Model paragraph response for Whitman's "Re-examine all you have been told..."

Here is the model reader response paragraph I wrote for the students while we did the Transcendentalism module (complete with "hippie" yearbook picture):

The task as it appears on the class blog:

"This is what you shall do..." by Walt Whitman, from the preface of Leaves of Grass.

"This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body." 

Think about the implications of Whitman’s exhortation to “dismiss whatever insults your soul.”  What are some of the things that you have been told “at school or church or in any book” that you might re-examine?

Imagine this quote is being used for Question 3 of the AP English Language and Composition Exam in May.  Write a paragraph response that defends, challenges, or qualifies Whitman’s argument.  Use specific, appropriate evidence to develop your position.

A MODEL:

Personal change and growth require a lifelong re-examination of one’s values and ideas about the world.  Great historical social, political and cultural movements have been inspired by individuals who have examined the past, acted in the present, and left a legacy for the future.  Walt Whitman, like other Transcendentalists of his time, believed in self-reliance and the necessity of living an examined life.  In his Preface to Leaves of Grass, he urges the reader to “re-examine” all that we have been told “at school or church or in any book.”  By doing so, we can live a life worth living, a life of self-reliance and non-conformity in which, as Abraham Maslow proposes, we become self-actualized. 

Growing up in the turbulent 1960s, I witnessed the upheavals of the civil rights movement, the women’s liberation movement, and the anti-Vietnam war movement.  I questioned my own Jewish upbringing, fantasized about becoming a Christian nun or a Hindu yogi, and finally was persuaded to adopt Aldous Huxley’s “perennial philosophy,” embracing my own set of moral values from the great religions I studied.  I dreamed of escaping to the woods and living a simple life attuned with nature in a “hippie”commune after reading Thoreau’s Walden.  With a black armband on my crimson graduation robe, I protested the Vietnam War and then practiced civil disobedience at marches and rallies, much to the dismay of my parents. Later in life, I realized with regret how much pain the actions of the protestors added to the horrors of the war the Vietnam veterans experienced.  Having rebelled against my parents, pursued theater as a career, yet returned to education, I am now reminded by this Whitman passage that I am, more importantly, always a learner and that’s what gives special meaning to my life.