Thoreau wrote in Walking , “In wildness is the preservation of the world.” Delivered first as a lecture, then published in Atlantic in 1851, it is an impassioned plea for the pleasures of sauntering, a type of walking meditation that affords reflection, inquiry, and creative thinking.
“Wildness” is my metaphor for learning. For thinking outside the box, off the beaten path, two over-used cliches.
Isn’t Thoreau’s “wildness” more eloquent, and more evocative?
As an English teacher, I use the tools of rhetoric and those of the web to convey my own passion for inquiry, for the sense of wonder and loftiness, the sense of the sublime, that come with a great workout of critical reading and reflection.
Each time I cross the threshold to Room 210, I do my utmost to ensure that everyone has a good time sauntering — around and through the layers of a complex, ambiguous text.
I know after a few decades spent within the constricted walls of a classroom that real learning occurs in the liminal space between order and chaos. At the edges. The margins. A space that is unrestricted, a sacred space where boundaries dissolve, when we stand at the threshold, prepared to move from where we once were to another place, where our awareness of self and others is deepened.
I spend much of my time in classes guiding students as they learn to take that leap. To take risks with their thinking and learning. To free themselves of what Stanford ‘s Tina Seelig calls “constraint-ridden” thinking because initially they are very busy trying to figure out what the teacher wants.
I want them to be detectives, to find ways to read sub-texts for meaning and purpose. I want them to make connections. I want them to rise above the text and dig into it by questioning, examining, teasing the meaning out of language. I want them to experience the joy that comes from playing with ideas, from making connections, from exchanging interpretations. I want them to learn to back up their claims with warrants and textual evidence.
I want them to have awakened minds, and the habits of mind to pose big, open-ended questions, medium questions for research, and small, directed ones.
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What kind of a scientist is Victor Frankenstein?
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What are his traits and values?
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What themes are associated with him?
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How can you tell that this is a Romantic text?
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What are the Gothic elements?
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Why does Shelley focus on the theme of education?
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What does Victor learn? Who are his mentors?
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Where and how does the creature learn ? And you…?
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How is the plot of Frankenstein (1818) as it unfolds similar to that of Oedipus Rex (421 B.C.E.)
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What is the problem with Victor Frankenstein?
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What is the problem with Oedipus Rex?
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Who is the monster? Why?
I hope that by sauntering — by mining a complex literary text for data, examining it, making observations, sharing insights, developing interpretations — that students arrive at a greater understanding of the issues that literature presents, as a living organic record of interiority, of inner life.
This kind of close reading and analysis is based in linguistics and philosophy, in the study of hermeneutics, and generates big questions. How do we read? How do we communicate? And why? And so what? And what now?
I hope that in reading students come to recognize something of themselves. That they can imagine lives, moral dimensions, ideologies, cultures they would otherwise know nothing about.
I hope that they learn about self and others, sameness and difference, a world of complexity that is “large…and contains multitudes.”
For David Perkins, intelligence in the wild involves a complicated and practical process of problem solving. “The phrase may conjure up images of someone trekking through the jungle, but it actually refers to intelligence as it is used to get along in the world, to handle gritty situations in smart ways. For example, “the wild” might be a classroom or the street or even a used-car lot. It might involve running a corporation or managing a scout troop. Intelligence in the wild includes the ability to recognize problems hidden in messy situations and the motivation and good sense to choose which problems (because there are always too many!) are worth the time and energy it will take to solve them.”
Reading can be wild.
“Let the wild rumpus begin.”
lateralthinking 