Teaching Thoreau

I taught Thoreau today.

At least, I think so.

My audience of a dozen 11th-grade cadets at an all-boys' military boarding school perhaps did not lend itself particularly well to the study of a 19th-century philosopher and observer of nature. They like the rebel in him, though. One of the boys had read Henry David Thoreau before at his previous school.

"Oh, yeah, he's the dude who sold all his stuff and went to live in a vacation home, right?"

If one considers two years' solitude in a rustic hand-built cabin at Walden Pond in Massachusetts a "vacation home," so be it.

Actually, they think he's crazy, especially in the part where he observed ants for a day and compared them to Greek soldiers.

Nonetheless, they succeeded in having a rather stimulating discussion about Thoreau's use of Greek allusions and the metaphors for life that he creates from his observations, including the battle of the ants. They questioned wars and the alleged purposes for them. They understood his aphoristic sentences, especially one of the most famous: "If a man loses pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music in which he hears, however measured, or far away. " At an age when many of them scoff at others who differ from the norm, and when few take the risk of exposing their innermost thoughts and ideas, they enjoyed gnawing on this bit of wisdom for a while.

I love Thoreau. One of the hardest parts of teaching high school English is the utter disdain with which some students reject authors I love. They don't get why I envy my colleague who won a grant to spend the summer at Walden Pond studying the transcendentalists. They think I'm crazy, like Thoreau.