Teaching Thoreau to
High School Kids
“Your dad says you really like Thoreau,” I said to the young
man standing the necessary six feet away from me in the Fruited Plain where
neither of us really should have been.
“Yeah,” he said smiling.
I asked him what, in particular he liked about Walden, and he mentioned he liked the
way Thoreau lived so simply when he went to live in the small shed he had built
in the woods. He liked it that Thoreau
was not interested in accumulating stuff.
He liked the depictions of the natural world.
Perhaps at the heart of his pleasure in reading
Thoreau—though he didn’t say it--was the question that Thoreau states as his
purpose for going into the woods and then spends the rest of the book answering: “I wished . . . to learn what it [life] had
to teach, and not when I die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life,
living is so dear . . . .”
I told him that for 23 years I had taught Thoreau and Walden to high school kids and I had
loved it. He smiled, said “cool,” and then asked, “How did your students like
Thoreau?”
“Most of them thought
he was kind of crazy,” I said, “but I really believe that a lot of them enjoyed
studying the excerpt from Walden in
our lit book. And if you asked me how I
felt about teaching it, I would say I loved it.”
That’s about where our conversation ended. I hadn’t thought about teaching Thoreau in
years, and his question brought back a wave of memories, good memories.
After I had assigned the Thoreau reading to my students, I
would tell them, “Thoreau is coming to class tomorrow so I want you to come to
class with questions you have about anything he says in Walden.” The next day I
would show up for class dressed in a farmer work shirt and an old wool pants
and try to impersonate Henry David. And
the questions came at me, fast and furious:
Why do you hate stuff--things?
What’s wrong with a dinner party?
Why do you hate newspapers? And on and on.
One question that always
came up concerned this statement: “ . .
. most men . . . have somewhat hastily
concluded that it is the chief end of man here to ‘glorify God and enjoy Him
forever.’” (These were, I should point
out, Christian school kids, young Calvinists, as we still called them in those
days.)
“How can you, Mr. Thoreau, believe that?” my students would
ask.
And I, in my role as Thoreau, would say something like,
“Well, did you notice the words I put in italics: somewhat
hastily. Most of you confess this
already now, at age 16. If your chief
purpose in life right now is to glorify God, then you should be asking how you
are going to do that. Will it be by
having a nicer car than anyone else? Getting
an education that will equip you to earn lots of money? Scoring more points on the basketball court? Dedicating your life to serving the poor? You might even ask your parents what they
think the primary purpose of living is.”
Some of them were smart enough to fire back, “Well, if the
purpose of this school is to equip us to glorify God, shouldn’t it be a little
more intentional in how you do that in every class?” And so it would go, back and forth. It was great fun but also good education. On teaching days like these, I thought I was
the luckiest guy in the world to have the job I had.
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