When I first became an English teacher, I imagined all of my most compelling moments with students would happen inside a classroom. However, thanks to the hiking club at my school, conversations and aha moments often cropped up in unexpected places. I discussed Dante’s descent into hell with my twelfth graders while scrambling with them down the edge of the Grand Canyon. I got to teach my ninth graders old Irish folk songs around a campfire near Mount Lemmon in Tucson. When a sixth grader struggled with classroom behavior, I got to bond with his mom while we pitched a tent outside Sedona. While playing by a creek with one of my shy eighth graders, I saw her suddenly jump in the water to rescue a stranger’s toddler. My teaching career has been dustier, sunnier, bloodier, and better than I first imagined.

In my school’s front office is a mural of Raphael’s The School of Athens. In the center of that painting, Plato and Aristotle do not sit and talk – they walk and talk. Indeed, the name of Aristotle’s peripatetic school comes from the Greek for “walking up and down.” Hiking club, for many, was a series of peripatoi. These walks were key parts of their educational experience, and not simply extracurricular treats. Now, when I visit a wilderness trail running up a mountain or down into a canyon, I think, this is school itself.

In 2015 I joined a group of ambitious young teachers to establish Cicero Preparatory Academy, a classical charter school in Scottsdale, Arizona. I have taught upper school literature and history there for nearly ten years now, but I might have quit after my first year if not for the hiking club. The club was founded by my coworker Matthew Yost, a precocious first-year music teacher with crooked glasses and unmatchable energy.

Sometime in spring 2016, on the verge of burnout, I finally decided to try out hiking club. The first camping trip I ever went on was in Sedona, Arizona. Jacob, one of the biggest personalities in my eighth grade Medieval History class, was also on this trip. For much of the school year I had no idea how to respond to his antics: he would brusquely and dramatically interrupt class every day with everything from wry counterarguments to Kermit the Frog impressions. In Sedona, however, we ran around Walker Creek catching frogs and leaped from cliffs into freezing water. Throughout the trip, I found myself laughing with Jacob and enjoying his mischief and energy.

Back at school, I was better able to discern when to find joy in Jacob’s antics and when it was more appropriate to pause and calmly reset the class instead. I no longer felt as flustered or anxious in front of groups of teenagers. Instead, I felt calm because I no longer saw my rowdiest students as problems; they became whole people with ideas and joys and sufferings, and I loved them.

Being a music teacher, Matthew Yost (or was it an eighth-grade boy?) nicknamed our club “Bachs on Rocks.” He scheduled two hikes each month, two camping trips each semester, and weekly meetings at school to establish traditions, record memories, and design shirts, hats, socks, stickers, and other custom gear. He led it all, from 2015 until his departure in 2021. I was one of many teachers drawn in, and before I knew it I spent at least one weekend a month scrambling on rocks and singing rounds with sixth through twelfth graders in Sedona, Flagstaff, Tucson, the Superstition Mountains, and many other places – even the Grand Canyon (seniors only!). During its golden age, around 2018, the club had over seventy student members, not to mention the parents, siblings, and teachers who usually came.

Students need embodied work and play more than ever before. John Senior writes: “The problem [with education] isn’t only books; it isn’t only language; it is things: It is experience itself that has been missed…. There is no amount of reading, remedial or advanced, no amount of study of any kind, that can substitute for the fact that we are a rooted species, rooted through our senses in the air, water, earth, and fire of elemental experience…. Children need direct, everyday experience of fields, forests, streams, lakes, oceans, grass, and ground.” Charlotte Mason argues something similar in her works on education, claiming that young children should spend more time outdoors than in.

Even in my ten brief years as a teacher, I have seen education become even more disconnected from natural experience, since now nearly everything students and their families do – both at school and at home – is accomplished through a screen. When I began, there was no such thing as “zooming into class,” TikTok, or ChatGPT. According to Michael Toscano, writing in First Things,“Members of Gen Z have been lured by their elders into a dispossession of their bodies, and of their social natures, which are accomplished bodily.” As millions of students opt out of traditional classroom education to attend school online, the age-old question returns with more urgency: What is school even for? It is one more chore to accomplish on a screen so we have more time to pursue pleasures on the same screen? As my students read in Thoreau’s Walden, “But lo! Men have become the tools of their tools…. We now no longer camp as for a night, but we have settled down on earth and forgotten heaven.”

The goal at my school is to free students to become more than “tools of their tools” by giving them great books and Socratic teaching, the foundations of the classical liberal arts. We lead seminars on Plato, Shakespeare, Twain, Austen, and the like. We ask questions – Why do those rocks look the way they do? What does a great leader look like? – and we let students work together to discover answers. We give them leadership roles in seminars, labs, and drama productions. Unfortunately, many students go home and return to a passive, disembodied life. Hiking club, however, invited these students and their families to be re-embodied, and to see that education is neither a series of boxes to check nor something that merely happens to them inside a building or on a screen.

Two “classroom concepts” that became particularly embodied on our hikes were risk and beauty. First, students entered situations that involved physical risk, and this taught them courage and joy. During our excursions, we often climbed precipitous rock formations, crossed through cold rivers, and scaled over 1,000 feet of elevation gain in a day. Students got muddy and soaking wet and scratched up, and they loved it. They used to always clap for the first person who bled on every hike. They were proud of themselves and each other for enduring hard things. I will never forget the look on a sixteen-year-old’s face as he crested a saddle, saw a sweeping view of Phoenix, and said, “I never thought I could do something like this.”

Being outdoors also met their craving for beauty. One of the most satisfying parts of the club was simply seeing students in awe at glorious sights: the top of Humphreys Peak, the rush of the Colorado River, the glow of a sunset over Lake Havasu. “Wait! Stop! Appreciate!” became one of our mantras. Furthermore, seeing natural beauty – stars, caves, pine trees, thunderstorms – taught that the tangible world and the world they heard about in class were one and the same. The very interconnectedness of the universe, they realized, was a thing of beauty. One of my sophomore boys emerged from his tent one evening to a Sedona sky strewn with constellations, and exclaimed, “Oh! The ancient Greeks saw this too!” Another student once walked past a cave with me and said, “Ms. Brown, if I become a monk like the ones you told us about in class, I’ll sleep there.” After reading Huckleberry Finn and Walden, two of my most Tom-and-Huck-like freshmen built a lean-to out of sticks, tarps, and twine on the Mogollon Rim. It stormed all night. Many tents leaked. Their lean-to did not.

The club was an organic place to build close relationships both with students and their families. It became a place for vulnerability. Many times, a walk or a night by the campfire was the ideal moment for a student, parent, or teacher to process not only their thoughts about class but also their personal suffering. Many students in the club struggled with anxiety, depression, ADHD, eating disorders, or self-harm. During their ventures in the wilderness I saw tremendous growth in these students’ relationships with their parents, their peers, and their own emotions. Many people, including me, were renewed and freed on the trails and around the fires. I recall seeing two shooting stars in a row with an eighth grader who was trying to decide if she should stay at our school for high school (she did) and jumping into an ice-cold lake with another laughing student who had attempted suicide the year before. Students have told me the hiking club community was the reason they survived middle school and thrived throughout high school.

While our class discussions continued in hiking club, the club also formed how we interacted when we returned to class. The Bachs on Rocks students knew firsthand that their teachers were human beings who roasted marshmallows, sweated, and dressed wounds. They approached us with trust, and grew less afraid to admit their academic weaknesses and failures. They spread this goodwill to their classmates, and the hiking kids and non-hiking kids alike came into class (with both hiking teachers and non-hiking teachers) with more joy and peace.

Matthew Yost is now a principal at another school, and I continue to teach humanities and lead an alumni continuation of our hiking club in Phoenix. The alums and I still hike monthly and call to each other across canyons: “Bachs on Rocks!” Though the club has changed shape, the legacy remains. Many of us, though dispersed all over the country, still climb mountains, blaze trails, and sing old songs. I am not sure what happened to my eighth-grade student who jumped into a deep creek to save a stranger’s toddler, but I imagine she will remember that moment more vividly than she will remember most of our history class. As Alyosha teaches his young friends in The Brothers Karamazov, a “beautiful, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man stores up many such memories to take into life, then he is saved for his whole life.”