On what was coincidentally the coldest morning in February
2012, Mr. Howard led my English 11 class to the Morton Deck for a lesson about
Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. We walked to the Deck together as a class,
tugging our hats down around our ears and fiddling with jammed jacket zippers
as we stumbled along the wooded trail.
As our hearts pumped and exposed cheeks reddened, we got energized for
class and for the rest of the school day. When we reached the Deck, Mr. Hoffman and a
blazing fire greeted us. Our class sat
in a lopsided circle and opened up our green English 11 Course Packets to “Where
I Lived, and What I Lived For,” from Chapter two of Walden. As Mr. Howard began
to read aloud, we dug pencils out from the depths of our jackets. We listened, and in our minds compared the
vivid descriptions of Thoreau’s wilderness to the hilly, frozen, and silent
woods around us. When we got to them, I
put a star next to the words, “I went to the woods because I wished to live
deliberately.” Something about trekking
up that hill to use the outdoor classroom screamed “living deliberately” to me.
Our discussion lasted the entire class
period and left us contemplative, numb from cold, and smelling of fragrant wood
smoke. I will never forget that class,
when we went to the woods to learn
deliberately. Although I enjoyed our
entire Romantic poetry study, the lines of text that I can remember most clearly
are those that we read that February morning out on Potomac’s secluded,
beautiful campus. We have 90 acres of
classrooms, yet I have only taken class outside a handful of other times since
I joined the Upper School. These
experiences in my sustainability, biology, and environmental history classes
have been some of the most memorable of my entire education. If I could make one wish for Potomac’s
future, it would be that students and teachers would more often utilize the
campus we are lucky to have (we didn’t move to McLean from Dupont Circle for
nothing!) and, in doing so, learn deliberately by exploring connections between
course material and the natural environment.
