correctly, because we know this is an idea that's really important to Angelou's poetry.

And indeed it's really important to "Woman Work." So read through each of the sentences and select which ones you think use the word resilient or its forms correctly.

Pause the video and complete this check now.

Welcome back.

Well done if you selected C and D, Angelou used some of her poems to celebrate the resilience of women, and "Phenomenal Woman" sees a resilient speaker assert her brilliance.

If we look at the first two, "Woman Work" and "Phenomenal Woman" were published in the same resilient volume of poetry.

A volume of poetry cannot be resilient itself.

It's something that a human or an animal, something animate, something alive, can exhibit one of the qualities that they can exhibit.

And Angelou uses resilience in her poem.

We'd have to change that to explores resilience in her poem.

The idea is explored in her poem.

She doesn't use resilience in her poems, it is explored.

All right, we're gonna move on to our first practise task where we get to read through "Woman Work." So I'd like you to read "Woman Work" twice and after reading, I'd like you to discuss these questions.

What are the main ideas and messages of this poem? What do you think the speaker is like? Why do you think this? How do you think we are meant to feel after reading this poem? What are the differences between this poem and "Phenomenal Woman," which obviously you've just read? And I'd like you to consider what the poems are about and the ways in which the poems are written in terms of your discussion.

Really enjoy reading through "Woman Work." As with "Phenomenal Woman," if you can read it aloud, then please do.

And I'll see you back here after you've had your discussion about these questions.

Pause the video and complete these tasks now.

Welcome back.

So lovely to hear people reading through that poem and really enjoying it and some beautiful ideas coming through in the discussion, which we're gonna go through a bit more in our feedback.

So peoples discuss what they think the speaker is like in "Woman Work." And Jacob says, I think the speaker is very resilient.

So using that key word, the idea that this speaker is able to overcome hardship.

Jun says, I think the speaker is very lonely.

And Sofia says, I think the speaker feels powerless in a world that demands so much of her.

And these three different ideas, It's one of the reasons why I love this poem so much is it's so rich in terms of its interpretation and in terms of the speaker and who is being presented for us.

So let's have a little think about these ideas in a bit more detail.

I'd like you to discuss who do you agree with most and why, and refer to specific parts of the poem in your discussion.

Pause the video and discuss this question now.

Welcome back.

Such a beautiful discussion.

A real split in the room in terms of who people agreed with and why.

Let's take Jacob's idea first.

So the idea of the speaker's resilience, most people said comes through really, really strongly in that first stanza where we've got this list of chores that the speaker has to do.

Some people notice there's no punctuation there except at the end.

So it really makes us race through these chores in the same way that the speaker really needs to keep the pace up in order to do everything that is demanded of her.

And then Jun's idea, I think the speaker is very lonely.

Most people notice it in the second half of the poem.

We get this idea that the speaker is speaking to the weather, to the seasons, and asking for a bit of support.

And because a speaker is speaking to seasons, we might think, well, does she have no one that she can speak to, no person that she can speak to, and therefore she is relying on the natural world.

And then Sofia, I think the speaker feels powerless in a world that demands so much of her.

Now most people looked to the end of the poem.

So with Jacob's idea, we looked at the beginning of the poem, the idea of this list of chores.

But with Sofia's idea, the idea that the speaker feels powerless, that really comes through at the end of the poem when the speaker says that she doesn't have anything to call her own except for these seasons.

And so that idea of powerlessness maybe comes through just at the end of that poem.

So just a few ideas there to support these arguments that the pupils put forth.

You might have a very different idea about the poem.

That is absolutely fine.

These are just three possible ideas.

Okay, we're gonna move on to our second learning cycle now.

We're gonna look at the structure of "Woman Work." We've actually touched on a few ideas already in our first learning cycle, when we were looking at the ideas of John, Jacob, and Sofia.

And we're going to think about them a bit more deeply now and really connect the poem and our exploration of it to the idea of structure.

So one way to develop your understanding of a poem is to look at its structure, how the poem is organised and put together.

An interesting place to start your explanation of a poem structure is to compare the poem's beginning to its end.

You can consider the speaker's tone and the poem's focus at the beginning of the poem, so the speaker's tone, the emotion in their voice.

And then you can also consider the speaker's tone and the poem's focus at the end of the poem, so beginning and end.

Now then you can explore is there any shifts in tone from the poem's beginning to its end? So one of the things I do whenever I'm looking at a poem and I'm thinking, I need to do more than just read this a couple of times, I'm actually gonna do some analysis, I generally always start with the idea of beginning and end.

Because I like to think of a poem as a journey.

So you start somewhere at the beginning, you've got the speaker, and then you start and then you finish at the end.

And I think, well, what's the difference between the beginning and end? What type of journey have I been taken on? Maybe the journey was very small, maybe the journey was very big, maybe it was a physical journey, maybe it was emotional journey.

But if I look at the beginning and the end, then often I can start to understand the poem a little bit more deeply.

So I really want you to connect the idea of structure to the idea of its beginning and its end.

So let's look at Lucas answer questions about the structure of "Phenomenal Woman" as an example.

I remember you read that at the start of the lesson.

So the beginning.

Who, sorry.

What or who is the focus at the beginning of the poem? What is the speaker like at the beginning of the poem? How might you describe their tone? So those are the questions that Lucas is asking himself.

And he answers, at the beginning, the focus is on other pretty women, not the speaker.

So at the beginning of "Phenomenal Woman" the focus is on other pretty women.

And at the beginning, the speaker's tone seems mysterious because she says she has a secret.

So she says the pretty women don't understand her secret, and we at that time, the reader, we don't understand her secret either.

We're gonna be told it during the poem.

So we've got mysterious tone and we've got the focus on pretty women.

You might interpret the poem a little bit differently, that's absolutely fine, but this is what Lucas has focused on for the beginning of the poem.

Now then Lucas looks at the end of the poem and he asks himself.

What or who is the focus at the end of the poem? What is the speaker like at the end of the poem? How might you describe their tone? And he answers, but by the end, the focus is on the speaker, the poem ends with the word me.

And but by the end, the speaker's tone seems confident because she is phenomenal.

So he's looked at the end of the poem, he thought the tone is no longer mysterious, it is confident.

And he said the focus is no longer the pretty women, but actually the speaker herself.

Now Lucas is analysing the structure of "Phenomenal Woman." He's making a comment on the structure of "Phenomenal Woman." He uses a phrase, but by the end, to explore the shift in tone from the beginning to the end.

So he said at the beginning it was this, but by the end it's this.

At the beginning it was this, but by the end it's this.

And that is what analysis of structure can look like, looking at the beginning and looking at the end for those shifts in tone.

So Lucas uses his analysis, his comments, to come up with a final comment about the poem now.

He's got his table in front of him, it's a little bit shortened there.

We know the focus was pretty women, the tone was mysterious, then we know the focus was the speaker and the tone was confident.

And Lucas says, ultimately the poem starts with a mysterious tone but shifts to an uplifting tone by the end.

This shift occurs because the focus moves from other pretty women to the speaker who is phenomenal.

By the end of the poem, we realise that the speaker has revealed her secret.

So he has used this analysis of the beginning and end of the poem just to make a comment about this shift in tone from mysterious to uplifting.

And that is an analysis of structure.

Okay, we're gonna do a check for understanding before we apply what Lucas just did and our understanding of structure to the poem "Woman Work." So true or false.

An interesting place to start your exploration of a poem structure is to compare the poem's beginning to its end.

Is this true or false? Pause the video and complete the check now.

Well done if you selected true.

But I'd like you to justify your response.

Why? Why is it a good place to start exploring a poem structure? Pause the video and see if you can justify that it is true now.

Welcome back.

Well done if you said, in this way, you can consider the shift in tone.

So that's a phrase we were looking for, shift in tone from the beginning to the end of the poem.

Now we have applied this to "Phenomenal Woman." So far we're about to apply it to "Woman Work," but really you can apply it to any poem that you read.

So this exploration of structure, it applies to any poem that you read.

All right, let's do our practise task.

I'd like you to reread "Woman Work." Enjoy that rereading.

You will see more at the more times you read it.

I know I do.

And then complete the table by answering the questions.

And in this way, you will analyse the poem structure.

So this is just what Lucas did before with "Phenomenal Woman," but now we're going to do it with "Woman Work." So at the beginning, ask yourself.

What or who is the focus at the beginning of the poem? What is a speaker like at the beginning of the poem? How might you describe their tone? And at the end, what or who is the focus? And what is a speaker like? How might you describe their tone? Pause the video and complete this task now.

Welcome back.

It was lovely to see people rereading and really enjoying the poem "Woman Work." But also answering these questions really carefully, you have now analysed a poem's structure.

Well done.

Let's do some feedback.

So here are just some ideas you might have had about the poem "Woman Work" and its structure.

So what or who is the focus at the beginning of the poem? What is a speaker like? How might you describe their tone? Maybe you had at the beginning, the focus is on the chores the speaker has to do, the speaker's tone seems focused and resilient.

So the idea of overcoming hardship in the face of her workload, she will complete the chores with no help.

Most people notice that she repeats that word I, she never says we, so she is completing the chores with no help.

Now let's look at the end.

Who or what is the focus at the end of the poem? What is the speaker like? How might you describe their tone? Well, but by the end, so that nice phrase that Lucas used earlier, but by the end, the focus is on how the speaker finds comfort in nature because no one else in the world helps her.

And the speaker's tone is lonelier and sadder.

So the tone at the beginning was resilient, but now we've got this lonelier and sadder tone.

So those are just some ideas you might have had.

You might have phrased it slightly differently, you might have thought the focus was slightly different, but you can see the point is to look at the beginning of the poem and then at the very end.

Now I'd like you to recall that Lucas uses table about the structure of "Phenomenal Woman" to make a comment on the shift in tone at the end of the poem.

Now remember Lucas said, ultimately the poem starts with a mysterious tone, so this is about "Phenomenal Woman," but shifts to an uplifting tone by the end.

The shift occurs because the focus moves from other pretty women to the speaker who is phenomenal.

By the end of the poem we realise that the speaker has revealed her secret.

So it's a really nice comment there from Lucas.

Now I'd like you to use your table and complete the sentence starters to make a comment on the shift in tone at the end of "Woman Work." So we've got, ultimately the poem starts with a tone, but shifts to a tone by the end.

This shift occurs because the focus moves from what to what.

And by the end of the poem, what do we realise? So pause the video.

Using your table, complete the sentence starters to make a comment on the shift in tone at the end of "Woman Work." Pause the video and complete this feedback task now.

Welcome back.

So lovely to see this exploration of structure taken even further.

So not just answering the questions from the table that we did earlier, but now making a deeper comment.

Some people said, ultimately the poem starts with a resilient tone, but shifts to a sadder tone by the end.

The shift occurs because the focus moves from the chores the speaker has to do to the fact that she is speaking to nature and doesn't have anyone else to speak to to help her.

By the end of the poem, we realise that the speaker is quite lonely.

So even though she's presented as very strong and resilient at the beginning, she's in fact quite lonely.

You might finish those sentence starters in a slightly different way.

But the way in which you did that, you were exploring structure using the questions you asked about the poem's beginning and end in order to explore its structure.

Well done.

In summary, presenting the experiences of women, particularly Black women, was very important to Angelou.

Many of Angelou's poems explore sexist attitudes whilst also observing women's resilience despite this discrimination.

"Woman Work" sees a Black woman explain how she has to complete hard manual labour for no reward.

When exploring the poem structure, a good place to start can be to compare its beginning to its end.

In this way, you can consider the shift in tone from the beginning to the end of the poem.

It has been such a pleasure to explore "Woman Work" with you today, and I look forward to seeing you next time.