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Re-examining the "Desperate County" and the "Desperate City":
A Look at the Parallels Between 19'* Century Environmental and Transcendental Thought
and Human Impact on the Albuquerque Region

I had the opportunity to teach a portion of my unit to my Enriched Junior English class during the 1999-2000 school year. As I reviewed my unit, I realized that I had been a little too ambitious.

To begin, there were considerable time constraints to consider. Although I would have enjoyed doing all of the proposed activities, it was all ready January and I still needed to teach many required curriculum elements, including the research paper. With this in mind, I pared down the unit considerably and I integrated a research project on a local environmental issue with the research paper. This gave students the framework to not only understand Transcendentalism, but also to learn research and organizational skills and the other skills associated with writing a formal research paper. In addition, it was my hope that by focusing on the environmental issues that effect Albuquerque, students would take a more personal interest in the research.

My approach to Transcendentalism and local environmental issues through the research paper was only moderately successful. The primary problem was that the students did not have strong enough research skills to find and analyze the information they needed. Furthermore, the students knew that the skills and grades associated with the research paper were far more important than the seemingly trivial, impractical philosophies of the Transcendentalists. Therefore, they focused more on trying to write the research paper than grasping the difficult concepts of Transcendentalism. In relation, combining the very difficult tasks involved with understanding Transcendentalism, environmentalism, and the research paper overwhelmed many of the students. It was simply too much information and too great of a leap for them to grasp simultaneously.

I no longer teach enriched students. Instead, I have regular students. I have not attempted Transcendentalism with these students, although I do plan to teach the philosophy and excerpts from the authors. However, I am going to keep it very simple and integrate some of the more hands-on activities proposed in the unit. I have learned that it is very important to keep the unit simple and to focus on the more concrete ideas than the abstract philosophies that the Transcendentalists embraced.