Thoreau Farm

The other day, as I considered the routine of my teaching life, I was wondering (again) about the thousand little decisions that occur in every class. What was I hoping to achieve? How might I get there? A teacher lives a class-period in a state of hyper-awareness, tracking (and, on a good day, weaving) both the threads of discussion and the simultaneous connections and disconnections happening all around him. It is far from a routine experience, even if it happens every day. “It is exhausting and startling,” I said to myself. And the word “startling” stirred familiar memory.

Whenever my students reach Walden’s chapter Higher Laws, I gird myself for their responses. Already poked and prodded for some 200 hundred pages, they enter this chapter’s room to find that woods-loving, pine-needle-appreciating Henry has adopted the tone of a scold. Worse yet, he has decided to take on appetite and its physicality, areas of life that seventeen-year-olds are exploring with more than a little fascination.

As he warms to his lesson, Thoreau writes the following:

If the hunter has a taste for mud-turtles, muskrats and other such savage tidbits, the fine lady indulges a taste for jelly made of a calf’s foot, or for sardines from over the sea, and they are even. He goes to the millpond, she to her preserve pot. The wonder is how they, how you and I, can live this slimy beastly life, eating and drinking.

“O, please,” I recall one student saying and dropping her book in disgust at this point. “What’s the alternative?” And in that moment, I thought, exactly; that’s exactly the question Thoreau wants, because he follows this wondering with one of Walden’s memorable, compact moments.

“Our whole life is startlingly moral,” he writes. “What’s that mean?” I ask, and silence usually ensues. Into it I trickle this question: “Did you take a shower this morning?” A little nervous laughter. Teachers are weird, I see them thinking. “Okay,” says one. “I’ll bite; yes, I took a shower.” And in the discussion that follows we talk about warm water versus cold, about soap and its types, about whether or not shampoos have been animal tested on sensitive eyes. What swirls down the drain and where does it go? we ask.

What about your lunch? What about your shoes? Your belt? Your bag? Your laptop? Questions stack up rapidly; it’s easy to imagine a point of paralysis. I notice that we’re all leaning forward over our tables and suggest that we sit back and take a deep breath. “Now I don’t think Thoreau wants us to drown in a welter of micro-decisions,” I say, “but he does want your initial question to be alive in our minds. What’s the alternative seems exactly on point.”

“So there’s the connection with the central theme of being awake,” says another student. “You have to be fully awake to even think that there’s an alternative, and then to think what that alternative might be. There’s an awakeness about being startled.”

Yes, there is; we wake from the complacency of routine, of herd-life, with a start; we begin to be individuals as a start. And that’s part of what I want for my students, and for myself.

And you? What startles you?

No matter our age, September’s arrival suggests beginning again. Our years of schooling tab it as the true new year; for me, a teacher, the effect is stronger still – I begin again with new groups of students.

All of this has me asking myself this perennial question: What does it take to teach and learn well? And as this question pools again at the start of my 40th year of teaching, I return to Thoreau’s question in the early going of Walden:

Which would be most advanced at the end of a month, – the boy who had made his own jackknife from the ore which he had dug and smelted, reading as much as would be necessary for this, – or the boy who had attended the lectures on metallurgy at the Institute in the mean while and had received a Rogers’ penknife from his father? Which would be most likely to cut his fingers?

Thoreau’s opinion is clear – real experience, hands-on work, trumps lecture and passive reception, and he would find many currently teaching who agree. Experiential education gains more converts each year. At my school a long history of devotion to the arts leads us in that direction – just as an artist makes art, so too a student makes learning. The challenge often lies in finding and fitting experience into the uniform time-boxes that form a school’s schedule. How can I make our work real rather than received, I wonder.

Here’s one attempt from this time last year:

9/4/11: The e-mails arrived last evening and this morning: Next Monday’s assignment includes the intentionally vague request that each student make a map of Thoreau’s essay Walking; in class, this request passed without comment and everyone shuffled off to the next class. “What do you mean, want?” chorused the four e-mails. “Okay,” I wrote back, “I’ll outline (vaguely, still) what sort of visual representation a map might offer, but I want your take, not mine.”

Shuffle shuffle, Monday arrives and they do too. We talk over passages; we speculate, we formulate ideas in small groups, we go outside and consider the act of walking, it locomotion. The class period comes to an end. “So,” I say with the sort of teacher-cheeriness that makes students roll their eyes, “will your maps get me from here to there?” And amid a rustling of paper, I collect their maps. Most are flat single sheets, a few are rolled, and one weighs nearly a pound. I sit in the now-empty classroom and prepare to be guided. The many drawings offer good distillation of Thoreau’s essay and a number of its key points; as I read and scan on, I am happy to be in their territory. I unfurl the heavy scroll and along its meandering ink lines and amid its drawings, I find the sources of its weight – glued to the map are twigs, pine needles, a stone and, where the paper was once wet, it wrinkles. The map uses a “tawny grammar,” a wild expression, and near the end it says, “Go see for yourself.”

I’m out the door in under a minute.

by Corinne H. Smith

As a weekend docent at the Thoreau Farm Birthplace, I do a fair amount of chatting about our friend Henry. Because our tours begin in the front yard, one of the first questions a guest is apt to ask is: “What would he think of that?” A nod or a finger pointing to the sky will accompany the raised eyebrows.

You see, the east-west runway of nearby Hanscom Field lies just beyond the property’s tree line. On most days, this lane is used for regular airplane take-offs. When the wind shifts slightly, it’s used instead for landings. The airport serves mostly small craft, but they all look rather large to us because they’re so close. Large and loud. The intrusion is only temporary, though, until the plane either soars away or touches down. Even on the airstrip’s busiest days, at least a few minutes of peace will pass before the next silver-clad “bird” shows up.

I quickly recite the text of Thoreau’s journal entry of January 3, 1861: “Thank God, man cannot as yet fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth! We are safe on that side for the present.” This quotation usually gets a giggle from the group. I also remind folks that the proximity of the runway to this house is similar to that of the railroad tracks and the site of Thoreau’s home at Walden Pond. Visitors understand this analogy, especially if they’ve just come from the pond and from hiking around its perimeter. If they happened to be at the state reservation at the “right” time, they got to see the gray and purple cars of an MBTA commuter train clatter along the tracks at the western edge of the water. Whether we consider the trains cutting through Walden Woods, or the planes flying over the farmland of Thoreau’s roots, both illustrate a relationship between people and nature, both are examples of industrialization’s imprint on nature.

Plane above the Thoreau Farm Treeline

On occasion, another question may arise: would Henry Thoreau have gone up in a plane, if he had been given the chance? Well, speculation across the centuries can be a tricky task. But let’s start with the “Sounds” chapter of Walden to find Thoreau’s reaction to the introduction of the railroad to Concord. At first, he calls the soot-spewing locomotive a “fire-steed” that makes “the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils.” But he grows to admire the way the trains improved both daily time-keeping and transportation. Thoreau traveled by rail frequently: to go to Boston and Worcester, to travel to lecture sites throughout New England, and even to reach his favorite mountains – Wachusett in Worcester County and Monadnock in New Hampshire. He did not discount all new inventions.

So, based on his acceptance of the railroad, I believe Henry Thoreau would have tried flight at least once, if only to see his hometown from yet another perspective. Who knows? Maybe he would have had to alter another one of his famous sayings: “The universe is wider than our views of it.”

On the other hand, if you look up that flying reference in Thoreau’s journal, you’ll see from his follow-up remarks that he appears to be addressing the issue of pollution, and not of mere travel. Ah. That would be a lesson for another day.