Teaching "The Road Not Taken"

I did teach Unit 12 “The Road Not Taken” before Unit 11. Before I did so, I told the students why: First, they just read the poem on the 2nd mid-term, which involved choice-making. Second, they are now facing a crossroads in their life. They have to decide whether to apply to university in February or not and, if yes, which school/depeartment to apply to. Third, I’d like them to memorize such a beautiful and meaningful poem and recite it to me. That takes time.

Then we started our contact with the poem.

1. I had a student (four students in Class 310) write the whole poem on the blackboard before class. The blackboard was divided into four parts, each for a stanza.

2. I showed two photos of Robert Frost and told the students about the popularity of him and this poem in the US.

3. The students listened to Robert Frost recite the poem twice. They told me the speaker sounded very old. My response was that they would find out that is the right tone for the poem. (It was a pity that in my cassette version, Frost skipped the third stanza. Thankfully, on Friday afternoon, Chris showed me a complete version she had downloaded from the Net. I'll let the students listen to it next week.)

4. The students read the poem once.

5. The students talked about the story in the poem.

6. We discussed the form and the sound of the poem. This poem contains 4 stanzas, each having 5 lines. Together, we discovered the rhyme scheme: abaab, cdccd, efeef, ghggh, by reading aloud the last word of each line. Then we went on to the metric pattern. Since in this poem the number of syllables in each foot is not so regular as that in “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” I used the first two lines of the latter to demonstrate the concepts of the weak-strong sound pattern and the“foot” in a poem.

7. We went over the poem line by line, discussing the meaning of some new words, the structure of some complicated sentences, etc. I even asked the students why the poet ended the sentence “Oh, I kept the first for another day!” with an exclamation mark. They gave very good answers.

8. Finished with the literal meaning, we went deeper into the poem by discussing its symbolic meaning: the choice-making in life.

9. The students read the whole poem by repeating after the poet.

10. The students read the poem twice by themselves. After getting the sense of the poem, this time they sounded like the speaker in the cassette.

The following is a video clip from YouTube of the recitation of this poem by Samuel Godfrey George. Just click on the title of the poem, and you'll go to the video.

The Road Not Taken