The Road Not Taken
Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel bothAnd be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
Still love this in spite of having taught it so many times I could recite it.
ReplyDeleteI love Robert Frost and that poem.
ReplyDeleteHis poetic language, sadly, has begun to show its age; I happened on a 'poetry for young people' site not long ago and I was both bemused and horrified at the number of words they marked as 'archaic". Lantern, buggy, lamps, horses as transportation, mein gott, it was discouraging. Not that the words were misrepresntend, but that no one just said, look it up.
ReplyDeleteoh, an almost offtopic rant: I found one of those clickbait things about how baby boomers and 'the rest of us' differ. Ahem. One of the things that stunned me was 'cursive? who needs cursive? Put down that pen, granny, and get yourself a phone..." "no one needs cursive anymore..." And I thought, wait until one of these spoiled darlings applies for a job as a clerk, or a librarian's assistant, or someone hands them a sheaf of letters that needs to be transcribed...
And memorization's not such a bad thing, it gives the brain something to do, like knitting, when you're waiting for other things to happen...
Back again -
DeleteA fellow teacher friend has pointed out more than once that there are actual brain processes that are specific to learning cursive
Also, there's a competition called Poetry Out Loud in which kids recite a poem they've learned - a combination of literature and performance.
I volunteered for 20+ years at the state historical society, and all of my work involved reading, deciphering, and sorting of family papers. My friend Lea and I would hunker down with a sheaf of letters, arrange them by person, and date, and from those figure out who was related to who (or whom) and what was going on in the family.
DeleteNo one printed. Not even the youngest child, and they learned cursive from 4 yrs on. Letters were how generals, parents, presidents and ship magnates communicated, even before the pony express.
Librarians, teachers, historians, anyone who deals with the written word before, say 1980, needs to know cursive. Anyone interested in those kinds of professions needs to know cursive. You can't even file papers without it.
I do love the idea of Poetry Out Loud. I wish more teachers, and parents--would do that. Kids love poetry, if they come to it soon enough. And they have to know it isn't all Byron and Keats.