Back when I was pretty moist [just for you, Paul Morrison] behind the ears as the guy standing in front of the class and trying to teach, I was often judged to be too opinionated, according to the reviews that students filed at the end of a semester. In my mind that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I thought of what John Milton says in “Areopagitica,” that “opinion in good men [by which Milton meant humans] is but knowledge in the making.” The assumption of goodness attributed to me is, needless to say, absolutely right, of course.
But then it occurred to me that despite Milton’s wisdom, the way of expressing opinion does, after all, condition how that opinion is received. If you’re talking to someone who in your opinion is an idiot, it does absolutely no good to say, “you’re an idiot.” If the person is really an idiot, there’s no remedy, ultimately—but wending your way around to convincing yourself that your opinion is a matter of fact will at least give some satisfaction.
So I worked my way around to a different way of expressing opinions in classes. An example follows.
The usual reading of Robert Frost’s well-known poem, “The Road Not Taken,” is that Frost is praising the person who marches to a different drummer, who boldly goes where no human has gone before. And of course that’s an almost irresistible reading. Probably everyone knows the poem, but just in case, here it is:
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And 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.
The standard reading leans very heavily on the final two lines. And, in my opinion, that reading is just inadequate to the subtlety of the poem—a subtlety that Frost is often considered to not have, by the way, because his language seems so conversationally straightforward, colloquial, easy enough to understand. All of those characteristics of Frost’s language are true. But subtle, I’m afraid, Frost really is.
So my old approach to presenting the poem in class was to say something like this: “Yes, there’s a suggestion of the speaker’s uniqueness of choice in the poem—no doubt about that. But leaving the poem as being all about the wonders of such uniqueness gets contradicted by almost everything in the poem, from the title, which focuses not on the unique choice but on the choice not made, to the limited vision of the speaker, who can therefore not judge anything about uniqueness or lack or uniqueness, to clear-eyed observations like ‘the passing there / Had worn them really about the same’ and ‘both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black.’ So surely the idea that the speaker chose the unique path is just incorrect.”
Talk about putting people’s backs up!
I worked my way into an alternative approach, then. I’d hear the standard response to the poem, and then ask, “How would you fold ‘the passing there / Had worn them really about the same’ into that reading? And similar questions for the other evidence—that’s what the terms of the poem gives us, after all, evidence.
Students would wrangle with the questions, come to whatever conclusion they thought most appropriate. Ignore the evidence, though, they couldn’t—I’d insist on that, for sure. Ultimately I hoped that they would come to my conclusion, that the poem is fundamentally about the nostalgia for a past where the full spectrum of options in the future are wide open, and of course the wistfulness that comes when one is older because the choices one has made foreclose such openness, so one is more or less stuck in what one has chosen. I know—“stuck” is pretty pejorative, and it’s often the case that one’s path is wonderful. Nonetheless, the poem suggests, one is stuck in that path, though wonderful.
But in fact, I came not to really care about students’ opinions coinciding with mine (even though, of course, I was right J). The real point was to get students to think through evidence, including the give and take in the class discussions as other people’s opinions were articulated, come to sustainable conclusions, and then write essays that supported those conclusions, using the evidence adduced to reach them. If research sources came into play on a given assignment, then the evidence of those sources would come into play as well. But the important thing, I concluded, was the process, not necessarily the “correctness” of the opinion expressed.
I’ve had an online presence, as they say, for many years. I think my first encounter with the world of online discussion boards was back in the early ‘90s—my memory being what it is, I can’t date it more narrowly. In those many years of observing and participating in online discussions, I’ve experienced many many good things. I’ve also seen many localized world wars, mostly on the basis of an opinion asserted as I used to assert the correct reading of the poem, or on the basis of misunderstood irony or sarcasm or humor or . . . fill in your favorite linguistic shtick. Those have been painful to see and to participate in. Emoticons don’t work all the time, and as many a literary scholar will say, irony and sarcasm are the most difficult verbal structures to convey. As Robert Scholes says, to know that “the majestic gingkoes of Brooklyn” is an ironic phrase requires knowledge of what gingkoes look like. Add the brevity that online communications almost demand, and the result is . . . localized world wars.
Maybe we need an online version of the UN? But then the SCOTUS might conclude that such intercession is prohibited by the First Amendment.
