There are a plenty of emotions that all human beings have, and these can be largely categorized by two, bad and good. The bad emotions include hatred, jealousy or anger, while the good ones contain love, compassion or joy. Since these emotions are general feelings and one of the human natures, they should be considered as a matter of course; however, unfortunately, the former emotions are often judged to be the wrong thing to be avoided only because they have negative meanings. Hence many teachers at education field do not teach them even though they shouldn’t. For this reason, I strongly think that a poem ‘Fire and Ice’ which covers the bad emotions, especially a ‘desire’ and ‘hate’, should be used as a teaching material in many classrooms. There are two grounds for supporting the idea of teaching ‘Fire and Ice’ in highschools.
First and foremost, the message of the poem is appropriate for the students. The message is about two different feelings of the ‘desire’ and ‘hate’ as mentioned above, and I correlated them with the students’ relationships. They are living in many relationships such as with boy or girl friends, just friends, families, and teachers. While the first one is closely related to the ‘desire’ or ‘fire’, the rest is about the ‘hate‘ or ‘ice.’ First, the highschool students are very sensitive when they are told about sexual matters, so they can possibly think about their relationships if I introduce the poem. The important thing here is that I should let them know the danger of physical sins. Because they are too young to tell good relationships, they are prone to going the wrong way sexually. Second, the students are not isolated from their friends, families, or their teachers, so they could probably have a mind of hatred, jealousy or anger toward them. Therefore, it is significant to teach them the fact that the feelings of hate are one of the human natures but are to be rejected.
Additionally, the language of the poem is suitable for the highschool students. Above all, the level of difficulty that the speaker says is appropriate to learn. The difficult vocabulary ,for example, can be narrowed down to three—’hold with’, ‘perish’, and ‘suffice’. I think the students in that age are able to study the words based on their levels. They are not that easy as well as challenging enough. Second, because the ‘desire’ and ‘hate’ are described as the concepts of ‘fire’ and ‘ice’, this must be easy for the students to match the abstract senses to the concrete images. In accordance with this match, the students can imagine the two serious emotions with visual materials including pictures or videos.
To sum up, I have been talking about why highschool students should learn ‘Fire and Ice’ by giving two reasons. First, the message of the poem can be a proper matter to discuss in the classroom. Since the students have many relationships, they can easily find and understand a sense of desire and hate as they interact with other people. Second, the language of the poem is appropriate to learn. The three words are suitable for them to study, and concepts of fire and ice
