A key element of my educational philosophy - not that I have one, really - is that 9th graders belong outside. I spend a lot of time with children in a fairly small cinderblock room, and they are not meant to be there. Don't get me wrong - a small cinderblock room with desks, tasteful wall art, and a subtle shade of blue that I spent 75 minutes choosing at Lowe's is a pretty good place to teach Romeo and Juliet to 14 year olds, especially when you throw in a couple oriental rugs, a classy wooden stool, and a white board with several colors of marker. Yeah, I color code my board work. Nbd. The problem is that teaching literature to children is an inherently unnatural thing to do.

Do children benefit from reading, discussing and writing about great books? Obviously. (Maybe that's not obvious to the rest of you). But this is a recent invention. For the vast majority of human history, children did not read books. They hunted wildebeest or something. I don't know that much about about early human history. For the vast majority of human history, actually, 14 year olds were not children, really, and so if you think writing an essay is hard, try working in the coal mines for a few years, and then tell me you don't want to turn in a rough draft because it's too much work.

I digress. In classrooms, kids cannot be loud. They can't really move. Even in a fun, good class with lots of interaction and cleverly designed activities, they pretty much just sit there and listen, or sit there and talk, or sit there and write, or sit there and read. Kids get up to act every day in my class, and everyone talks, and we break the time into 25 minute chunks, but to teach 16 freshman, the vast majority of them need to be still and quiet at any given time.

This is not the case in the woods, which is one of the reasons I've been taking a group of ninth graders on outdoor adventures this fall. We've done two trips, one whitewater rafting, and one backpacking, and both have been awesome. The backpacking trip was to Three Ridges, which is actually the place I wrote my first blog post about.

It was lovely. It was peak leaf season, and the forest was a sea of yellow and red. The hiking was great; the kids loved it; and all in all, everyone had a fantastic time. We didn't finish the hike because of a knee injury, but we plan to go back in the spring to finish up.

There's one kid on these trips, and he is (apparently) diagnosed with ADHD like everybody and their aunt these days. I was talking to another teacher about him, and he described to me how listening in class for this kid was almost impossible. It is also almost impossible for this kid to listen in the woods, actually, but in the woods, a lot less listening is required, at least to other people. It doesn't take any concentration to listen to leaves rustle or birds chirp. He did spent 25 minutes bouncing pebbles off of bigger rocks and muttering, but hey whatever.

Other kids are extremely loud, and in a classroom, this is extremely annoying. These kids often get kicked out of classes for distracting others, get yelled at in the halls, and generally have pretty unpleasant school days. In the woods, you can yell as loud as you want, and as long as you're not disturbing other hikers, you're good. There are definitely times to be quiet - we had a silent night hike on the second night, for example - but when kids' yells don't bounce off cinderblocks, but float through the trees, kids can be themselves and no one has to tell them to be quiet.

There weren't too many I-went-to-the-woods-because-I-wished- to-live-deliberately moments. Even though this was an outdoor leadership trip, and we had deep(ish) discussions, few kids, as far as I know, forged a personal relationship with the gods of the forest. Mostly the kids spent a lot of time huffing up hills, giggling about who likes whom, and looking forward to dinner. But I like to think that a couple days without anything to do but walk around in the woods can't do any harm.