Ernie Descheneaux
Summer Institute:
Thoreau & Emerson
July 13, 2001
Rough Outline
Curriculum Guide
The students in the class will undertake a year-long effort in the writing of their journals. The number of entries and the type of entries will be decided upon soon. At this time I do plan on having them make several nature observations in a place that they decide will provide them an opportunity to observe the physical and mental (for them) changes that occur throughout the school year. Also, their entries will include literary observations on the literature that is part of the American Literature curriculum. I want active readers responding to the literature. The students will also make social, educational, and philosophical commentary throughout the school year in these journals. Certainly, all of these entries will encourage a personal dialogue throughout the year.
This year, I will introduce more than just the text provided in our anthology. I will encourage the students to find your web page and read several areas from the Thoreau site that I will direct them to read and think about. More nature readings will be selected from Thoreau as well as other naturalists, some of which have been provided by the teachers at this seminar and their suggestions. Weekly, if not daily quotes from Thoreau and Emerson will be either used to enhance thought and or discussion throughout the year.
The students will also be asked to find an aspect of nature that interests them, trees, plants, insects, animals and other things of nature. They will be asked to photograph, paint, draw or film whatever they choose and then look up and explain as much as they can through research and other observations and data they collect. A portfolio will be a part of this project.
This area needs more work on my part at this time.
My idea at this time is to have the students re-read their journals and see if there is a theme that seems to be evolving from their entries. I would like them to analyze this theme and write a composition on this theme. This might be done in each semester.
As Emerson and Thoreau did in their lives, I would love to have the students present a Lyceum on one of their thoughts from their journals, nature observations and research, or literary readings this year. Oral reports have always been a problem. However, I hope that creating something uniquely their own will encourage students to present their lyceum on their own topics.
More details to come.
Thank you,
Ernie Descheneaux
Ernie Descheneaux
Summer Institute:
Thoreau & Emerson
August 9, 2001,
The students in the class will undertake a year-long effort in the writing of their journals. They will make several nature observations in a place that they decide will provide them an opportunity to observe the physical and mental (for them) changes that occur throughout the school year. Also, their entries will include literary observations on the literature that is part of the American Literature curriculum. I want active readers responding to the literature. The students will also make social, educational, and philosophical commentary throughout the school year in these journals. Certainly, all of these entries will encourage a personal dialogue throughout the year.
nature
|
4
|
3
|
2
|
2
|
Literary
|
3
|
3
|
3
|
3
|
Social, Political,
Philosophical
Educational |
3 |
3 |
3 |
2 |
Personal
|
4
|
4
|
4
|
2
|
The social, political, philosophical, and educational area is wide open. This will provide students the opportunity to become aware of decisions that are being made for them and in some cases to them in the adult world. They will have to become more aware of current events in order to have an opinion in this area.
Finally, the personal area will make the students create an area where they can try to write about their own actions and thoughts. I would like to see them create perspective for themselves when they reflect on their entries for each semester. Sometimes the high school student is so caught up in the moment that perspective is lost. Feelings are sometimes too personal or not personal enough. I will leave this area to their own discretion.
Grading:
The students will receive a quiz grade of the 1st and 3rd terms.
The students will receive a test grade for the 2nd and 4th terms.
20. Students will select and use appropriate genres, modes of reasoning, and speaking styles when writing for different audiences and rhetorical purposes.
This year, I will introduce more than just the text provided in our anthology. I will encourage the students to find your web page and read several areas from the Thoreau site that I will direct them to read and think about. More nature readings will be selected from Thoreau as well as other naturalists, some of which have been provided by the teachers at this seminar and their suggestions. Weekly, if not daily quotes from Thoreau and Emerson will be either used to enhance thought and or discussion throughout the year.
Man's Place in the Universe
This will be the first reading that the students will encounter in the American Literature class. I think that this will be a good point for the students to think about while reading what Smith and Bradford think about the wilderness and the “savages” they encounter. I would like to see them compare and contrast these entries.
Throughout the year the students will read excerpts downloaded from Thoreau’s Journal and other entries. I will give them samples from his nature observations as well as from “Ktaadn,” “Walking,” and “A Winter Walk.”
Some of the Naturalist writing they will encounter will be from some of the excerpts provided at the Institute by the participants as well as excerpts from Teale’s Journey into Summer, and from Sand County Almanac.
Weekly aphorisms from Emerson and Thoreau will be a part of their year. I am hoping to share the wisdom of these men with these students.
I will continue to have the students read The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail.
9
Students will identify the basic
facts and essential ideas in what they have read, heard, or viewed.
10 Students will demonstrate an understanding of the
characteristics of different genres
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.
The students will also be asked to find an aspect of nature that interests them, trees, plants, insects, animals and other things of nature. They will be asked to photograph, paint, draw or film whatever they choose and then look up and explain as much as they can through research and other observations and data they collect. A portfolio will be a part of this project.
As Emerson and Thoreau did in their lives, I would love to have the students present a Lyceum on one of their thoughts from their journals, nature observations and research, or literary readings this year. Oral reports have always been a problem. However, I hope that creating something uniquely their own will encourage students to present their lyceum on their own topics.
What I am hoping for here is the opportunity to allow students to research perhaps something they have found in their nature observations. Perhaps they can paint, film, or photograph a plant, tree, bird or whatever they see that strikes them. From there they might want to research the name, the habitat, and the nature of the object they are studying. Maybe they might want to research the area they have chosen and find out about the history of the particular location.
26 Students will obtain information by using a variety of
media and evaluate the quality of the information obtained.
28 Students will design and create coherent
media productions with a clear focus, adequate detail, and consideration of
audience and purpose
19 Students will write compositions with a clear focus,
developing the composition (presentation) with logically related ideas to
develop it, and adequate supporting detail.
22
Students will use their knowledge of standard English
conventions for sentence structure, usage, punctuation, capitalization, and
spelling to edit their writing.
23
Students will use self-generated questions, note-taking,
summarizing, précis writing, and outlining to enhance learning when reading or
writing.
24
Students will use open-ended research questions,
different sources of information, and appropriate research methods to gather
information about their research projects.
25
Develop and use rhetorical, logical, and stylistic criteria
for assessing final versions of their compositions or research projects before
presenting them to varied audiences
My idea at this time is to have the students re-read their journals and see if there is a theme that seems to be evolving from their entries. I would like them to analyze this theme and write a composition on this theme. This might be done in each semester.
19 Students will write compositions with a clear focus,
developing the composition (presentation) with logically related ideas to
develop it, and adequate supporting detail.
21 Students will improve organization, content, paragraph
development, level of
detail, style, tone, and word choice in (diction) revising
their compostions
22 Students will use their knowledge of standard English
conventions for sentence
structure, usage, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling
to edit their writing.
23 Students will use self-generated questions, note-taking,
summarizing, précis writing, and outlining to enhance learning when reading or
writing.
25 Develop and use rhetorical, logical, and stylistic criteria for
assessing final
versions of their
compositions or research projects before presenting them to varied audiences
Man's Place in the Universe
from A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf (1916)
The world, we are told, was made especially for man - a presumption not supported by all the facts. A numerous class of men are painfully astonished whenever they find anything, living or dead, in all God's universe, which they cannot eat or render in some way what they call useful to themselves. They have precise dogmatic insight into the intentions of the Creator, and it is hardly possible to be guilty of irreverence in speaking of their God any more than of heathen idols. He is regarded as a civilized, law-abiding gentlemen in favor either of a republican form of government or of a limited monarchy; believes in the literature and language of England; is a warm supporter of the English constitution and Sunday schools and missionary societies; and is as purely a manufactured article as any puppet at a half- penny theater.
With such views of the Creator it is, of course, not surprising that erroneous views should be entertained of the creation. To such properly trimmed people, the sheep, for example, is an easy problem - food and clothing "for us," eating grass and daisies white by divine appointment for this predestined purpose, on perceiving the demand for wool that would be occasioned by the eating of the apple in the Garden of Eden.
In the same pleasant plan, whales are storehouses of oil for us, to help out the stars in lighting our dark ways until the discovery of the Pennsylvania oil wells. Among plants, hemp, to say nothing of the cereals, is a case of evident destination for ships' rigging, wrapping packages, and hanging the wicked. Cotton is another plain case of clothing. Iron was made for hammers and ploughs, and lead for bullets; all intended for us. And so of other small handfuls of insignificant things.
But if we should ask these profound expositors of God's intentions, How about those man-eating animals - lions, tigers, alligators - which smack their lips over raw man? Or about those myriads of noxious insects that destroy labor and drink his blood? Doubtless man was intended for food and drink for all these? Oh no! Not at all! These are unresolvable difficulties connected with Eden's apple and the Devil. Why does water drown its lord? Why do so many minerals poison him? Why are so many plants and fishes deadly enemies? Why is the lord of creation subjected to the same laws of life as his subjects? Oh, all these things are satanic, or in some way connected with the first garden.
Now, it never seems to occur to these far- seeing teachers that Nature's object in making animals and plants might possibly be first of all the happiness of each one of them, not the creation of all for the happiness of one. Why should man value himself as more than a small part of the one great unit of creation? And what creature of all that the Lord has taken the pains to make is not essential to the completeness of that unit - the cosmos? The universe would be incomplete without man; but it would also be incomplete without the smallest transmicroscopic creature that dwells beyond our conceitful eyes and knowledge.
From the dust of the earth, from the common elementary fund, the Creator has made Homo sapiens. From the same material he has made every other creature, however noxious and insignificant to us. They are earth-born companions and our fellow mortals. The fearfully good, the orthodox, of this laborious patch-work of modern civilization cry "Heresy" on every one whose sympathies reach a single hair's breadth beyond the boundary epidermis of our own species. Not content with taking all of earth, they also claim the celestial country as the only ones who possess the kind of souls for which that imponderable empire was planned.
This star, our own good earth, made many a successful journey around the heavens ere man was made, and whole kingdoms of creatures enjoyed existence and returned to dust ere man appeared to claim them. After human beings have also played their part in Creation's plan, they too may disappear without any general burning or extraordinary commotion whatever.
Plants are credited with but dim and uncertain sensation, and minerals with positively none at all. But why may not even a mineral arrangement of matter be endowed with sensation of a kind that we in our blind exclusive perfection can have no manner of communication with?
But I have wandered from my subject. I stated a page or two back that man claimed the earth was made for him and I was going to say that venomous beasts, thorny plants, and deadly diseases of certain parts of the earth prove that the whole world was not made for him. When an animal from a tropical climate is taken to high latitudes, it may perish of cold, and we say that such an animal was never intended for so severe a climate. But when man betakes himself to sickly parts of the tropics and perishes, he cannot see that he was never intended for such deadly climates. No, he will rather accuse the first mother of the cause of the difficulty, though she may never have seen a fever district; or will consider it a providential chastisement for some self-invented form of sin.
Furthermore, all uneatable and uncivilized animals, and all plants which carry prickles, are deplorable evils which, according to closes researches of clergy, require the cleansing chemistry of universal planetary combustion. But more than aught else mankind requires burning, as being in great part wicked, and if that transmundane furnace can be so applied and regulated as to smelt and purify us into conformity with the rest of the terrestrial creation, then the tophetization of the erratic genius Homo were a consummation devoutly to be prayed for. But, glad to leave these ecclesiastical fires and blunders, I joyfully return to the immortal truth and immortal beauty of Nature.