Where’s the Nature in the Junior English Transcendentalist Unit?

Is the “Language of Nature” unit allowing students to connect with nature?

Liam Norton, Contributing Opinion Writer

Today we live in a time when a unit on transcendentalism is powered by technology. We read passages about the benefits of nature while sitting with our faces glued to a screen. Students are more focused on checking their next grade on Aspen than observing the natural beauty around them. Over the past few months, SHS juniors have been urged to explore the outdoors and admire what our world has to offer. This unit could be very important to students and stick with them their whole lives. But in the teachers’ eyes, they’re still not considered engaged because they weren’t able to post their response to a writing assignment on Google Classroom by 11:59 p.m.

We are blessed to be awarded the natural beauty around us, yet nearly every day we are forced to ignore it from 7:45 a.m. to 2:16 p.m. God forbid a student becomes distracted by the allure of nature just beyond the classroom windows while the teacher babbles on about computing numbers into a function. Nowadays a much-needed glance out the window or a quick mental break from the constant overflow of work is immediately slapped with a label like “ADHD” or “ADD.” So, the way to deal with these natural occurrences is with drugs — to put aside what’s really going on, right? Wrong.

Going into the transcendentalist unit, I was extremely excited — keyword “was.” At first, I believed the unit would be something different — maybe traveling outside and observing nature while recording our thoughts. Maybe our minds would be taking a break while processing the immense beauty at our fingertips. I was wrong. Before our field trip to World’s End (the only part of the unit that made sense to me), our English class didn’t go out into nature once. Meanwhile, we analyzed Henry David Thoreau, a man who made nature his entire life. We read about all the consequences that technology brings, and the proven fact that nature can reverse these mental and physical consequences. Yet we still spent time looking at a screen — putting our backs to the most abundant, beautiful, and important part of our Earth: nature. If this was a transcendentalist unit, where was the nature aspect? Where was the part of this unit the teachers stressed the most?