Frolicking in Nature with Emerson & Dillard
Objective: SWBAT use textual evidence to provide clarity to student-created questions about Emerson's "Nature" and connect an excerpt from "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek" to Transcendental ideology.
Big Idea: Investigating occult relationships with vegetables and arguing over the value of pennies...you have to love the Transcendentalists!
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Introduction
To begin our discussion of "Nature" (Chapter 1), I will ask students a few questions about their overall reading experience.
- How easy or difficult did you find the text to read?
- What strategies did you use to make more sense of the text?
- Did you have problems collecting questions to post on TodaysMeet.com?
After collecting this feedback, I will use the questions students generated on the same website to guide our discussion. The questions that were generated by my classes are attached in the resources. My role during the discussion will simply be as a facilitator as needed. I will ask the questions, and students will respond with textual evidence to answer them for their peers. I will also try to arrange the questions as they would arise naturally in the discussion, adjusting the question order to fit each group's needs. There are a few things that I want to ensure happen during the discussion, so in addition to the student-generated questions, I will ask them to expound upon or clarify a few more questions of my own, including:
- How does Emerson's view of the stars remind you of Walt Whitman's view of the stars in "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer"?
- Do you buy Emerson's idea that nature brings you to a place of youth, either in attitude or by reducing responsibilities? Have you experienced this?
- Am I the only one who sees an old man walking into the woods, unzipping his "old man suit" like the aliens in Men in Black, and emerging a young man in the woods? I know it's weird. But what words might have made me get that particular image here?
- How is the "Universal Being" idea connected to the Transcendentalist belief in an Oversoul?
- The word "occult" has a variety of meanings. What are they? Which does Emerson's use of it suggest?
- Nature being "tricked in holiday attire" might sound like an old-school speech pattern, but how do we still use the word "tricked" in the same way in a modern-day context?
- Can nature be "tricked" in every season, or just the holiday season? How is nature tricked in winter? Fall? Spring? Summer?
- Why has the word "melancholy" appeared in SO many texts that we've read so far this year? Is it being overused, or is it just the most accurate word for what these authors are describing?
- How is Emerson's view on nature consistent with the Transcendentalist views on nature?
- Overall, do you think Emerson comes off as crazy or insightful here? What did you use to make that judgement? Structure? Word choice? Use of logic or personal examples?
After we conclude our discussion, we will move on to another work that shares Transcendental ideology, though it was written rather recently by a modern-day author.
Closing
In our final few minutes of class, I will preview an upcoming project for students. Next class period we will be reading "Self-Reliance" and an excerpt from "On Civil Disobedience," which are both favorites of mine. I want students to approach these two difficult texts with excitement, so my plan is to build anticipation and add relevancy for students. I have found that the best approach to do this in my classroom is to work the angle that Emerson, Thoreau, and Transcendentalism were all pretty disliked by the "old people" of the time, but all three were pretty widely loved by young people. I will make the analogy that this school of thinking was akin to all the "dangerous" things that "the kids these days" are into, like technology and "the rap music." Students will generally perk up when they hear that we'll be reading something distrusted by adults for the complex ideas presented. I will build interest in the topic by briefly outlining some of Thoreau's biography, which includes being a "follower" of Emerson, living in the woods with a handful of beans for a couple years, and spending time in prison for refusing to pay his taxes in protest, among other things.
After I have students sufficiently hooked, I will also inform students that they will be creating their own argumentative presentation which will take a stand on some current issue in the news. In order to choose a topic, students must find a newspaper article that has been published in the past 30 days discussing the topic in some way. The article does not have to be argumentative itself, but it should be grounded in a topic that they could argue. For homework, they will be collecting at least two articles from credible online newspapers and linking them in a Google Doc that must be shared with me. We will talk more about this project in the future, but I want to give them plenty of time to find a topic that appeals to them, since it will be our first project like this. We will complete a longer argumentative research project next quarter, so this project will be tremendously valuable to preteach some of those concepts, gather formative assessment on their knowledge of argument, and really emphasize the structure of argument (which is an area students have really struggled with in the past).
The "mini-research" project will have several components, including an outline, Powerpoint (Google Slides) Presentation, and 3-5 Brainshark recording. Attached in the resource section in this file, I will include a sample template for the outline and presentation. I will also include a student's topic brainstorming document, completed outline, and presentation.
