What Does Shooting Wolves Have To Do With Rivers?
“Think Like a Mountain.” A Wisconsin teacher uses an essay about wolves to teach teen boys about empathy and environmentalism.
“I wish I had my gun so I could shoot these pumpkins,” Cody announced to his classmates before he even stepped off the bus. We were at the trailhead, next to a farmer’s market and across the street from a pumpkin patch. We’d had a few frosts already, and with the vegetation blackened and flattened, the pumpkins were lined up like a rafter of turkeys.
“I’m in charge of the sack,” Cody said next when I handed him one of two camelbacks, each holding seventy ounces of water, which I planned to distribute in Dixie cups at the hike’s midway point. We would hear the word “sack” over and over that morning, along with the fact that Cody was “in charge of it.” I cringed each time. Cody was a master of sexual puns. If a word had even a hint of double meaning relating to intercourse or the involved body parts, he would find it and exploit it. He was so good, in fact, that most of the other students didn’t get his jokes.
“Everybody on your wood!” he shouted once, when I gave each student a square of paneling to mark where to stand during a team problem-solving…
