Students from Hallie Weil’s Honors English class at Ronkonkoma Middle School are studying the work of Edgar Allan Poe, most recently “The Raven.” They worked collaboratively to decipher the meaning of his poems by paraphrasing each stanza to further understand his message.

As a means of sharpening their paraphrasing skills, the students first worked on an exercise which asked them to decipher lyrics from popular songs such as Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” and One Direction’s “What Makes You Beautiful,” before applying their new skill set to the work of Edgar Allen Poe.