Thoughts on Backward Design

I found the backward design project much easier as an individual than as a group member. Since, both in college and graduate school, I have never taken a course focusing on poetry, as I prefer to read and work on novels, I am not especially confident in my ability to read and interpret poetry. I read up on “The Road Not Taken," and once I got to class had a firm idea of the results which I thought teaching this particular poem should produce, which sort of clashed with the group I crashed. (rhymes) I felt that students should be guided away from their subjective reading of the poem, and into an understanding that the poem is “trickier than it looks,” to paraphrase something Frost said about it. I slowed down our progress with this perspective and ended up feeling like a total poem nazi.

Once I was back home working on my own design, and freed up to be as much as a Frost-fascist as I wanted to be, finishing the assignment was breezy, however, that does not mean I am completely confident in the lesson plan I devised.

For one thing, I haven’t been teaching in a while, and don’t feel too in touch with how things work in the classroom from an instructor’s perspective right now. My imagined audience for the lesson plan was the 18 member freshman writing seminar I taught several years ago. It’s a long lesson plan, which I think would take about as long as our English 790 normal seminar class length, so, therefore, probably did not turn out to be realistic.

To get to the point, though, I think concentrating first on my desired results did help me conceive of the lesson. I wanted students to be able to see that this poem, which is often seen as very simple, might have an ironic, as well as a surface, meaning, and then I wanted them to think consider whether seeing more in the poem increased their appreciation of it or not. Though I had very clear ideas about what I wanted students to see in the poem, my sense of what they should take from this was wide open. I think the idea that “The Road Not Taken” could be considered a “failure,” since it has been enjoyed by so many, yet perhaps from the point of view of authorial intention, is so often misread, is an interesting one and brings up the question of what is the point of “tricky” poetry in general. I.e., is it just a tool of elitism, etc.?