In my efforts over 26 years to motivate high school juniors to engage themselves with the writings of Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Margaret Fuller—pioneers of the transcendentalist literary movement in the mid-nineteenth century—I gave them homework to live a simpler life for a month.
I instructed my students to give up one convenience, which included, through the years, remote controls, beds, hot water, television, radio, curling irons, and cars, and then write about the experience in Thoreauvian style.
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