03 June 2008

Depending on how you feel about Frost...

A group of teenagers were punished with poetry after throwing a house party at Robert Frost's old farm in Ripton, Vermont. The prosecuting attorney on the case offered the 28 partygoers a deal: Your record will be cleared if you attend a class on Frost's poetry taught by a Middlebury professor. In the first of these classes the perps were led through a line by line reading of "The Road Not Taken" and "Out, Out--"

Yeah, that's the way to get kids into poems -- threaten them!

1 comment:

Elizabeth said...

I don't think the intent was so much punishment or deterrent as it was rehabilitation: or perhaps habilitation in the first place.

My late grandfather-in-law's house and synagogue (a rabbi) was vandalized by a few teenagers with spray-painted anti-Semitic slurs. Instead of sending the kids to jail, he offered to spend time with them to teach them about the Holocaust (since he knew from experience, having lost many members of his family to the Holocaust, that these kids weren't Nazis; they were just ignorant). A Daytime Emmy-winning episode of "CBS Schoolbreak Special" was made of it.

I wish I had met him.