I’ll bite. What is the “correct” interpretation of “The Road Not Taken”, and how does the meter tell us this?
Strangely, I was taught the different kinds of meter you find in (mostly) old poetry, but I was also taught (I’m pretty sure by the same teacher) to ignore this knowledge when reading the poem out loud. The feel of the meter was supposed to come out naturally in a normal reading of it as a piece of English text.
I’ve taken away what I thought were some insights about how poetry works from this. I had the idea that meter is a tool the poet uses to affect the reader, and a tool the critic uses to analyze the poem, but is not a tool the reader uses to understand and enjoy the poem. For the reader, the meter has an effect, but the effect should be largely unconscious. In other words, it shouldn’t be like “Ah, this poem is in such and such meter, so it must have such and such feel to it.” Rather, it should be like “This poem has such and such feel to it.” Then later, in the transition from reader to critic, “Ah wouldn’t you know it, it had such and such feel to it, and lo and behold that was brought about, as one would expect, by such and such meter!”
Have I got the wrong idea about all this?
-FrL-
Two and a Half Inches, why are you a sub instead of a regular classroom teacher?
I agree that seniors in an honors English class should know how to scan poetry by the end of their senior year. (My fundamental 10th graders learned to scan some of the more basic patterns.) But I am also aware that some substitutes can be gullible when students say they don’t know something. Or perhaps they don’t relate to the word “scan” but do remember iambic pentameter.
At any rate, your duty is to impliment to the best of your ability the lesson plans.
Wouldn’t it be grand to have them analyze a series of poems ending with Archibald MacLeish’s Ars Poetica? The last line is
“A poem should not mean but be.”
I too think that poetry should be read aloud at least once. I didn’t really understand the value of that until reading “The Song of the Chattahoochee” aloud. The river runs over your tongue when it is supposed to and is slowed by certain words when it has to be.
I doubt meter has much to do with it. But the narrator of the poem is saying, basically, “There were two paths, each with equal claim, both having been used about equally.* I took the one I took, and [wryly] I’m sure someday I’ll romanticize the choice I made by painting it as some kind of momentous choice to move against the herd etc etc. Ha, people (including me) are funny, aren’t they?”
-FrL-
*In one passage, he says they are equally worn, but in another, he seems to be saying neither had been travelled yet at all, unless I’m misreading it. Perhaps the narrator is already becoming untrustworthy, even though he thinks this untrustworthiness is something that only lies in his future.
ETA: BTW 2.5 you seem to know about this so could you tell me what meter that poem is in? It seems to have some bits with two syllables to the beat and some bits with three syllables to the beat. Is this covered by a single meter or does it somehow change meters several times?
The meter does tell us the “correct” interpretation. There probably is no one single correct interpretation of the poem. But the common interpretation is undoubtedly wrong. Here is the poem (I hope this does not violate copyright):
Neither of the roads is less traveled by. And the common interpretation, which does not use a close reading of poem, needs the one of the roads to actually be less traveled by and not just be the speaker’s future spin when relating the incident of the two roads.
I considered myself a poet, had taken poetry classes in college (and been praised by my teachers and nominated for stuff and everything) and just didn’t get it (I now know) until I started reading stuff out loud. I had thought Whitman was boring. After reading him aloud to my wife, I suddenly began to realize he’s a magician.
Hm, I interpret it not so much as one of romanticizing the choice that was made, but as being unable to stop wondering over whether it was the right one, possibly with some regret (as indicated by “I shall be telling this with a sigh”). Although, yeah, there is also an element of trying to justify it after the fact by pretending to oneself that the one road was the one less traveled by, even as one knows, internally, that this was not really significantly true.
I think the narrator can be read as saying that he is sure that, in the future, he’ll deal with that kind of uncertainty by romanticizing the choice.
Which is, after all, something that we probably all of us do from time to time. 
-FrL-
You have it right. It uses an iambic tetrameter base, but the stress is variant and there are anapest and dactyl feet.
The first line is:
Two ROADS (or TWO ROADS) l di VERGED l in a YEL l low WOOD
Iambic ( or spondee) l iambic l anapest l iambic l
The rhyme is ABAAB.
And it is a very, very rare poem that does not alter the stress. (Although, with Frost we have a good example with “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening.” A perfect example of how rhythm can reinforce the mood of a poem.)
I, too, am a little bit surprised that somebody in high school would have no concept of scansion. However, knowing how to scan a poem is not necessary for knowing how to read a poem.
Ooo, do another.
Here’s a couple of lines from something. It feels metered to me. But how do I figure out what meter it is, if any?
What do I mean by saying it “feels” metered? Just that, as I read it, I can make out a steady beat of stressed syllables (with some exceptions).
-FrL-
Since when does a set of students in one school not having a particular specialized skill set in the humanities translate into ‘oh, kids these days don’t know how to learn/teachers these days don’t know how to teach’?
It’s been 10 years since I graduated high school, but I know that my high school experience was pretty different from other kids in other schools. There’s just so darned much of “English,” that to expect everyone to have the same knowledge is ridiculous.
I’m pretty sure I missed an important Shakespeare play or two. I know I had people look at me funny when I said I had never read Catcher In The Rye (“didn’t you have to read that for English class???”). I was bummed when I went to college that no one seemed to have read Babbitt or Madame Bovary. I didn’t read Catch 22 until college, which seemed to set me apart, and aside from reading poetry extensively in the 3rd grade (no joke. We didn’t delve deep into them, just read for comprehension and fun I guess), I had very minimal experience with poetry until college as well, where I read a fair amount in one of my English classes. Did I mention I was an English major?
My point is just that I don’t think that the experience cited in the OP justifies the pontificating in the OP. I don’t see how we have a case of ‘how to think’ as opposed to ‘what to think’. I don’t see how high schoolers being untrained in scansion is a big deal. The curriculum is tight, and unless you’re going to spend a lot of time on poetry, I wouldn’t imagine spending more than 10 minutes on scansion before moving on.
My big frustration in college was classmates coming to conclusions about the books/stories/poems we were reading that had no specific basis in the text. Making judgments about characters, moral, and authorial intent based on nothing more than how they happened to feel about a piece. They’d have a rich and complex text in front of them, and all they could say was, “well, I really identified with the main character, because I’ve been in that sort of situation, and that’s what I would have done.” Gah.
Seriously, I know that some poetry likes to go “One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish,” while others like to go, “I do not like green eggs and ham,” and yet others go, “Horton the elephant heard a small noise.”
I can’t remember which is a dactyl and which is a spondee and which is a trochee . And, I can’t remember when it’s mattered much.
I believe this is of critical importance to the discussion at hand (funny how something written in the 60’s is still so relevant).
This was also easily the most frustrating thing for me during my short time at a “top” New England prep school. Say whatever the hell you want, just make sure you include the liberating disclaimer: “yea but that’s just my opinion, it’s ok if you disagree with me. Oh and also lets not think critically about it or discuss it in any way cause you should respect my opinion.” :smack:
I see nothing wrong with teaching children how to think. It is something like the adage of "give a man a fish (data) and you feed him for a day, but teach him how to fish (think) and you feed him for a lifetime. Specific knowledge matters little in our world of libraries, internets, and countless other places one can gain instant access to indepth knowledge of any subject one desires. It is smart to teach one how to think, to be curious, to want to learn more. I have been in class with those who could recite almost any fact needed, but couldn’t find their next classroom without help. Teaching how to think is fundamental, it is like teaching reading and writing.
In the realities of life there are no right or wrong ways to do things, they will need all the ability to think they can muster to cope with it.
Just reading it and looking at the way the lines are broken up, I don’t hear any regular meter in it.
I managed to get through high school and college English courses without learning how to scan poems or read them properly. We learned about metered prose but never had to read them in anything other than the typical monotone voice most others seem to use.
Marc
- Have you read up on your state’s expectations for English teachers? Do you have any basis for stating what an English teacher’s job is, if you haven’t?
- Your second claim is simply false. It is quite possible to read something flawlessly and have no clue what it ‘means’ or to understand what something ‘means’ but have to suck at public speaking.
But of course, that’s not what 2.5 is talking about, and based on his response, he seems to have missed the point (do I need to point out the irony )
What you’re doing is based on solid best practices models: point out the semantic value of text, have students revise things that are sloppily presented or inadequately supported while teaching students about how to go about constructing a flawed versus a successful argument. All while reinforcing that interpretations must be text-based and logically supported.
I’d wager, however, and disagree if I’m wrong, but if one of your students wrote a paper on Gatsby that claimed Gatsby had indeed successfully chased the American dream, but that his journey showed the limits of the AD as well as his own, you might disagree, you might even tell your student to dig deeper… but if you were handed a 10 page, exquisitely cited and well reasoned paper, you wouldn’t hand it back and say “You’re wrong, now write me a paper about how Gatsby shows that the American Dream is a myth.”
Right?
Well, it also depends on the time you’re working with and the class. The sad reality is that teach-to-the-test is here to say for a good while at least, until abominations like NCLB are done away with. Heck, I’m now making the transition from teaching at an independent school to getting state certification to teach at public schools. I can guarantee you that any unit on poetry, even in an 11th or 12th grade AP course, would by necessity be brief and I might very well have to rely on ‘high verbal’ students to read poems aloud rather than making scansion and public reading the focus of my lessons. Especially since, as Manda pointed out, the AP generally doesn’t care all that much about scansion and my job safety is largely dependent on helping my students do well on the tests, rather than making them connoisseurs of poetry. It’s a drag, but that’s the way it is.
Now, I’m more than willing to admit that a veteran teacher of twenty years whose original lesson plans are beginning to yellow, will probably be able to do a much better job of integrating more pedagogical goals. But even then, it’s pick and choose. I honestly see no way that a teacher could focus on everything in a school year that would be good/neat/enlightening to cover. And, heck, let’s not forget that teachers have a responsibility to help their students pass these tests, too. Whether a kid gets a 3 or a 5 can mean the difference between getting into a first choice college, or a second choice and/or whether or not they come in with college credits already or without them.
I don’t know how well I’d feel about myself if a kid who was capable of a 4… came out of the test with a 3. I’d wager it’d be especially difficult on me if that student did poorly precisely because I’d decided that instead of preparing him/her for the test as well as I could, I decided to teach extraneous material that, while certainly uplifting, wouldn’t help them get into their college or save money on tuition.
Now, 2.5:
First, let me say that I probably came off as being too harsh, so for that I apologize.
You should realize, of course, that lesson plans often have to be completed well in advance of any given week, and any changes can be a real headache to undo.
For example, let’s say I was running a poetry unit, and one day I wanted students to simply get familiar with some poems and complete a basic exercise whose goal was not to come up with a final answer, but to get them thinking and writing on their topics for at least 30 solid minutes. I planned that in specific, as I knew I’d have to be out one day, and that not much would get done with a substitute in the classroom in my place.
I was counting on the students at least getting ‘primed’ for a discussion, and would then steer the class discussion the next day into a mini-debate on various students’ impressions of the poems, asking them to defend their claims with textual citations. Along the way, certain concepts like flow, rhythm and imagery would naturally be discussed, defended, challenged and elucidated. Often in the students’ own vernacular with students deepening their own understanding by explaining their views to their classmates, as well as providing a tone and method of communication that is simply impossible for me as someone who is a generation older than the students themselves.
I would, then, plan to have the lessons and tangents from that day carry on and so on, and so on.
Instead, when I get back (as I would find out only when I sat down with my first class, and not before), some or much of the assignment wasn’t done and, instead, they got into a discussion of meter and scansion. I hadn’t intended to teach that. In fact, I may even take issue with some of what you told them. They may have questions that deserve answers. They almost certainly haven’t completed the assignment as I had intended. So, to start with, I have to revise, on the fly, my entire lesson plan for that day. I have to perform diagnostic evaluations as well as restructure the day’s lesson, on the fly. I may have to do this for each of my classes, assuming that they got into tangents of varying lengths with the substitute teacher. I will almost definitely also have to trim down my objectives and lessons for the next few days, possibly the next week or two.
So no offense to you, but if I returned to a classroom and found out that a sub had disregarded my lesson plan in order to teach something that they felt was more important, I’d make sure I never had that sub take my class again.
Just wanted to explain that.
Do you know the ability level of the kids in the class, or their individual proclivities? Keep in mind, by the way, that you may have one, or several kids in your classes who have IEP’s. You wouldn’t know about that as a sub, but the teacher you were standing in for, would. Teachers are legally obligated to bend over backwards for students of that sort, and, if a kid is simply swamped by normal, grade-level expectations, a book of Tupac’s poetry might be enough to get them to understand the basic and/or at least get them emotionally involved. And that’s not saying anything about students of more average ability who might, still, benefit from something that can tickle their fancy.
There is much more to being an educator than giving out rote facts, and if I had to use a book of crap poetry to motivate some of my students to at least get some sort of emotional reaction to what we were doing in class, I just might.
It depends on what you mean by that, and what they actually do know. You should take, as a given, that most students will play dumb for you. No class wants to work hard while a sub is in the driver’s seat, and “Gee, I don’t know” gets them out of a discussion, or at least gets you lecturing, which lets them zone out.
Even assuming that they are ignorant about certain facts that you consider to be basic, so what? If they don’t know the difference between the Yorks and the Lancasters, let alone what their conflict was, does that change their capability for continued inquiry, analysis, etc…? If they don’t know the Spartans from the Athenians, does that mean they can’t take a look at them during college, should they be so interested?
I think you’ll find that, even considering yourself an intelligent and well educated person, there are a hell of a lot of ‘basic’ facts that you, too, simply do not know. Students could (and often do, in college) spend an entire semester on not just ancient Greek culture, but on a very limited slice of ancient Greek culture.
Telling students “This is about the death of the American Dream and blah blah blah, now tell me why/prove my point/ agree with me.” yields up only students who can vomit back what you tell them, on command. It certainly does not yield (except via accident) students who can look at a work of art, isolate textual clues, synthesize a cohesive gloss and then defend it. The very process of voicing and defending their interpretation is infinitely more valuable than your view of education.
Even your views of how Frost should be taught would yield up students who might even be pretty good parrots, but wouldn’t have any actual analytic tools if you set them a new poem. Not to mention that your dogmatic interpretation is simply not supported by a text that plays greatly on ambiguity, qualifiers and caveats.
Come on, you don’t understand why you changed the lesson plan?
Did the lesson plan ask you to make sure that the students read poems “correctly”? Were you instructed to make them redo their readings to your satisfaction? Were you told, in the instructions you were given, to ask questions and/or discuss meter or scansion?
You changed the lesson plan. And even assuming a waste of time of only five minutes, in a standard class period you’ve already wasted more than 10% of the total time on something that specifically violates the lesson plan you were left with. Depending on your classroom management skills, that could be a much more significant waste of time.
It’s not your call to make. You were given a lesson plan. You don’t get to decide when to go off of it and do something else.
What I described was a textbook example of someone climbing the rungs of Bloom’s Taxonomy. I’m not sure what else to say if you don’t understand that, honestly.
Have you even checked your state’s educational standards and/or grade level expectations? Have you studied curriculum and instruction? Theories of cognitive development and learning styles? Have you even looked at how much time teachers have, and what else they’ve decided is worth teaching?
That claim is an absurdity. Feelings cannot be wrong, and getting students to have emotional responses to subjects is part and parcel of Critical Literacy.
And I have to ask, did you have any contact with the class beyond that one day? Do you know if the teacher was building on what happened then? Did you know about the individual students, and their individual achievement levels?
Were you really making judgments about pedagogy based on brief snippets of out of context time in classrooms?
Speaking of which, what is your training in pedagogy, curriculum and instruction, diagnostic evaluation, etc…? What is your experiences with these classes? You have, not once, referenced the greater context any individual lessons occurred in. Do you realize that? Do you realize why that’s so important? You honestly seem to be passing judgment on not just students and teachers, but the entire arcs of various units, based on out of context impressions.
Do you have anything to support your claims?
Is that entire poem? If so, it does not have a discernible form.
It’s not the entire thing, but I think you’re probably right about the work as a whole. It’s been a matter of minor debate between me and someone else I know.
I think my concept of meter is more broad than is technically correct.
-FrL-
God, when I was in high school (only ten years ago) I had to do a 20 page prosody/scansion paper on ten lines of Paradise Lost. I remember it with great bitterness, but then again, I know what “scansion” means.