Today
One of my students asked whether the significance of the date influenced the reading that I had assigned for today. The short answer was (and is) “No.” I also made a crack that Rudy Giuliani’s campaign referenced September 11, 2001, more than enough for all of us.
I tend to avoid topical lesson plans, at least ones that are so tied to dates, unless the connection between the day and the class is (at least somewhat) obvious. With writing classes, I have taught “Letter from Birmingham Jail” on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and poetry about World War I on Veteran’s Day. With “Nature in Literature,” connections to September 11 seem strained, at best. (That’s not to say that Frost’s “Brook in the City” or Blake’s “Tyger” can’t be read in that context, though, which is probably how my student’s suspicions arose.)
On the train ride home yesterday I started thinking a little more seriously about the connection between “nature” and September 11. Perhaps the way to teach for the day in this kind of class would be to begin with questions about our sense of place, how we value our environment, and so on. We could look at root causes, such as how Osama bin Laden was largely motivated to attack the United States because of our military presence in Saudi Arabia—what he views as our “occupation” (and by extension, desecration) of holy land.
More obvious, though, would be to talk about the rhetoric still swirling around the misinformation from the EPA, which has led to all kinds of serious health problems for the survivors of the World Trade Center collapse. You can read some about that fiasco—a tragedy within a tragedy, even—on Wikipedia’s page for Christine Todd Whitman.
Is there any literature that relates to these issues in a way that would fit in a “Nature in Literature” class? (I wish I had time to figure out how best to implement comments on this site!)