After over twenty years of teaching, I’ve learned not to have expectations for a lesson plan. The better I think it is, the better I am positioned for disappointment. No class makes this more obvious than Adventure Survival Literature. I get too excited. Too amped. I get too much inspiration from books, podcasts, and high-level thinkers, and forget that when I was a teenager, school wasn’t fun for the lessons. Fun days in class were about things being interesting or less boring. I never left class thinking, “Boy, that was transformative.”
I see things from the perspective of a kid, you have to. You have to know that any day could be the day a brain is ready to absorb, so you bring the heat. Yet, you can’t force-feed insight. You can’t reason with a 14-year old like he’s 34 or give inspirational speeches every day. There must be a certain level of lived experience to turn smart quotes into true intellectual philosophy. A life philosophy also necessitates enough freedom to make decisions to live deliberately.
So I don’t take offense when I feel a tepid response to someone like Thoreau though I sometimes find myself asking them rhetorically, “Isn’t this miraculous? Have you ever read anything so enduring and relatable?”
When I was in high school I memorized the “I went to the woods…” quote, thought it would be “sick” to live in a cabin for two years and that was that. The seed was buried beneath a crust of social experiences, crushes, sports, and life experiences that didn’t require that sort of existential reflection.
But great upheavals, erosion, earthquakes of personal enlightenment provided a climate in which the seed grew and now flourishes.
If nothing else, I’ll have fun 4th hour during Thoreau Week.