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I played this video clip recently during a presentation titled ‘Materials World’. To me, the clip encapsulates a beautiful relationship between old and new media.
I imagine that most teachers will have a good idea of how to use the poem in class. The lesson plan I have written consists of a few basic ideas that can be adapted or expanded accordingly.
Lesson plan: 
animated-poem.pdf
The above lesson plan can be divided into three main parts:
Part 1 (Steps 1 - 3) School quiz
A large part of the poem explores the idea that adulthood involves forgetting the facts that we learned at school. The school quiz has two aims:
- To activate/pre-teach the specific example facts that the poem mentions (quadratic equations, the planets, the nine muses, state flowers, country capitals).
- To take students back to school and find out how much they remember/have forgotten.
Part II (Steps 4 - 6) Prediction
Students are given a number of phrases from the text and asked to guess what the poem is about. Some of the isolated phrases (kiss goodbye, pack your bag, a little fishing village where there are no phones, the southern hemisphere, a dark mythological river, etc) would suggest that the poem is about a journey. In fact, much of the imagery in the poem involves ‘memories going places’. Perhaps students will appreciate this characteristic for themselves if we present these isolated phrases first.
Student also guess about the nature of the poem by watching the video animations with the sound turned down.
Part III (Steps 7 - 9) Intensive reading / listening
I am a big fan of activities that involve simultaneous reading and listening. The narrator’s tone is one of resignation and complements the poem well. He also provides pauses, phrasing, intonation and other elements of vocal punctuation that may contribute to the listener’s comprehension of the text.
I haven’t created any ‘reading for detail’ tasks. I imagine that most teachers will have their own ideas about which words, phrases, structures, etc, they would like their students to take away.