Author: deeRock

My passion is, has always been, and will probably always be traveling and experiencing different cultures. If I had one wish, it would be to be fluent in every single language in the world.

One of my favorite poems

The Road Not Taken – Robert Frost

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 marked 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.

This is one of Frost’s most well-known poems, and perhaps one that is most often misunderstood by people. Now, I am all for the readers’ own interpretation of a poem because regardless of what we read, we relate it to our experiences. However, this poem is not about taking the less-traveled road. On the contrary, the two roads are the same. Many people focus heavily on the last line and assume it to be the main message of the poem. The title of the poem is “The Road Not Taken”. Simply put, the poem is about second-guessing or even regretting and wondering about the choices we made. This dilemma is something that people have thought about “ages and ages hence”. We can never know for certain what could have or would have happened if we made different decisions. The only thing that we can do is “Carpe Diem”.

Everything is a “Remix”

First, check out the series here. Then, check out this article from Brain Pickings.

One of the posts I wrote for my summer Teaching of English Practicum class was about how the lessons that teachers plan have been thought of and used at one point or another. The post is as follows:

“When I was planning lessons on my own and with Heidi, I found that almost everything has been done and used before by many others. With the internet, we can find ESL lessons on every topic imaginable. As language learners and language teachers, we have seen and used many of the same lessons that (always) work well (Alligator River anyone?). We have mixed and matched activities and thrown together lessons at the last minute. We have games and tricks that we turn to when we are out of ideas. So, where is the creativity and the innovation that people talk about? We have new ideas and concepts all the time and most of these ideas and concepts are based off of something that we have come across. The end product is always something different, and in a way, the same. This is where I tie in what we learned from Curriculum Design: we plan units, and lessons plan themselves. Everyone is capable of being creative. When we think of ideas to put in a lesson, sometimes we realize that wait, this is cool because I’ve never done this before, nor do I know anyone else who has! The truth is someone else somewhere else some time during or before may have already thought of and perhaps used the same idea. This does not mean that you are not creative or anything. Just take a look at history, hundreds of years ago in Ancient Greece, Africa, and China, they were thousands of miles apart yet they all thought about the meaning of life, gods, good and evil, ideal society, the cosmos, and so on and so forth. Now we see that the ideas they came up with have many similarities (not going into it).

The curriculum units and lessons are the same. Ideas have been floating around and probably have been used in one way or another. Even though people are completely different and can be on two ends of the world, our ways of thinking are similar (evolution hello!) I think as teachers, we have a limited amount of time and if we constantly come up with new things to do, our lives are over! So, we need to be smart and know how to adapt and change what is already there to use it for our own classes according to different contexts and teaching situations. I think this is where creativity and innovation come in combining different things because the possibilities are limitless.”

I still stand by what I said: Creativity is about remixing and renewing ideas and looking at things from different angles through different lenses.

Time Traveling? I don’t think so.

Do neutrinos really travel faster than the speed of light? Maybe. If you haven’t heard, check out some articles here, here, and here. The original study has been made public and is currently under peer review but if you’re interested, the PDF can be found here.

Many scholars in the field of astronomy and physics are challenging the merits of the study because neutral subatomic particles traveling faster than the speed of light would undermine Einstein’s theory of relativity, which would change the world of physics as we know it. Not that it hasn’t happened before (Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and so on). Anyways, until further experiments are carried out at the CERN LHC, sci-fi fanatics should keep those pants on.