The idea that “The Road Not Taken” is advice about nonconformity is not supported by the text. There are multiple interpretations that can be supported by the text, but that is not one of them. There is no ambiguity on that point.
I never said there was one single correct interpretation.
If they are not told they are wrong, how are they going to learn?
I did not make him read it correctly or even attempt to after I learned that he did not know how to. It was my mistake to assume that a senior in a honors English class would understand one of the most basic things about verse poetry.
I am pretty confident is saying they are behind. In this particular district there are two high schools. The standards are night and day. At the other school, it is expected that a majority of the students will go graduate and go to college. At the school I have been at this past week, they just hope the students will graduate. It is really sad that they do not expect these students to live up to the same standards. Many of these students are profoundly ignorant, but they are not stupid. They have just been systematically let down. There is no reason that the students at one school should be so far behind (I am not just comparing them to the other school in the district, but multiple other schools).
Yes, that’s very true, and I was speaking rather flippantly. I meant to say that it’s a lot more interesting to read his stuff than hear him read it. He reads it with an incessant descending intonation that would make any high school student fall asleep. To be certain, if you are familiar with the vocabulary (as a university English grad would be), then you catch that “less natural” rhythm, and appreciate it. But to a high school student? It sounds like droning. If you want a bunch of high school school students in L.A. (where 45% of the people speak Spanish at home) to appreciate Dylan Thomas, I don’t think the oral approach is going to work at first.
The idea–put forth by 2.5–that a high school student can use a dictionary to look up unfamiliar words and suddenly have an epiphany about the meter and sense of a poem is naive. (That’s what some Scientologists in the LAUSD tried to promote a while ago–they said that the only reason students don’t succeed in public schools is because they don’t look up a word in a dictionary when they don’t understand it). Even a good dictionary is not going to really convey the full connotation of a word. Linguistic research has show that native speakers usually need to come across a new word (either in print or conversation, in a meaningful situation) about 7-9 times in order to fully grasp and be able to use its connotation correctly.
So, yeah, Thomas does pay attention to meter, but not in a way that is going to stimulate high school students at Belmont High, where I often visit classrooms and see the kind of assignments mentioned in the OP.
By “descending intonation” do you mean cadence? Because it would be a grievous fault if he didn’t recite with a cadence, since this is intrinsic to the language. As Richard Wilbur wrote:
A ball will bounce, but less and less
That’s cadence in a nutshell for you. In general, each syllable gets less stress than the previous one, which is why the second “less” is lighter than the first.
As far as being boring, I suppose you might be thinking of a softer reading like “In My Craft or Sullen Art” which may take a subtler appreciation. But if they’re sleeping through “Death Shall Have No Dominion” then I don’t think Thomas is to blame. He is one of the most dynamic readers ever recorded – he spits ninja stars.
Heck, if we’re talking Frost, I wanna throw in my parody, inspired by the movie Catch Me if You Can:
*Two mice fell in a bucket of cream,
A desperate fate, a struggle met.
The white flow a soft cold dream
That pulled them down, a nightmare threat.
One mouse drowned, a life submit.
The other thrashed, he wouldn’t quit.
His life was his, and strongly earned
All the cream to butter, churned.
I’ve earned your faith, a job, a house,
As the mouse crawled out, to live his life,
I’ve earned the love of my son and wife.
I stand before you; I am that mouse.*
Okay, but you and I are talking as people who (I assume in your case) are versed in poetry. [C.F. my post above about perceiving things from the POV of a high school student.] When I was 16 and heard “Death Shall Have No Dominion,” I actually laughed. “Why is this guy talking like an ATM?” I asked myself. The point is that a high school teacher should be able to present poetry in a way that engages the students–NOT IN A WAY THAT SIMPLY SATISFIES THE TEACHER’S VANITY ABOUT WHAT SHE OR HE HAS LEARNED IN COLLEGE, as in the case of the OP.
That’s basically what this OP’s thread is about: his vanity about what he knows, not about actually teaching–the classic sign of an inexperienced teacher.
As for ninja stars, even as a 16-year-old I wouldn’t’ve cared.
Okay, I’m repeating myself here, so this’ll be the last time I say this, you can internalize it or not, as you will.
You do not have a large enough sample size, or a longitudinal study. You do not know the specifics. Are both schools at approximately the same SES level? Can many students at the second school even afford college? Do the parents of the children at both schools all speak English? How about how many students have two parents at home? Two parents who aren’t working full time and then some, and can help and provide encouragement? How about two parents who view education as important and teach their children those values? How about the students themselves? Are many of them recalcitrant and bear no actual desire to learn, at all? Do you know their academic records? How about their history of behavior problems or a lack thereof?
Do you even know what has systematically been done? You actually went as far as to claim a systemic failure, but can you speak authoritatively about how the system actually works? You admitted earlier that you don’t even have access to individual teachers’ lesson plans, teachers’ long term goals, students’ learning styles and academic records or your state’s expectations… let alone the practical knowledge as to how a teacher goes about constructing a year’s worth of lesson plans and how they can or cannot manage to hit everything the state expects of them.
Without all of that (not to mention without any of that), you don’t have a leg to stand on.
I expect poetry is given short shrift in all high schools. Perhaps, that’s regrettable but I think the general feeling is we need more engineers and scientists than English majors these days.
All those things are irrelevant to whether the students are behind. The particular challenges that a school faces are just that―challenges. The parents of the children do that value education? So what? It is an educator’s job to overcome that. Parents are not home to help? Deal with it. Come up with a plan to overcome this challenge.
I do not know the solutions to these problems, but then it is not my job to know these solutions. I may not have your extensive experience in education, but it does not take extensive experience to know that many schools are failing students, especially in the inner cities.
I do not need to know all details of the American post invasion strategy of Iraq to know it failed.
You don’t need to have extensive experience to be a good teacher. I hire teachers all the time who have no class-room experience, but they have the right attitude (and, of course, the legally required amount of education). I monitor them and I give them a lot of guidance and support (modeling for example). If they maintain their attitude (specifically, the desire to improve their teaching), then they can go from substitute to “permanent.” Someone with your attitude (that “teaching how to think is BS”), would not get far with me. It’s good that you’re questioning pedagogy, but to simply dismiss something like that particular English class because some students in a high school English class don’t know about all the subtleties of scansion is pure vanity on your part. You apparently don’t care about their learning; you just want to show off what you know. Since you were willing to drop the lesson plan of the teacher (and I agree with you that regular teachers often leave substitutes with pathetic lesson plans, so I don’t fault you there) instead of simply dropping the whole thing…
why didn’t YOU read the poem to them, so they could hear it as you wanted them to hear it and eventually speak it???
Do you have children? If you don’t, I can tell you that it takes about one and a half to two years for a child to begin to talk. But that child is LISTENING from the very first day of its life. (Some might say that a child is listening in the womb, but that’s a different story.) So if you were willing to deviate from the teacher’s lesson plan, and if you thought the students really needed to speak the poem out loud in a way that satisfied your particular interpretation of its intent, then you had an OBLIGATION to read it to them YOURSELF. Did that even occur to you?
I don’t mean this as criticism, because it seems you’re new to teaching (correct me if I’m wrong). This is my job: to guide new teachers. The problem is that many people who end up as English teachers are graduates with English degrees–but that doesn’t help the students, because they obviously don’t have English degrees, and you don’t have to learn a thing about pedagogy to get an English degree. That doesn’t mean that you can’t be an excellent English teacher; you just need to learn how to see the subject from the students’ perspective. You learn that by three means:
sticking it out
trying, and trying, and trying to get them to “get it” by experimenting
let me repeat: “EXPERIMENTING”
knowing when your experiment has worked (and then tinkering with it to make it better.)
There are others, but I’ve got to make breakfast.
Of course not, but try explaining that to a bunch of Guatemalans.
As for “failing schools”? That cliche has been bouncing around so long that it really has little meaning. You need to specify where you teach, the funding of schools, and the demographics of the district. Granted, there are teachers who are “burned out” and don’t give a damn, but if that were the only problem with public schools, then we could just send them off to some pointless administration job. It’s not necessarily schools that fail–it’s society that fails.
I’m not sure I trust Canadian schools to teach children what to think OR how to think. Just this week, my daughter had a ‘wetlands’ units in her grade 5 class. As part of that unit, they had to learn taxonomy for wetland creatures. I was quizzing her on definitions, and got to ‘Amphibian’. this is how schools in our district define ‘amphibian’:
Amphibian
Any animal born in the water, which can later live on water or land. For example, a frog, or a beaver.
Yes, our schools are teaching kids that beavers are amphibians. The copyright on the lesson plan was 1997, so they’ve been doing this for 11 years.
As for ‘how to think’ - later in the week, their class project was to learn an interpretive wetlands dance. They brought some avante-garde dancer in to the class to teach them how to interpret the plight of the wetlands by circling around each other and contorting their bodies into various shapes to represent what they felt about them.
So… Beavers are amphibians, and one good way to learn how to think about wetland environments is to engage in interpretive dance. Go team.
I do not think that actually teaching students how to think is a bad idea. It is the way it is used as a code to not teach anything that I think is bullshit.
Again, I did not drop the lesson plan of the teacher. I only asked a couple of questions. I would not disregard the lesson plan of a teacher. That is why I did not read them the poem in a proper manner. I would not teach them something (like reading verse poetry) that was not on the lesson plan.
And the issue with reading verse poetry is only a small part of the problems I have seen in this school. As said earlier in this thread, I had a history/social studies teacher leave A Knight’s Tale for the students to watch. When the department chair came in and asked how everything was going, I told him the students were behaving, but I did see why they were watching a historically inaccurate film. His response, “Well, what are you going to do?” This same class had earlier in the year watched War of the Worlds. Why possible reason could there be for wasting class time like this? In fact, it is worse than wasting time because it puts forth inaccurate information.
How have you NOT sent this to every major newspaper you can? I mean, this is the sort of shit the papers eat up. “Edmonton Public Schools: ‘Beavers Are Amphibians’” would be on the CP wire and in every paper in the country in two days. It might get on TV. I can see Mercer mentioning it.
This is comedy gold, and it must be shared with the rest of the nation.
I’d also be on the phone with the principal. but that may be a brick-wall-head-banging exercise so I’d understand if you didn’t want to bother with that, but come on; you HAVE to send this to the Edmonton papers, and possibly also the Calgary Herald. And make sure you send it to the National Post and Globe and Mail.
Copy the original document or they might not believe you.
I’d be real slow to judge a teacher or a school based on sub plans. I mean, we have our share of crappy teachers, but a lot of the time, if someone’s left a movie for a sub it’s because some sort of emergency has occurred (hence the need for a sub) and whatever the original plans were, they don’t translate easily into something a random sub can do. Teachers are people too, and they get food poisoning, their moms have strokes, their daycare suddenly craps out just like anyone else.
It’s also one to three weeks from the end of the school year, the kids are restless and hard to control–I can completely see thinking “No matter what I leave, they are going to do, at best, a half-ass, copy-off-your-neighbor job if that. I might as well just leave a movie and make it easy on the sub.” I mean, hell, as far as I am concerned, my kids took the AP exam on Wednesday (and have been taking AP exams all week) and when I left at noon on Thursday, my lesson plans said “Free day. They will be good”. If the sub thought I was a bad teacher for that, screw 'em. Those kids have worked their asses off for 9 months, no free days, no movies, no mercy. They deserved the time.
You also will be seeing the crappiest plans if you are working as a “random” sub, not one that has a long-term relationship with the teachers they sub for. People that are out a lot tend to have a couple subs they always call on. These are the people that leave really useful, complex lesson plans because they leave them with someone they call the night before and talk with, they leave them with someone they trust to be able to do the job right. When you don’t have a regular sub (and I don’t, I am not out enough) or when it’s an emergency and you can’t get your regular sub, you really have no idea what you are getting. We have some crazy subs. It’s best not to leave anything too complex.
