Each autumn, the author leads a group of teenagers around Walden Pond, once the home of Henry David Thoreau, and proves that a whole curriculum--from history to philosophy to science--can be taught outside of a conventional classroom. The pond--located in Concord, about 20 miles west of Boston--is where Thoreau built his famous cabin and wrote about simplicity, being true to oneself, and living deeply in his seminal work, "Walden". Thoreau was arguably the greatest of American jacks-of-all-trades--writer, lecturer, teacher, carpenter, apple tree grafter, surveyor, botanist, and self-appointed inspector of snowstorms.