Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, Sudbury, MA

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Our truest life is when we are in dreams awake.

Henry David Thoreau

During the 1997-98 school year, 20 students, my colleague Joe Pacenka and I succeeded in building a replica of Thoreau’s famous cabin using mainly hand tools. The original plan for the one semester course (entitled “Building Thoreau’s Cabin”) involved building the cabin in one quarter, and using the remaining quarter to study Thoreau’s ideas. But the cabin took over a year to complete! So the following year, I created a successor course called, “Meet Mr. Thoreau,” which was dedicated to exploring the many facets of Concord’s most famous saunterer (read the curriculum unit developed by Bill Schechter).

The course is a general elective that students take as they might an art course, that is, in addition to their regular academic load. My challenge was to figure out how to teach a course about Thoreau that had substance, but would not add too much of an additional academic burden to the already overburdened. I also felt that I needed to find ways to make the course fun so that students would be willing to do a little more academic work––for how can one meet Thoreau without some reading and writing?

My solution was to center the course on four essays that reveal different sides of Thoreau:  The Man Himself (some biography), the Transcendental Naturalist (“Walking”), The Social Critic (“Life Without Principle”) and the Political Rebel (“Civil Disobedience” and “A Plea For Captain John Brown”).  The essays—each about 25 pages long– are preceded by a discussion of the issues that are raised. Having already had an opportunity to think through a position, students are better prepared to enter into a dialogue with Thoreau, as he makes his arguments. During the discussion of each essay itself, students are assigned specific pages, and must “present” them to the class, with classmates challenging or adding their own interpretations.

In addition, Thoreauvian activities are woven throughout these units: pencil-making in the woodshop, walking in the woods behind the school and around Walden, “soloing” in our cabin, listening to wildlife sounds around our electric campfire in an otherwise dark room, going for a sunrise swim at the pond, camping, tracking Thoreau through Concord (cradle to grave), canoeing on the Concord River, planning a Utopian community, and participating in year-end animal oratory contest.

In terms of assignments, students must complete their pencils, read the essays, write one brief journal entry a week wherein they reflect on the essays, or a Thoreau quotation, or some nature experience they have just had. In addition, they must complete two projects: a “Seeing Nature” Project (this involves writing a haiku about an autumn leaf, a sample of nature description, and a poem about nature); and The Final Project, which involves illustrating their favorite Thoreau quotation in some unique and creative way.

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Though this one-semester course meets only three times one week, and two times the next (each time for 60 minutes), I believe it provides a powerful, memorable, and enjoyable experience for students. I know that some of the best writing I have seen in my 32-years as a history teacher has been handed in by my Thoreau students. (Two compilations can be found in the Thoreau Institute archives). The strength and beauty of the course reside in the radiant mind of Mr. Thoreau, who once walked through the fields that surround Lincoln-Sudbury, sampling the wild apples he found there. One hundred and sixty years after he first built his cabin by Walden’s shore, his thoughts and words still inspire and provoke the students of a new millennium.

The course introduces them to Mr. Thoreau, but I do believe the bond is sealed when they sit in the darkness before dawn, shivering in the late fall air, their legs dangling over Walden, waiting, as he once waited, for the sun to rise over that most fabled and “bottomless” pond.

Interested students have the option of continuing to study Thoreau through a semester-long independent studies class that focuses on his masterpiece, Walden. About a dozen students choose this option each year, during the semester following “Meet Mr. Thoreau”.