A Time to Talk

Robert Frost (1874–1963). Mountain Interval. 1920.

A Time to Talk


WHEN a friend calls to me from the road

And slows his horse to a meaning walk,

I don’t stand still and look around

On all the hills I haven’t hoed,

And shout from where I am, What is it?

No, not as there is a time to talk.

I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,

Blade-end up and five feet tall,

And plod: I go up to the stone wall

For a friendly visit.


I read this with my eighth graders. I have a bit of a problem communicating literature to my students, I've realized. I just want to read it and love it and discuss it, like we did in college, but they don't seem to be able. So I sit there, loving it, trying to get them to appreciate it, and I just don't get the feeling I'm being very successful. The questions in the textbook are not much help, but I don't know what to say exactly to get them to appreciate the stuff, even though I really do. Working on it.

I have assigned an essay in response to this poem and three other pieces we have read with themes similar to the one here. They were kind of struggling with it. (I decided later they were faking it a bit due to laziness, but I'm not sure I'm right.) I decided to do the assignment myself so that I could model my process for them and give them my ideas for one of the body paragraphs. This was my "quickwrite" in response to the poem...

communication in a time to talk. there is a time to talk and a time not to talk, I am always telling the students. I know I am right. I also know they are adolescents and all they want to do is talk. good for them. but something will happen to them as they grow. they will mature, they will calm down, and yes, the impossible will happen, they will begin to talk less. eventually they will grow up and make their own lives away from their parents. they will get jobs, maybe get married and have kids. they will laugh at how busy they thought they were back in school. in school they had time to read, to play sports, to take ballet class, to ride horses, to surf....and they still managed to get their homework done and do plenty of talking. as grown-ups they will become a little burnt out maybe. become caught up in the rat race of life. their jobs and their kids will take a lot out of them. talking to their buddies.....will slip further and further down on their priority lists. and you know what....if they talk too much now, the opposite might oddly be true 20 or 30 years from now. friends are important. relationships are important and not only our family relationships. I do find, as a grown-up, that I have to force myself sometimes to connect with my friends. It isn't that I don't want to, it's just that I have so many important priorities. Other times I might be in the middle of something when a good old friend calls. I might think for a second "I have to do this and that..." but I quickly realize "No. What I really need to do is talk to my friend."

(This is a good start, I think. The kids seemed to like my free-form thoughts and wrote very productively for the remainder of the period. I also read them the body paragraph I constructed from the above and something made me bow when I was done reading it all. They actually clapped! Polite Catholic school kids!)