Curricula for the Science classroom developed for the Summer Content Institute:
“Approaching Walden: From Emerson to Thoreau”
at
The Thoreau Institute
July 5 – 13, 2001
by
Donald Bockler
Arlington High School
I have long held an educational
philosophy that involves getting students involved in their local
environment. As a result, I have
gravitated toward teaching courses that get my students outdoors to study local
natural history. I have had a personal
interest in Henry David Thoreau and Walden Pond (it’s so close!) since
relocating in New England several decades ago.
For some reason this interest rarely transferred into my classroom
teaching… Perhaps I wrongly felt that
Thoreau was “owned” by English and Social Studies Departments and that those departments
covered all that there was to be covered about Thoreau and his ideas. After participating in the Approaching Walden summer institute I
realized that there is a lot of science and natural history in Thoreau’s works
that is not covered in the humanities classes.
The man and his ideas on natural history are truly classic, and his
study area is very local and world famous.
As a result I plan to integrate Thoreau’s writings and ideas into three
of my science classes at Arlington High.
These lessons will expand on curricula already in place in each
class. The courses include an
independent study A.P. Environmental Science class, Ecology of New England, and
Honors Biology. This paper describes
the Thoreauvian curricula to be used in my science classes.
I.
A.P. Environmental Science
For the past four years I have assigned Walden as
one of the summer readings for students enrolled in my APES independent study course.
We concentrate on Thoreau’s Walden, “A Civil Disobedience”, and “Life
With Principle” during the first term as we study Environmental Science in
preparation for the A.P. Exam. We
consider Thoreau to be the first “environmental scientist”. During other terms these students focus on
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, A Civil Action, and Edward Abbey’s
Desert Solitaire. Thoreau’s
ideas and deeds are contrasted with these literary works. During the “Thoreau term”, we highlight his
natural history of local environments as we study our local environment around
the school. Thoreau is also contrasted
with Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the
Commons” early in the course.
The additions to our curriculum following the summer
institute Approaching Walden include:
1) an in-depth review of Walden
using specific quotes taken from the text and, 2) a summary outline of
“the times”, “the man”, and “the place” for a better understanding of the
book. Both the Walden quotes
pages and the summary outline are included on the following pages. I also will have the students read and
discuss sections of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Nature”
to provide them with a better philosophical understanding of Thoreau and
Transcendentalism.
Walden quotes to consider/discuss after summer reading
assignment in A.P. Environmental Science
at Arlington High School: (Pages refer to the 1993 Barnes & Noble version of Walden.)
Ch. 1. Economy (narrator = Thoreau, cultural critique, societal values, spiritual/rebirth metaphors, house costs)
10 – For the improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man’s existence: as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors. The necessaries of life…
11 – According to Leibig, man’s body is a stove, and food the fuel which keeps up the internal combustion of the lungs.
…animal life is nearly synonymous with the expression animal heat…
12 – Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.
15 – For many years I was the self-appointed inspector of snow storms … - and surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths … keeping them open … where the public heel had testified to their utility.
16 – My purpose in going to Walden was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly there, but to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles …
18 – Clothing, … perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty and regard for the opinion of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility.
19 – I say beware of all enterprises that require new clothing, and not rather a new wearer of clothes.
26 – … points to an important distinction the civilized man and the savage; and they have designs on us for our benefit, in making the life of a civilized people institution, in which the life of the individual is to a great extent absorbed …
27 – And when the farmer has got his house, he may not be the richer but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him.
28 – While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them.
30 – I had three pieces of limestone on my desk, but I was terrified to find that they required to be dusted daily, when the furniture of my mind was all undusted still …
31 – The best works of art are the expression of man’s struggle to free himself from this condition, but the effect of our art is merely to make this low state comfortable and the that higher state to be forgotten.
- Before we can adorn our houses with beautiful objects the walls must be stripped, and our lives must be
stripped, and beautiful housekeeping and beautiful living be laid for a foundation …
37 – But alas! We do like cowbirds and cuckoos, which lay their eggs in the nests which other birds have built, … I never in all my walks came across a man engaged in so simple and natural an occupation as building his house.
38 – What of architectural beauty I now see, I know has grown from within outward, out of the necessities and character of the indweller, who is the only builder …
40 – I thus found that the student who wishes for a shelter can obtain one for a lifetime at an expense not greater than the rent which he now pays annually.
41 – … students should go to work with their hands instead of their heads … they should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end.
[Calculate the house cost considering inflation: $1 (2001) = $0.043 (1845)]
43 – We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.
45 – … if one would live simply and eat only the crop which he raised, and raise no more than he ate, and not exchange it for an insufficient quantity of more luxurious and expensive things, he would only need to cultivate a few rods of ground …
46 – I am wont to think that men are not so much the keepers of the herds as herds are the keepers of men …
51 – Leaven, which some deem the soul of bread, the spiritus which fills its cellular tissue, which is religiously preserved like the vestal fire, - some precious bottle-full, I suppose, first brought over in the Mayflower … I am glad to escape the trivialness of carrying a bottle-full in my pocket, which I would sometimes pop and discharge its contents …
55 – It is best to avoid the beginnings of evil. – When a man dies he kicks the dust.
58 – In short, I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one’s self on this earth it is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely.
60 – If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life … No, - in this case I would rather suffer evil the natural way.
61 – If you give money, spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them.
62/63 – There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root … I do not value chiefly a man’s uprightness and benevolence, which are, as it were, his stem and leaves. Those plants of whose greenness withered we make herb tea for the sick serve but a humble use, and are most employed by quacks.
63 – We should impart or courage, and not our despair, our health and ease, and not our disease, and take care that this does not spread by contagion.
- Being a microcosm himself, he discovers – and it is a true discovery, and he is the man to make it – that the
world has been eating green apples…
Ch. 2. Where I Lived, and What I Lived For (morning philosophy, search for spiritual perfection, self = center)
69 – As long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail.
70 – The morning wind forever blows, the poem of creation in uninterrupted; but few are the ears that hear it.
74 –We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep.
75 – I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I wanted to live deep and suck out all of the marrow of life. … Our life is frittered away by detail.
76 – Simplify, simplify. - We do not ride on the railroad; it rides on us.
80 – Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails
81 – Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in. I drink at it; but while I drink I see the sandy bottom and detect how shallow it is. Its current slides away, but eternity remains.
85 – A written word is the choicest of relics.
90 – We have a comparatively decent system of common schools, schools for infants only… It is time that we had uncommon schools… It is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities…
Ch. 4. Sounds (summer reverie, daily activities, experience life à ecstasy, railroad trains, bird sounds)
92 – I love a broad margin to my life.
98 – We are all educated thus to be the sons of Tell. The air is full of invisible bolts. Every path but your own is the path of fate. Keep on your own track, then.
Ch. 5. Solitude (nature as source of pleasure, harmony à spiritually whole, metaphors: loon & thaw, pond = pure soul)
109 – There can be no very black melancholy to him who lives in the midst of Nature and has his senses still.
- I have never lonesome, or in the least oppressed by a sense of solitude…
112 – I only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another.
- I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. … Solitude is not measured by the miles
of space that intervene between a man and his fellows.
113 – I have a great deal of company in my house; especially in the morning when nobody calls. … I am no more lonely than the loon in the pond that laughs so loud, or than Walden Pond itself. What company has that lonely lake, I pray?
114 – I have occasional visits in the long winter evenings, when the snow falls fast and the wind howls in the wood, from an old settler and original proprietor, who is reported to have dug Walden Pond, and stoned it, and fringed it …
Ch. 6. Visitors (claims to be sociable…, few visitors, woodchopper)
116 – I have three chairs in my house; one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society.
117 – Individuals, like nations, must have suitable broad and natural boundaries, even a considerable neutral ground between them.
119 – I had withdrawn so far within the great ocean of solitude, into which the rivers of society empty, that for the most part, so far as my needs were concerned, only the finest sediment was deposited around me.
Ch. 8 The Village (purification bath, contempt for town life, jailed à Civil Disobedience)
138 – As I walked in the woods to see the birds and squirrels, so I walked in the village to see the men and boys…
141 – Not till we are lost, in other words, not till we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are and the infinite extent of our relations.
142 – I am convinced, that if all men were to live as simply as I then did, thieving and robbery would be unknown.
Ch. 9. The Ponds (metaphor of self, divine expression through nature, inspiration via spring/sky, earth’s eye, turnover)
147 – But, looking directly down into our waters from a boat, they seem to be of very different colors [from pure blue].
155 – A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is the earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.
156 – Walden is a perfect forest mirror. … Sky water. It needs no fence. … Nature continually repairs; no storms, no dust can dim its surface ever fresh; - a mirror in which all impurity presented to it sinks, swept and dusted by the sun’s hazy brush
157 – Paddling gently to one of these places, I was surprised to find myself surrounded by myriads of small perch, about five inches long, of a rich bronze color in the green water, sporting there, and constantly rising to the surface and dimpling it, sometimes leaving bubbles on it.
159 – But since I have left those shores the woodchoppers have further laid them to waste. … How can you expect the birds to sing when their groves are cut down?
163 – Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.
Ch. 10. Baker Farm (nature & the pond à celebration of life & spiritual perfection, John Field visit, commons idea?)
167 – Instead of calling on some scholar, I paid many a visit to particular trees…
168 – As I walked on the railroad causeway, I used to wonder at the halo of light around my shadow, and would fain fancy myself one of the elect.
171 – I should be glad if all the meadows on the earth were left in a wild state…
173 – Enjoy the land, but own it not. Through want of enterprise and faith men are where they are, buying and selling, and spending their lives like serfs.
Ch. 11. Higher Laws (hunting à nutrition à spirituality, commons, nature reveals absolute truths, butterfly life cycle)
175 – I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented
176 – But already a change is taking place, owing, not to an increased humanity, but to an increased scarcity of game, for perhaps the hunter is the greatest friend of the animals hunted, not excepting the Humane Society.
179 – I believe that every man who has ever been earnest to preserve his highest or poetic faculties in the best condition has been particularly inclined to abstain from animal food, and from much food of any kind. … The gross feeder is a man in the larval state; and there are whole nations in that condition, nations without fancy or imagination, whose vast abdomens betray them. … The abdomen under the wings of the butterfly still represents the larva.
180 – Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man.
181 – I am glad to have drunk water so long, for the same reason that I prefer the natural sky to the opium-eater’s heaven. … I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man.
183 – All sensuality is one, though it takes many forms; all purity is one.
184 – We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones.
Ch. 12. Brute Neighbors (Hermit/spirit vs. Poet/nature, battle of ants, symbols: partridge, winged cat & loon)
187 – Shall I go to heaven or a-fishing?
190/192 – [the battle of the ants] … [also discuss the other animals described in the Brute Neighbors chapter]
Ch. 13. House-Warming (Oct. foliage, chimney = soul, spiritual winter à renewal, fire = inspiration, freezing pond)
199 – Each morning the manager of this gallery substituted some new picture, distinguished by more brilliant or harmonious coloring, for the old upon the walls.
200 – I thus warmed myself by the still glowing embers which the summer, like a departed hunter, had left.
201 – I lingered most about the fireplace, as the most vital part of the house. … The chimney is to some extent an independent structure, standing on the ground, and rising through the house to the heavens; even after the house is burned it still stands sometimes, and its importance and independence are apparent. … Should not every apartment in which man dwells be lofty enough to create some obscurity overhead, where flickering shadows may play at evening about the rafters? … I now first began to inhabit my house, … when I began to use it for warmth as well as shelter.
204 – I was surprised to see how thirsty the bricks were which drank up all the moisture in my plaster before I had smoothed it, and how many pailfuls of water it takes to christen a new hearth..
207 – I withdrew yet farther into my shell, and endeavored to keep a bright fire both within my house and within my breast. … How much more interesting an event is that man’s supper who has just been forth in the snow to hunt, nay, you might say, steal, the fuel to cook it with.
209 – Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection.
210 – The animal merely makes his bed, which he warms with his body, in a sheltered place; but man, having discovered fire, boxes up some air in a spacious apartment, and warms that …
211 – The stove not only took up room and scented the house, but it concealed the fire, and I felt as if I lost a companion.
Ch. 14. Former Inhabitants, and Winter Visitors (winter solo stimulation via history, nature/owl, & human visitors)
220 – But no weather interfered fatally with my walks, or rather my going abroad, for I frequently tramped eight or ten miles through the deepest snow to keep an appointment with a beech-tree, or a yellow-birch, or an old acquaintance among the pines.
224 – We waded so gently and reverently, or we pulled together so smoothly, that the fishes of thought were not scared by the stream, nor feared any angler on the bank, but came and went grandly, like clouds which float through the … sky
Ch. 15. Winter Animals (list the animals described here, sounds of frozen pond, frozen “self” will soon thaw…)
226 – I also heard the whooping of the ice in the pond …
233 – That must be a poor country indeed that does not support a hare.
Ch. 16. The Pond in Winter (frozen pond/self metaphor cut through, pond depth measured, ice sent to Ganges, thaw)
Ch. 17. Spring (physical & spiritual thaw, revitalization, lake booms, thawing sand/clay à life, tonic, “selfish” nature)
249 – One attraction in coming to the woods to live was that I should have the leisure and opportunity to see the Spring come in.
251 – Few phenomena gave me more delight than to observe the forms which thawing sand and clay assume in flowing down the sides of a deep cut on the railroad through which I passed on my way to the village… [read next 3 paragraphs]
253 – You find thus in the very sands an anticipation of the vegetable leaf. No wonder that the earth expresses itself outwardly in leaves, it so labors with the idea inwardly. … The feathers and wings of birds are still drier and thinner leaves. Thus, also, you pass from the lumpish grub in the earth to the airy and fluttering butterfly. The very globe continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes winged in orbit. … The whole tree is but one leaf, and rivers are still vaster leaves whose pulp is intervening earth, and towns and cities are the ova of insects in their axils.
254 – What is man but a mass of thawing clay? … True, it is somewhat excrementitious in its character … This is the frost coming out of the ground; this is Spring.
255 – The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book… but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit.
256 – So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth its green blade to eternity.
257 – Suddenly an influx of light filled my house, though the evening was at hand, and the clouds of winter still overhung it, and the eaves were dripping with sleety rain. … where yesterday was cold gray ice there lay the transparent pond already calm and full of hope as in a summer evening, reflecting a summer evening sky in its bosom, though none was visible overhead, as if it had intelligence with some remote horizon.
258 – As every season seems best to us in its turn, so the coming in of spring is like the creation of the Cosmos out of Chaos…
259 – We loiter in winter while it is already spring. In a pleasant spring morning all men’s sins are forgiven.
261 – Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness…
262 – Poison is not poisonous after all, nor are any wounds fatal.
263 – And so the seasons went rolling on into summer, as one rambles into higher and higher grass.
Ch. 18. Conclusion (need to explore, self realization, forget the past, fight conformity, strong & beautiful bug emerges)
265 – Patriotism is a maggot in their heads.
266 – I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there.
267 – The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels.
- I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there
I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.
268 – If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.
- While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so
much more widely and fatally?
269 – Why should we be in such desperate haste to succeed and in such desperate enterprises? If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.
271 – Humility like darkness reveals heavenly lights. … Superfluous wealth can buy superfluities only. Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.
273 – Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.
274 – Most men have not delved six feet beneath the surface, nor leaped as many above it. We know not where we are.
- As I stand over the insect crawling amid the pine needles on the forest floor, and endeavoring to conceal itself from my sight, … I am reminded of the greater Benefactor and Intelligence that stands over me the human insect.
275 – The life in us is like the water in the river. … [the story of the strong and beautiful bug crawling from the table…]
- The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. … There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.
Summary Outline: Things to
consider when assigning Walden to a
science class:
1. The times: 150 years ago & 75 years after the Revolutionary War
· Science & Technology – rapid changes during the industrial revolution
- energy and transportation differences (the invisible fields of gravity & magnetism were being exploited via machines)
- humoral vs. germ theory of disease
- the stability of species was disrupted by fossils, geologic time & evolution
- role of scientists & science occupations
- counter-revolution of anti-materialists
- wilderness, farming vs. cities (extensive deforestation)
- Native Americans vs. colonists
· Religion & Spiritual enlightenment – cultural/religious revolutions ~ 1960’s…
- Unitarian Church conflict à Transcendentalists
- Emerson vs. Thoreau: love/hate relationship
- Concord & Walden at the epicenter
- Individual vs. Society – self-reliance, the Ideal vs. the Real
- Book-learning vs. real-life experience
- Seek & find your own way to the Truth
2. The man: Henry David Thoreau
· Upbringing: youth à Harvard à (teacher/surveyor) à saunderer/writer
· Misconceptions – the “year”, the reasons, the man, the results, the book(s)
· The writer/philosopher – naturalist, journalist, self-searcher, civil disobedient
· Clarify life by simplifying to the basics, rid obstacles, identify with nature
~ Buddhism (?)
- the book ends with Spring…
3. The place – WaldenPond/Woods in Concord
· The ecology – seasons, animals/plants, succession
· Environmental Science – human uses of place: hunters, ice-cutters, railroad trains
· Metaphor – the house, the pond, birds, butterfies, the eye, the self, the spirit
4. Walden today – the pond & the woods
· Bumper stickers, Walden Two, Doonesbury comics
· Nature – vs. nature, malls & TV, anti-materialists of today
· Self-searching & self-reliance, quest for higher spirituality via Nature
· Wildness vs. wilderness, the “tonic”
· vs. “Fall/Winter Survival” (~ Outward Bound) course at Arlington High
1. What does “nature” mean to you?
- a symbol – a human idea? - or a human “thing”?
- wild vs. “natural”
- antithesis to cities & modern culture?
- the last repository or hope for humanity?
- … red in tooth and claw…
2. What is “environmentalism”? - must one be for or against it?
After a brief description of Thoreau as a person and
Walden as a place, this class will focus on the concepts of “nature/Nature”, “wildness/wilderness”,
and “environmentalism”. We will read
sections of “Huckleberries” (for
nature, rivers, White Mountains, and parks), “Walking” (for swamps, wilds of literature and domesticated animals,
and knowledge), and perhaps “Ktaadn”
(for Maine wilderness, getting lost, and adventure). These students will later
read “Seasons of Want and Plenty”
from William Cronon’s classic, Changes in the Land to contrast Indian,
Colonial and modern views on ecology.
An outline of the class discussion topics related to Thoreau follows.
GGGGGGGGGGGGG
Ask the students, “Does anyone here know who Henry David Thoreau is and/or for what he is famous?”
- “Why should we study Thoreau in a science class?”
Discuss the man –
Local and famous
His writings and “bumper-sticker” Thoreau quotes
Natural historian – early scientist, ecologist, and environmentalist
- more as a natural historian than a developer of theories (as Darwin)
- we can gain much about ecology of New England from his writings
- time of maximum deforestation in New England (vs. today?)
Many of his ideas are relevant today – ecology, environmental science, social/cultural criticism
He was odd then & would be odd today, but not really a “hermit”
- Walden was a description about living alone as well as a personal quest for identity
- He walked a lot & avoided company (he died at the young age of 42 of consumption)
Discuss “Nature” – Ask, “What does nature mean to you?”
Have students bring 5 or 6 objects that typify “nature” to them & have them explain their choices
Wild, bloody, anti-civilization, “real”, a symbol, Eden, a balance, last hope, habitats, no people, etc…
- “wildness” vs. “wilderness” – quotes & discussion
- “laws of Nature” & living close to nature
- “environmentalism” – must one be for or against it?
Discuss the science –
Walden Pond/Woods – geology, origin and nature of NE ponds via glaciers
- also Arlington waters: Spy Pond, Mystic Lakes, Arlington’s Great Meadows; Mill Brook, etc.
Rivers, swamps, mountains – as “wildness”
- Pre-Thoreau – Indian vs. Colonial ecology
- Thoreau’s time – Industrial Revolution & the backlash
- Post-Thoreau – modern environmental problems & the future outlook
- Ask, “Where are the ‘wild places’ in Arlington?” & “Why is it important to nurture wild places?”
- Discuss & visit the “wild places around the school – from Mill Brook “woods” to contaminated lands
I start my Honors Biology course with an in-depth
unit on observation and analysis in nature and science. We concentrate on leaves and seeds, cricket
sounds, and microscopic rotifers. We
then move into a unit on ecology (energy & matter; producers &
consumers), concentrating on local plants as the fall foliage turns. I plan to have students examine selected
local leaves in greater detail in the classroom by using more analytical
drawing techniques. They will use
Thoreau’s drawing of a Scarlett Oak from “Autumnal
Tints” as their model. Students
will choose a leave from a box of leaves removed from trees located around the
Arlington High School grounds. It is
not important for the students to know the names of these leaves during this
observation unit. We will be walking
the school grounds to draw and learn the natural history of all of these trees
in a few weeks, during the ecology unit.
At this point, the students will be asked to use the technique sometimes
called “contour drawing”. They will
carefully draw the outline of the leaf on a blank sheet of paper without
looking at the paper as they draw the outline.
The students will slowly and carefully draw the leaf outline on the
paper as their eyes slowly and deliberately follow the edge of the actual
leaf. Ideally the drawing should mimic
the leaf, but this takes practice.
Students will be encouraged to make several attempts at making the
drawing, and will be asked to self-examine reasons for lack of perfection. I do not expect nor want perfect drawings
using this technique, but I hope that the students become keener observers of
natural objects during the process. They will be asked to make a better drawing of their leaf while
looking at it after several “contour drawing” attempts. They will also be asked to read “Autumnal
Tints” as the leaves change color in their neighborhood.