Self Reliance

Grade Level:  High School

Objective: Students will gain a greater understanding of the transcendental roots of American environmental literature through delving into Emerson's "Self Reliance"

Today we:

-Compared and contrasted Emerson's "Self Reliance" with the excerpts of Walden we read last week
-Looked for the tenants of Transcendentalism (as seen from "The Transcendentalist Fact-sheet") in Emerson's work
-Defined "Emersonian" and debated whether our mountain community would be considered "Emersonian"
-Watched Apple's 1997 "Think Different" commercial and identified Transcendentalist and Emersonian tendencies in the company's nonconformist ad campaign
-Listened to an excerpt of Charles Ives's "Emerson" and analyzed the music for echoes of the tone and values we'd noticed in "Self Reliance"
-Read McSweeney's satirical piece: "Ralph Waldo Emerson Pitches the Snuggie to the Home Shopping Network" by Mira Hayward, and laughed at the tonal similarities to what we'd read


Homework:

Read assigned except from “A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf" by John Muir