Embedding Thoreau in a Writing Curriculum

This curriculum was developed by Katherine Hayes Adams, an English teacher at North Quincy High School in Quincy, Massachusetts, a city of 100,000 adjacent to Boston.   Most students who take the course in which this curriculum is used will enroll on a four-year college following high school graduation.

Table of Contents

Links to the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks
Introduction
The Observation Journal
The Descriptive Essay
Other Essay Forms

Literature Strand Learning Standards         

#8    Students will decode accurately and understand new words encountered in their reading           materials, drawing on a variety of strategies as needed, and then use these words accurately           in speech and writing.

#9    Students will identify the basic facts and essential ideas in what they have read, heard, or           viewed.

#13   Students will identify, analyze, and apply knowledge of the structure, elements, and meaning            of nonfiction or informational material and provide evidence from the text to support their            understanding.

#15   Students will identify and analyze how an author's choice of words appeals to the senses,            creates imagery, suggests mood, and sets tone.

 

Composition Strand Learning Standards

#20   Students will select and use appropriate genres, modes of reasoning, and speaking styles            when writing for different audiences and rhetorical purposes.

#23   Students will use self-generated questions, note-taking, summarizing, precise writing, and            outlining to enhance learning when reading or writing.

 

Embedding Thoreau in a Writing Curriculum        

Henry David Thoreau's name is familiar to most high school students taking a course in American literature.  They often read selections from "Economy" and one or two other sections of Walden, and in many cases they study "Civil Disobedience."  When pressed, these students might be able to describe Thoreau's "transcendental characteristics" and tell a bit about his Walden Pond experiment.  And then they move on to Hawthorne.

While he certainly deserves his place in the American literary canon, Thoreau can also serve as a powerful model for the writing classroom.  After all, Thoreau followed a pattern in his work remarkably similar to the writing process with which most students are familiar today.  On his daily four-hour walks, he was a close observer of everything within his sensory range.  He then recorded and commented on his observations in his journal, often drawing on his wide-ranging knowledge derived from both his classical education at Harvard and his life-long voracious reading.  The first public presentation of his ideas often occurred in the form of a lecture at one of the lyceums prevalent in New England.  Finally, he carefully shaped the ideas into essay or book form for publication.  These writings -- the journal entries and less widely-known essays, as well as Walden and "Civil Disobedience" -- serve as models for important elements of essay writing: precise description, humor, figurative language, and allusions.

At North Quincy High School, college-bound eleventh graders study American literature for one semester and expository writing for the other.  In the latter course, they write a series of essays, each using a different rhetorical strategy, and a research paper.  This guide suggests ways for using Thoreau's insights and strategies and the works of other nature writers within the prescribed writing curriculum.

 

I.    The Observation Journal          

Thoreau's practice of close observation followed by journal writing, lecture presentation, and essay publication serves as a model for emerging writers.  Early in the course, students are introduced to an observation journal format.  This format includes date, time, weather conditions, and detailed notes on surroundings.  The students then take some ten minute "practice trips" to the school's front yard, a hilly acre with trees, grass, and shrubs in the midst of a circular driveway.   Having examined some of Thoreau's journal entries, they then rewrite their observations in paragraph form in their journals, and they are encouraged to include questions, speculations, and connections that occur to them.

The core of their observation work is a series of field trips to a wilderness area located on Quincy Bay about a mile from the school.  Locally known as the Hummock, this is a place of both historic and environmental significance.  The first treaty between Native Americans and European settlers in Quincy was signed there in the seventeenth century, and a trail winds through the hill with its variety of vegetation and rock formations.  Each student selects a place to observe closely and record field notes, and then as a home assignment, transfers the notes to journal form.  Students return to the same area as a class at least twice throughout the semester, and they observe continuity and change at their "personal places."

While students do not prepare formal lectures on their observations (alas, no Lyceum in Quincy!), they are encouraged to discuss their observations with peers and the class.  For some students, the observations and subsequent journal entries serve as the basis of their descriptive essays.  For others, the careful attention to detail helps them shape descriptive elements in any essay.

 

II.    The Descriptive Essay          

Since vivid and accurate descriptions is at the heart of all effective writing, short exercises focused on specific skills help students to sharpen their writing style.   "Winter Animals" in Walden is just one passage that provides multiple examples of careful descriptions of sounds.  With descriptive phrases and figurative language, Thoreau brings the reader on the scene in passages such as

          moonlight nights, in search of a partridge or other game, barking raggedly
          and demoniacally like forest dogs, as if laboring with some anxiety or
          seeking expression, struggling for light and to be dogs outright or run            freely in the street....

By analyzing passages like this and ones focussing on experiences of the other senses, students develop tools to sharpen their own writing.

But while creative evocative writing is an important goal, ultimately students write essays to make sense of some aspect of life and to present that meaning to readers.   Thus the students read from a variety of nature writers to see how authors convey meaning through descriptive essays.  Thoreau's "Autumnal Tints" in the first semester and "The Pond in Winter" during the second semester provide seasonal topics which show what an essayist can do with material gathered from the kinds of observations the students themselves are making.  Aldo Leopold's "Marshland Elegy" from A Sand County Almanac explores a landscape similar to the marshes that neighbor our school.  Annie Dillard, Rachel Carson, the dozens of writers in The Norton Book of Nature Writing all provide inspiration and models for student writers.

 

III.    Other Essay Forms          

Following are brief suggestions about ways in which Thoreau's writings and his approach to living and writing can inform the other essay types that students in this course must write.

A.    The Example Essay

In this essay form, the goal is for students to select and explain one or several examples that illustrate a particular point.  One way students can use their observation journals is to select one object under observation -- a bird, a plant, a tree -- and use library reference materials to explore the way this object has been developed as a subject by other writers.  Again Thoreau provides a model:  the results of his classical education at Harvard and his life-long love of learning through reading appear frequently in his writing.  Students might read selections of "Walking," "Wild Apples," or "Economy" in Walden as examples of ways in which historical and mythological information can be used to explain a topic.

B.    The Comparison-Contrast Essay

Thoreau's life-long dedication to examining his community serves as a model for ways in which contemporary students might look at their own communities through the lenses of geological history and human history.  In Quincy, the latter includes the histories of Native Americans, the early European influx, and the many subsequent waves of immigrants from all parts of the world.  For the students interested in research, the Quincy Historical Society has a variety of resources -- maps, monographs, books, documents -- that would enable them to write about continuity and change in a particular area such as Squantum or Wollaston.  Working on a topic like this also encourages interdisciplinary links with the history department.