Jamie Pietruska

Dover-Sherborn High School

Dover, MA

English Curriculum Unit based on the Thoreau Institute's Approaching Walden

 

 

 

 

Topic:  Using Thoreau's experience and writings, this unit will examine how we define ourselves through an understanding of place.  How does the way we see the landscape around us relate to the way we see ourselves?

 

Class and Level:  This unit was designed for use in 11^th grade AP Language as part of a thematic term on language and place, but it will work in an American Lit, American Studies, or a writing course.

 

Unit Length:  10 days minimum

 

Goals and Objectives:

Ø       Students will examine their natural surroundings as a way to begin thinking about an abstract idea.

Ø       Students will analyze and compare/contrast the rhetorical strategies of two essayists.

Ø       Students will interpret and evaluate images culled from nature, popular culture, art history, and other sources.

Ø       Students will synthesize their own definitions of an abstract idea using models from Thoreau and Atwood.

Ø       Students will conduct independent research on the historical context of Thoreau's writing and then organize and present that information in a useful format (webpage).

 

Assessment:

Ø       Analytical take-home essay (see assignment description below)

Ø       In-class writing on a chapter from Walden (see assignment description below)

Ø       Journal writing (take-home) on an observation of at least two places

 

 

Opening Question/Activity

How do we find something "wild"?  In the classroom setting, tell students they will spend the rest of the period in search of things that are "wild" as part of an attempt to define this category.  Do not provide any additional instructions or begin eliciting definitions of "wildness" at this time.  Set the expectation that they will probably need to search outdoors.  Follow the class as they make their way outside.  Students may search in pairs or individually.  Each group or individual must choose one area or object or image to be photographed with the digital camera.  As the teacher takes the digital photograph, each group or individual should explain briefly what is "wild" in the chosen setting.  (Digital images may be uploaded to the class homepage.)

 

 

 

Day 2

Class discussion of the "wild" images from yesterday and Thoreau's definition of the "wild."  What is the "wild"?  Is it a place?  Is it a metaphor?  How can a direction (West) be "wild"?  (Page numbers are from the 1991 Beacon Press edition of Emerson's "Nature" and Thoreau's "Walking," with a fairly useful introduction by John Elder.)

 

Significant quotations and concepts for discussion:

Ø       Nature = "absolute freedom and wildness" (71)

Ø       Man should inhabit nature, not society (71)

Ø       Man should be equally at home everywhere

Ø       "Half the walk is but retracing our steps" (73)

Ø       "I am alarmed when it happens that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit…But it sometimes happens that I cannot easily shake off the village" (78)

Ø       There's a "subtle magnetism in Nature" that will guide us

Ø       "Eastward I go only by force, but westward I go free" (86)

Ø       "We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure" (87)

Ø       "From the East light; from the West fruit" (90)

Ø       West = Wild (94)

Ø       "How near to good is what is wild" (97)

Ø       "Life consists with wildness" (97)

Ø       "Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated field, not in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps" (98)

Ø       "My desire for knowledge is intermittent, but my desire to bathe my head in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant" (113)

Ø       "I live a sort of border life" (115)

 

 

Day 3

Class discussion of Atwood's essay for both the content of her geographical definition and the rhetorical strategies she employs.  How does her definition and her construction of it compare to Thoreau's?

 

Significant quotations for discussion:

• The north is another country.  It's also another language.  Or languages.

• Where is the north exactly?  It's not only a place but a direction and as such its location is relative.

• …the north is at the back of our minds, always.  There's something, not someone, looking over our shoulders; there's a chill at the nape of the neck.

• The north focuses our anxieties.  Turning to face the north, we enter our own unconscious.  Always in retrospect, the journey north has the quality of dream.

• Where does the north begin?

• The weather is important again.

• The south is moving north.

• We don't want to be near.  We want to be far.

• This was my first lesson in point of view.

• This was my first lesson in the nature of illusion.

• …existence is thus precarious.

• It's territorial, partly; partly a felt violation of some area in us that we hardly ever think about unless its' invaded or tampered with.  It's the neighbours throwing guck into our yard.  It's our childhood dying.

• In northern Canada, the roads are civilization, owned by the collective human we.  Off the road is other.

• "Impenetrable wilderness" is not just verbal.

• In the north getting lost is not knowing how to get out…. You begin to feel watched… You begin to feel judged… You tell yourself not to panic….

• Not many of us know how to survive in the north.

• One way of looking at a landscape is to consider the typical ways of dying in it.

• In the north there are several hazards… Like most lessons of this sort, those about the north are taught by precept and example.

• …what may be lurking behind the next rock for all of us, all of us who enter the territory they once claimed as theirs.

• In our retelling of these stories, mystery is a key element… So, strangely enough, is a presumed oneness with the landscape in question.

• It's not so good to get too close to Nature.

• …the north had taken him to herself:  This was, of course, a pathetic fallacy gone to seed.

• Would the trees save us, given the chance… we have our doubts.

• When exactly did the old days end?  Because we know they did.

• What bits of our daily junk - our toasters, our pocket computers - will soon become obsolete and therefore poignant?

• We pride ourselves on knowing a few things like that, about the sky… There is only one place you can really see the stars…

• It strikes us that we don't really know very much about the night sky at all any more.

• The north is no longer a refuge.

• These are the horror stories of the north, one brand.  In the new stories, the enemies and the victims of old have done a switch.  Nature is no longer implacable, dangerous, ready to jump at you…it is on the run…

• Somehow just as the drive north inspires saga and tragedy, the drive south inspires parody.

• But we go forward, as we always do, into what is now to us the unknown.  And once inside, we breathe the air, not much bad happens to us, we hardly notice.  It's as if we've never been anywhere else.  But that's what we think, too, when we're in the north.

 

 

 

Day 4

Display and discuss images of direction.  Each student should display his or her images and then provide a brief explanation.  When all the images have been explained, ask students to look for commonalities: what kinds of images or colors or figures or landscapes signify North, South, East, and West?  Why?

 

 

 

Day 5

Use library resources to conduct research on specific aspects of HDT: personal experience and early writing career, Transcendentalists, influence of Emerson, history of Concord as a literary community.  Students should work in small groups to locate information and determine which aspects of their findings will be useful to the rest of the class.  (Depending on the skill level of your students, you may ask them to present their information in webpages that you can link to your class homepage.)

 

 

 

Day 6

In-class writing based on the opening pages of Thoreau's "Conclusion" to Walden.  Explain how Thoreau's call to "Explore thyself" is related to a sense of place in this chapter.  Point value = 40 

 

 

 

Day 7

Discussion of Thoreau's "Conclusion" and "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For."  What does it mean to "be awake" and to "live deliberately"?  What are the "necessar[ies] of the soul"?

 

Significant lines from "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For" (Page numbers are from the Norton Critical Edition of Walden and Resistance to Civil Government):

Ø       "…for a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone" (55)

Ø       "As long as possible live free and uncommitted.  It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail" (57)

Ø       "Though the view from my door was still more contracted, I did not feel crowded or confined in the least.  There was pasture enough for my imagination." (59)

Ø       "The millions are awake enough for physical labor; but only one in a million is awake enough for effective intellectual exertion, only one in a hundred millions to a poetic or divine life.  To be awake is to be alive.  I have never yet met a man who was quite awake." (61)

Ø       "We must learn to reawaken and to keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn" (61_

Ø       "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." (61)

Ø       "I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life" (61)

Ø       "Simplify, simplify." (62)

Ø       "Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?" (63)

Ø       "a Realometer" (66)

 

Significant lines from "Conclusion" (Page numbers are from the Norton Critical Edition of Walden and Resistance to Civil Government):

Ø       "The universe is wider than our views of it" (213)

Ø       "Nay, be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening new channels, not of trade, but of thought." (214)

Ø       "…Explore thyself" (215)

Ø       "It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves." (215)

Ø       "How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity!" (216)

Ø       "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." (216)

Ø       "The fault finder will find faults, even in paradise." (219)

Ø       Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage.  Do not trouble yourself much to get  new things, whether clothes or friends.  Turn the old; return to them.  Things do not change; we change.  Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts." (219)

Ø       "Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul." (220)

 

 

 

Day 8

Class discussion of "Economy" chapter for its social commentary and rhetorical strategies.  Read selections from James Gleick's 1999 Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything and ask students how much Thoreau's lament resonates with Gleick's (and ours).

 

Significant lines from "Economy" (Page numbers are from the Norton Critical Edition of Walden and Resistance to Civil Government):

Ø       "He has no time to be anything but a machine." (3)

Ø       "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." (5)

Ø       "But man's capacities have never been measured; nor are we to judge of what he can do by any precedents, so little has been tried." (6)

Ø       "The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior." (6)

Ø       "One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels." (7)

Ø       "…at night we unwillingly say our prayers and commit ourselves to uncertainties" (7)

Ø       "It would be some advantage to live a primitive and frontier life, though in the midst of an outward civilization" (7)

Ø       "Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are not only indispensable, but positive hinderances to the elevation of mankind." (9)

Ø       "My purpose in going to Walden Pond was not to live cheaply nor to live dearly there, but to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles; to be hindered from accomplishing which for want of a little common sense, a little enterprise and business talent, appeared not so sad as foolish." (13)

Ø       "In the long run men hit only what they aim at.  Therefore, though they should fail immediately, they had better aim at something high." (18)

Ø       "It would be well perhaps if we were to spend more of our days and nights without any obstruction between us and the celestial bodies" (19)

Ø       "…the cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run" (21)

Ø       "While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them.  It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings." (23)

Ø       "But lo!  men have become the tools of their tools." (25)

Ø       "Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things.  They are but improved means to an unimproved end, and end which it was already too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York.  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." (35)

 

 

 

Day 9

Student presentations of their webpages on the historical context of Thoreau's writings.  Provide additional information and relevant journal passages as necessary.

 

 

 

Day 10

Concluding discussion on images of the landscape and ourselves.  Show students a variety of images (from landscape painters, nature photographers, a specific ad campaign, or postcards of a particular place).  Discuss what values/ideas/assumptions/"truths" about nature and our relationship to it are represented in these images?  When we look at nature, are we looking through it to something else?

 

 

Culminating activity (if possible):  Fieldtrip to Walden Pond in Concord.