A Walk In The Woods

My teaching buddy Erin recently took her students on a short trek along a patch of woods behind our school during their study of Frankenstein. “The world to me was a secret which I desired to divine,” Victor says in Chapter 2 of Shelley’s mysteriously haunting book, and off Erin took them to discover the divine on a rather misty morning.

Most of my ideas are stolen, and when I found out about Erin’s, I began to think about taking a walk into the woods with my 7th and 8th graders.  What excuse objective could I introduce that would reinforce good writing and reading skills?

We happened to be studying using our settings to create mood and tone, so why not try using the five senses in our writing to enhance the setting? We would do this in two different settings: in the classroom, and on our walk.

The first thing I told the students to do is simply collect data.  I handed out a worksheet and told them to write down a list of everything they hear, see, smell, touch, and taste in the classroom. Taste, I explained, could be great material for a metaphor unless of course they’re all chewing gum (which, let’s be honest, most of them are).  “No sentences, just lists,” I assured them.

We did the same thing on our walk.

(That cutie-pie on the right is my little guest student, Hadley Grace. She got braces a few hours before I taught, and was feeling sore and a tad shy about her metal wear, so I told her she could be a 7th grader that day.)

I challenged the students to point out the difference between this sort of path,

and this one.

What sorts of divine secrets would they discover on this route?

The path runs between the school and a cemetery. A fallen tree trunk marks the path’s end, as does the roar of cars along 370 that reveal we are still very near the Nation’s Capitol. We saw a huge bees’ nest swinging back and forth on a branch overhead. Someone wondered as we all looked, how the branch held a nest that large. A deer leaped in front of us and pranced deeper into the forest, turning around to look at us once it was safely in the brush. I tried to point all these things out, encouraging the students to describe what it is they are experiencing through sight, touch, sound, smell, and taste.

Once I start teaching a lesson, I begin to get anxious for the results.  Will the students produce quality writing after this? Are they fooling around too much under the fall sky and the bees’ nest that I think actually might be a hornets’ nest? Will they discover nothing divine? I’m taking them into the woods, and I’m leading them back out, but did anything change?

I decided on our walk that I can come up with the best, most creative ideas (stolen or not), but then I need to stand back and let the students decide what to do with what I’ve offered them.

“Keep the lights off,” my 8th graders demanded when we got back to the classroom and it was time to write.  I did, and I stood behind them and watched them move their pens and pencils across the page and wondered why this group thrives in the dark. This group is terrifying and this group is lovely.  I don’t know how they pull beauty from their snickering and back talk and menacing attitudes, but they do. I think they are starting to trust me, though I can’t be sure, so I have to do what I promised myself I’d do during our To Kill a Mockingbird unit; give them my best every single day no matter what. It’s taken a toll on my writing, on my weekends, on my sleep, on my self-confidence, but I have faith that the smiles I get from them every so often, from the writing they shock me with almost every time, from the new hands that are raised in class that wouldn’t raise in the beginning, that seeds of better stories, a deeper peace, and a stronger confidence are being planted in the soil of fear and doubt. I think what I’ve discovered that is divine on my walks with this group is that they are phoenixes waiting for someone to tell them they are doing OK so they can rise; unlike Frankenstein’s stitched together human he was so afraid of. What would’ve happened had Victor nurtured what he created? How would things have turned out if Victor hadn’t been afraid?

In the meantime, we all keep on walking and writing.