Dear Sir,
At my interview you asked me what I would teach if money were no object, if I could teach anything in the world. Realize now that my answer was lame. Yes, I would certainly love to teach the Hunger Games but now I don’t think I was thinking big enough. If I could sir I would teach a unit on Romantic poets. The unit would have students reading Wordsworth, Clare, and Shelley while traveling the English countryside. We would stop at all of these poets’ favorite outdoor haunts and while at each spot the students would be required to write a journal entry recording their thoughts and feelings. At the end of the trip they would be required to submit their journals and 5 poems, each poem written on a different stop on the trip. The trip would give the students a chance to see what it is these poets were feeling when they wrote their poetry. It would open them up to the changing landscape and the never ending struggle by conservationists to save it as well as the life of the everyday person.
Once we returned to school I would follow this unit with a unit over American transcendentalism. This would show them how this movement grew out of the English Romantic poetry but also the many differences. We would read Emerson, Thoreau, and the more modern transcendentalist, Annie Dillard. If I had the money still this unit would be followed by a trip to Waldo Pond, Mount Katahdin, and Tinker Creek so that students could compare this countryside to the English one. Perhaps they would see that the differences between transcendentalism and the romantics have to do with the differences in landscapes.
Sometimes to grasp what we see on paper we need to see what inspired it for ourselves.
Sincerely,
Ms. Danielle Terrill
