Waldorf Education is Anti-Intellectual?

News to me. Rather than give an abstract response, let me tell you about my graduating class, Waldorf School of Garden City, 1980, all 18 of us.

Two of us have PhDs, one in biotech and one in history.
Three of us are MDs, including two cardiologists.
Three of us are lawyers, including one who attended Harvard Law.
Five are in business, including a CEO of a video technology company and at least two corporate vice-presidents.
One more is a hospital administrator.
One is a professional fundraiser for a large foundation.
One is a social worker.
One is a world-famous musician.
And one, I just don’t know what happened to her.

Elevator Speech--Part II

(My friend Winslow Eliot, a former Waldorf student and administrator and current part-time Waldorf high school English teacher, sent me her version of an elevator speech. I've decided to post it here rather than in comments on the old post in an attempt to re-spark the discussion. What do you think? What would you say?)

Person in Elevator: “What’s Waldorf Education?”

Me: “Waldorf Education, based on Rudolf Steiner’s insights into human beings, integrates three essential components:

1. It’s holistic. Education is not just about learning facts and figures; it’s about exposing students to emotional and character building skills and physical, active development. This means showing them how to accomplish and finish projects so they know they can DO things as well as think and feel them.

2. It’s developmental: A seven-year-old doesn’t learn the same way a seventeen-year-old does. We teach kinesthetically and experientially in the lower grades. We try to inspire more interest and engagement in the middle years – teaching history through the telling of biographies, for example, instead of asking students to memorize historical facts. In high school, their intellectual lives are ripe for analysis, knowledge, and weighing what matters and what students themselves can do to impact the world for the better.

3. It’s phenomenological. It’s developed and presented by teachers’ own experience and observations of children and of the subject matter.”

Who is becoming a Waldorf teacher?

I’m just wrapping up a week of teacher education (the program meets for 13 weeks over the course of a bit more than two years), and I took some notes on the backgrounds of these adult students who plan to become Waldorf school teachers:

Public school principal
Public school assistant principal
Pediatrician
Social worker
Speech therapist
Pharmaceutical sales rep
Lawyer
CFO of a small business
Business manager
College registrar
Artist
Actress
Chef
3 public school teachers
4 mothers
5 students moving from BA or MA programs to teacher education

Of these, two have some background in Waldorf education, having attended Waldorf schools for part or all of their elementary school education.

Approximately one-third first learned of Waldorf education in finding schools for their own children.

Approximately one-third are choosing a mid-career change that will almost certainly earn less money and fewer benefits but, they hope and believe, bring greater intrinsic rewards.

Approximately one-third already have advanced degrees.

Two are men; the rest are women.

Their ages range from twenty-two to fifty-five or so.

Is Waldorf Education a Religion? Is it Religious? Is it Based on a Religion Called Anthroposophy?

The issue of religion and Waldorf education is not a simple one. The field extends, minimally, over three points of view. The first might be that all education, all meaningful human endeavor, has, in the broadest sense, a religious component. As A.N. Whitehead (1929/1967) said, “The essence of education is that it be religious.” (14) To speak of value, explicitly or implicitly, is to give evidence of a religious engagement with the world. This view is too broad to consider here, however, and does not necessarily distinguish Waldorf education from other methods.

The second point of view, probably the source of Waldorf critics’ frustration with aspects of Waldorf education as manifested by certain teachers or, potentially, by certain schools, is that Waldorf education is religious in a more conventional sense because some ideologues, through misunderstanding and misapplication of Steiner’s work, make it so. As Dorothy St. Charles, former principal of the Milwaukee Urban Waldorf School said in a radio interview, Waldorf education is not a religion, “but some people make it one.”

The third point of view, and the more carefully considered, is that Waldorf education and anthroposophy, the method that underlies it, are not religions at all. Douglas Sloan, former coordinator of the joint program in Religion and Education between Union Theological Seminary and Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, made this point eloquently as an expert witness in a lawsuit arguing that charter Waldorf schools, as religious schools, violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Sloan (2004) argued against this view:

By all scholarly criteria of what constitutes religion, anthroposophy is not a religion. ...

The attempt to define religion has been notoriously difficult, and the approaches to doing so are many. In general there have been three main approaches.

The first can perhaps be called the essentialist approach. Essentialist definitions tend to focus on the inner essence or substance, the metaphysical reality claims, of religions, and the relationships to these demanded of human beings by the claimed realities. One of the conceptual difficulties with this focus is that philosophers and others can make metaphysical and ethical arguments about the nature of reality without advancing these as themselves constituting a religion, although they may well have implications for religion.

The second main approach to the study and definition of religion can be called the functional approach, and is probably the theoretical approach most favored by social scientists, although as I shall point out, some theologians also favor it. Functional definitions of religion stress the effects, the functions of religion, in actual life—the ways in which religion functions to fulfill basic human needs, both individually and communally. Different scholars stress different functions as the defining characteristic of religion. Among these various functional definitions are, for examples: the cognitive—religion provides meaning systems for understanding and coping with life; the psychological—religion functions to meet psychological needs, such as, a sense of security in the face of life’s uncertainties, a sense of identity, a sense of purpose, and so forth; the social—religion serves primarily to provide values for social cohesion and the preservation of the social group; and the ideological (Marxist definitions of religion are a good example)—religion serves the power interests of governing elites by deluding the masses. Each of these taken by itself is decidedly reductionist, and, in order to avoid inordinate reductionism, most scholars attempt to fashion combinations of various functional approaches.

One form of functionalism, often utilized by students of religion, is that of the twentieth-century American theologian, Paul Tillich. Religion Tillich defined as expressing “the ultimate concern” of an individual or of an entire culture. Every person and every society, he argued, has its “ultimate concern” (often, to be sure, directed toward less than ultimate objective realities).

In fact, for Tillich, every culture is grounded in its own ultimate concern, to which it gives concrete expression. Culture itself as a whole is, therefore, the religious expression and activity par excellence.

“Religion,” Tillich famously wrote, “is the substance of culture, culture is the form of religion.” Tillich’s position can be a good illustration of how the strength of the functionalist can also be its main weakness. The strength is that it enables one to see the religious functions, as noted above, of many human activities not usually recognized as religious: the state, the university, science, technology, the stock exchange, Sunday afternoon football, and so on. Each has its ultimate concern, and often its own “priesthood,” paths of initiation, dogmas, sacred texts, and other marks of religion.

The weakness is that a definition which begins to apply to everything often ends up telling us little about anything.

In view of these various approaches, it is not surprising that one leading historian of American religion (Catherine Albanese of UC Santa Barbara), whose works I reviewed in forming my opinion, has observed that scholars have become increasingly less certain about what should be counted as religion as a general phenomenon. “In the end,” she writes, “religion is a feature that encompasses all of human life, and therefore it is difficult if not impossible to define it.”

In this light it is probably also not surprising that historians of religion turn mainly to the third approach to the definition of religion, namely, the formal. Scholars in the history of religion and comparative religion deal primarily with the actual religious forms manifested by concrete religious groups and movements. These religious forms include such things as beliefs and doctrines (creeds), ritual activities, forms of worship, sacred texts, and recognized sources of authority. The advantage and strength of this approach is that it is concrete and makes it possible to determine whether a group actually functions, not just religiously in general, a la Paul Tillich, for instance, but as a formal, identifiable religion as such. It also is possible then to distinguish it in detail from other religions and their forms, and to trace the actual development of a specific religion over time. In this perspective, a religious group is one that manifests and is organized around these common religious forms, albeit with its own distinct versions of them. This approach can also incorporate aspects of the first two approaches.

It is especially from the perspective of this third approach to the definition of religion, the formal, that I can meaningfully and concretely testify that anthroposophy is not a religion. …

Anthroposophy is the name given by Rudolf Steiner to designate the way of knowing, the method of inquiry, that he established. …

It is a wholly personal choice not only whether one follows Steiner’s method of knowing and tries to develop it, but also whether, out of conviction, one accepts–or does not–Steiner’s own results and content flowing from that method as he practiced it. If the principle of individual freedom based on knowledge is violated in following Steiner’s indications, then the entire method is vitiated.

It is worth noting that the case was dismissed and dismissed again upon appeal. I believe PLANS plans another appeal. Stay tuned.

St. Charles, D. (1994) Interview by Alan Chartock on WAMC, 90.3 FM, Northeast Public Radio, Albany, NY. April; exact date unavailable. Reference obtained from undated cassette tape recording.

Sloan, D. (2004) “Declaration of Douglas Sloan in Support of Defendants’ Opposition to Plaintiff’s Motion for Summary Judgment…” Case No. CIV. S-98-0266 FCD PAN. PLANS, Inc. v. Sacramento City Unified School District, Twin Ridges Elementary School District, DOES 1-100. United States District Court, Eastern District of California. July 30, 2004.

Whitehead, A. (1929/1967) The Aims of Education and Other Essays. New York: Free Press.

The Elevator Speech: What is Waldorf Education?

What do you say? I mean it, what do you say? Comment below!

It happened again.  A dinner with strangers, four couples at a round table in a big room. –And what do you do? –I’m co-founder, Faculty Chair, and a teacher at the Great Barrington Waldorf High School. –Oh. Great. Waldorf? What’s that?

And, as usual, I’m at a bit of a loss. I just don’t have an elevator speech. Depending on the noise level of the room and my assessment of the question, I say something about balancing academics, arts, physical activity, and social health. Or I say something about a non-denominational, non-sectarian approach to spiritual questions.

Sometimes I find myself in a meaty, fruitful conversation. Sometimes people’s eyes glaze over and I turn the conversation to another topic as soon as possible.

When I started looking into definitions and descriptions of Waldorf education, more than fifteen years ago, I believed it would be easy to find, say, a pithy paragraph in Rudolf Steiner’s work that would begin, “Waldorf education is…” But such a paragraph doesn’t exist. So I looked at the work of Henry Barnes, Jeffrey Kane, Eugene Schwartz, Steve Talbott, Douglas Sloan, and other very smart writers and thinkers about Waldorf education. All of them had lots of good things to say, but none had a synopsis that could fuel the elevator speech or the dinner table introduction.

So I’m putting it to those who read this blog: What do you say?

Waldorf Schools: Where are the Boys?

Several years ago, one of my master’s degree students wrote a study (unpublished) based on a sample of 4000 U.S. Waldorf school students in grades 1 through 8 and found that there were 8% fewer boys than girls in Waldorf schools. These results are independent of the gender of the teacher (we had theorized that male teachers might attract or retain more male students) and independent of the grade. That is, first grades are “missing” boys just as often as the higher grades. (We had theorized that boys and girls might enter in equal numbers, but that boys would leave over the years for one reason or another.)

Following this work, another student (also unpublished) surveyed Waldorf school parents. Parent attitudes largely determine school choice, and, perhaps, mothers choose Waldorf schools for their children. Fathers are then more likely to intercede and insist that their sons attend another school, one with a more competitive sports program or an apparently beefier math and science program. The study, not conclusive, suggested that this was the case. Anecdotally, that has been true of several families at the school in which I teach.

A further study might investigate what aspects of Waldorf education are perceived as more appropriate for girls than for boys.

Regardless, Waldorf schools—individually and jointly in teachers’ conferences—would do well to keep an eye on the breakdown of their enrollments between boys and girls, and attempt to address imbalances through study, research, experimentation, and hard work. Eight per cent is two students in a class of 25; what school can afford to overlook such an enrollment boost?

(My own small Waldorf high school currently enrolls 16 boys and 15 girls, but we continue actively to address the questions I raise above.)

Did Dwight Shrute go to a Waldorf School?--New Addition

New information has come to light that warrants re-posting this:

• He wears Birkenstocks with socks AND carries a spare pair in his car.

• He speaks German and apparently knows about that awful German children’s book, Struwwelpeter.


• He plays the (fluorescent plastic) recorder.


• He believes exposure to germs strengthens your immune system.


• He wanted to teach children to make cornhusk dolls...

Did Rainn Wilson or a writer for the American version of The Office go to a Waldorf school?
Is there other evidence that Dwight Schrute did?

Inquiring minds want to know.
Comments, please!

How to Ruin the Soul of the Child

Translations of Quotations Taken Out of Context from Rudolf Steiner

(Before we begin, you deserve some attempt to make sense of Steiner’s frequent references to “soul ruining,” some of which are collected below. As a first pass at attempting to say, in part, what Steiner may have meant by “soul ruining,” we may turn to a recent item on NPR’s Planet Money. Job training, it turns out, is more effective for those who have had an early childhood education, controlled for socio-economic variables. Nobel-prize winning economist James Heckman found that training relies on what he calls “soft skills,” which “involve things like being able to pay attention and focus, being curious and open to new experiences, and being able to control your temper and not get frustrated,” things you learn in preschool. Astonishingly, on average, boys who went to preschool, in one study, were found to be 50% less likely to be in jail, and to earn 50% more than their peers. Further, skills not learned early are harder and harder--and ultimately impossible--to learn later. Doesn’t it seem possible—adjusting for translation from an early 20th century German idiom, expressed in lectures transcribed later—that the souls of one group were less “ruined,” in an early 21st century, non-judgmental way, than the souls of the others?)

Conclusions can live and be healthy only in the living human spirit. That is, the conclusion is healthy only when it exists in completely conscious life. That is very important, as we will see later. For that reason, you ruin children’s souls if you have the children memorize finished conclusions.
p. 150
http://www.steinerbooks.org/research/archive/foundations_hum_exp/foundations_hum_exp.pdf

Proceed to reflect with the children, without hesitation, that you are looking beyond their horizon. It does not matter, you see, if you say a great deal to the children that they will understand only later. The principle that dictates that you teach the children only what they can understand and form an opinion about has ruined much in our culture.
pp. 48-49

You can present the human intellect, in a makeshift way, with historical or physiological facts before age twelve, but by doing so you ruin human nature; strictly speaking, you make it unsuitable for the whole of life.
p. 110

Do not give children verbal definitions but show them the connections between the concepts and the phenomena related to air and those related to solid bodies. Once we have grasped the concept of solid bodies flowing in the direction in which they tend when not prevented, we can dispense with the concept of air flowing into empty space. Healthier concepts would arise than those that fill the world today—such as Professor Einstein’s complicated theory of relativity. I mention this as a passing comment on the present state of our civilization, for I cannot avoid pointing out how many harmful ideas live in our culture (such as the theory of relativity, especially in its most recent variation). These ideas run a ruinous course if the child becomes a research scientist.
p. 117

By using shorthand, we retain something in our culture that, if left to ourselves with our present natural aptitudes, we would cease to notice and, in fact, forget. We thus keep something artificially awake in our culture that destroys it just as much as all-night studying ruins the health of overzealous students. For this reason, our culture is no longer truly healthy.
p. 132

The children do not as yet have a full understanding for matters of the rights sphere, and if they are confronted with these concepts too early in their development, their soul forces will be ruined for the rest of their lives because such concepts will be so abstract.
p. 151
http://www.steinerbooks.org/research/archive/foundations_hum_exp/foundations_hum_exp.pdf

Thus, because of this method of treatment—giving him wine as a young child—he was completely ruined by the time he was seven years old.
p. 105
http://www.steinerbooks.org/research/archive/discussions_with_teachers/discussions_with_teachers.pdf

Experimental psychology can be a valuable basis of psychology but when it sneaks into pedagogy and even into courtrooms, it ruins everything that requires healthy development, that needs fully developed people not separated by a gulf from other fully developed people.
p. 150

We must not understand our task as imagining that what is good for one is good for everyone, since thinking so abstractly would be the ruin of all genuine desire.
p. 162
For the convenience of the faculty, the child has, for instance, mathematics or arithmetic in the first period; then, perhaps Latin, then, maybe a period of religion. After that, there is music or singing, but maybe not even that, and, instead, geography. We cannot more fundamentally ruin human nature than by teaching children in this manner.
p. 168
http://www.steinerbooks.org/research/archive/education_as_a_force_for_social_change/education_as_a_force_for_social_change.pdf

The first thing you have to do is to dispense with all the textbooks. For textbooks as they are written at the present time contain nothing about the plant and animal kingdoms that we can use in teaching. They are good for instructing grown-up people about plants and animals, but you will ruin the individuality of the child if you use them at school.
p. 37
The chief point is that thinking must never, never be separated from visual experience, from what the children can see, for otherwise intellectualism and abstractions are brought to the children in early life and thereby ruin their whole being. The children will become dried up and this will affect not only the soul life but the physical body also, causing desiccation and sclerosis.
p. 84

Now if there is the right treatment in the language lessons, that is to say if the teacher does not ruin the child’s feeling for language but rather cherishes it, then the child will feel the transition to eurythmy to be a perfectly natural one, just as the very little child feels that learning to speak is also a perfectly natural process.
p. 105
http://www.steinerbooks.org/research/archive/kingdom_of_childhood/kingdom_of_childhood.pdf

Children should not enter elementary school before their seventh year. I was always glad to hear, therefore (and I don’t mind if you consider this uncivilized), that the children of some anthroposophists had no knowledge of writing and reading, even at the age of eight. Accomplishments that come with forces that are available later on should never be forced into an earlier stage, unless we are prepared to ruin the physical organism.
p. 116
Through ill treatment, a violin may be ruined for ever. But in the case of the living human organism, it is possible to plant principles that are harmful to growth, which increase and develop until they eventually ruin a person’s entire life.
p. 137

We ruin our students’ future worldviews when we introduce them prematurely to subjects such as chemistry, mineralogy, physics, dynamics, and so on.
p. 192

People prefer to fall back on traditional religious creeds, trying to bridge what remains unbridgeable unless they can rise from the sensory world to the spiritual world, as anthroposophy endeavors to do. For adults, such a conflict is indeed tragic. If it arises in childhood before the eleventh year, it brings disturbances in its wake that are serious enough to ruin the soul life of a child. A child should never have to say, “I study zoology and find nothing about God. It’s true that I hear of God when I study religion, but this does not help explain zoology.” To allow children to be caught in such a dilemma would be awful, since this kind of questioning can completely throw them off their proper course in life.
p. 281
http://www.steinerbooks.org/research/archive/soul_economy/soul_economy.pdf

At about the age of twelve, while still under the guidance of authority, another important desire, namely, to reason independently, begins to develop. If we use independent reasoning too much before the age of twelve, we will actually ruin the child’s soul and bodily forces. In a certain sense, we deaden human experiencing with reason.
p. 135
http://www.steinerbooks.org/research/archive/renewal_of_education/renewal_of_education.pdf

The Anthroposophical Writer of the English Language Must Read This

Too many anthroposophists adopt the style of (badly translated) German in writing for an American audience. Here's some advice on avoiding this clunky and annoying style:

Germans capitalize Nouns. Americans capitalize only proper nouns; anthroposophy is not a proper noun and should not be capitalized, nor should any number of other nouns translated from German into English.

Germans are a definite people and use definite articles more frequently than Americans do. A German (Steiner) could write a book, The Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy. Three definite articles in a ten word title. Educating Children sounds less stilted to American ears. Teaching Children is even better, and, by the way, the word "pedagogical" is archaic in English.

Germans, as definite people, also speak definitely, using "must," for example, far more frequently than Americans do. What is common in Germany sounds almost impolite, and certainly too commanding and definite, to Americans.

Further, especially with regard to Steiner's lectures from the early 20th century, the style of argument is often to indicate the extreme, recognizing that the audience understands this as a definite boundary within which action will (must!) occur. When Steiner says, for instance, that teaching abstract concepts too early will "ruin a (the) child's soul," he is not saying that one teacher in one instance will curdle the soul the way one undissolved piece of sugar will crystalize a batch of fudge, or one dust mite may ruin a computer chip. He is indicating, in a culturally appropriate way that we need to translate, that such activity, pursued in the wrong way, over time, will lead us in a direction that is unhealthy for children (the child).

It is already enough. We must now stop this activity by the conscious retranslation of the concepts and the language we use to describe our engagement with anthroposophy. Not to do this simply demonstrates our superficial understanding (our misunderstanding).

Do you have to be an anthroposophist to teach in a Waldorf school?

No.

(And, to answer the question in Comments below, it depends on the program in which you're getting your Waldorf teacher education--they vary considerably and there's no standard or template--and it also depends on what your definition of "studying anthroposophy" is--if you mean reading Steiner's work in areas outside education, that's one thing. If you mean reading any of Steiner's works, including those in education, that's another...)

We are Plato's Cave Men and Cave Women

A student asked me to write this up, so here goes.

Plato’s allegory of the cave is just that, an allegory. We mistake it, then, if we try to identify ourselves or others as, say, prisoners. We are all prisoners, but we are also all, to some extent, those who have freed themselves.

For those not familiar with this allegory, I’ll review it. You can find it in Book VII of Plato’s Republic.* Find a contemporary translation. The language should sound fresh, immediate, direct. Plato did not write or speak in archaic or stuffy language. (Grube’s translation is good.)

Imagine that we are prisoners in a cave, chained so that we can see only the rear wall. We cannot see our neighbors, or even our own bodies. Reality, for us, consists of the shadows on and echoes from the cave wall. If we push the allegory, we could say that even our own thoughts, while we are thus chained, are only the shadows and echoes of true thoughts. We have been chained since before we can remember, and we believe that reality consists of the shadows and echoes that we perceive.

If we are able to free ourselves, however, we notice that there is a fire behind us on an elevated platform. Between the fire and us is a low wall that disguises beings who carry objects back and forth, holding them aloft so that the fire casts their shadows on the back of the cave. The prisoners take these to be real.

But, recognizing our mistake, although we are now free, we have not yet seen reality. We need to make our way up a path and out of the cave, into the real world, to recognize the source for the objects of which we had previously seen only the shadows. To be clear—because many who refer to this allegory leave out the middle portion, referring only to prisoners and then their apprehension of the world outside the cave—when we were prisoners, we saw the shadows of images of the things that are real. And, to take common experience, the sun that we see in the sky, the brightest thing in common experience, it is, by this allegory, only the shadow of the image of the true sun.

Emerging from the cave, having spent a lifetime in darkness, we are blinded by the light. It takes time for our vision to adjust, to be able to see in this new, true world.

Then, when we embrace the task of returning to the cave to free those still imprisoned, we are blinded a second time as we pass from light to darkness. To the perception of the prisoners, then, we appear to be blind and to have lost our minds, unable to see the shadows and babbling about a world of which they have no conception. They see no value in our attempts to free them, and may, Plato tells us, turn on us and try to kill us if we persist in attempts to free them.

Also, having seen the world outside the cave, we have lost interest in the now meaningless shadows of images. When we see prisoners competing over shadows, we withdraw, we decline to join this fruitless activity.

Our task, then, becomes a task of education, of gradually turning the prisoners’ minds and sight—these are inextricably linked—to the light of the real.

I don’t want to argue about whether or not this is a good allegory—it has survived more than 2000 years—or whether or not it promotes authoritarianism—those who know leading those who don’t. I want to argue that, as an allegory, it applies in all its parts to each of us.

Each of us is, in some respects, deluded, a prisoner who takes shadows for reality.

Each of us, too, is somewhat free, has turned at least slightly to see the fire and the objects that cast the shadows, has begun to recognize his or her imprisonment.

Each of us has, if only in rare, powerful dreams or fleeting, high ideals, glimpsed the world outside the cave.

Each of us has been blinded by light and blinded by darkness.

Each has returned to others in the cave to help them.

Each has benefited from the work of others to bring us closer to freedom and reality.

Can we say it’s not so?


*Plato, in his humility and in order to indulge a powerful rhetorical device, claims not to record his own thoughts and words, but those of his teacher, Socrates. This is why Plato is the author of the Socratic dialogues. In Book VII of the Republic, Socrates speaks to Glaucon, Plato’s older brother, whose name means “bright eyed” or “owl eyed,” an apt and symbolic name for the allegory laid out in the dialogue.

Good Teachers Don't Answer Their Own Questions

Once Harry Kretz asks a question, he stands and he waits. You can see that he is willing to wait while civilizations rise and fall, oceans dry up, stars die and fall from the sky, the universe rumbles to an end, bang or whimper. He’s present, attentive, with his students, but waiting. He has asked a real question that a real student needs to answer for a real reason. Not to prolong a class, or to demonstrate knowledge, or to be pedantic, but because he’s teaching young human beings and it’s necessary for them to exercise themselves, to rouse their minds to activity, to make connections for themselves. Mr. Kretz asks a question that requires students to engage, to think, to draw new connections, to make an insightful leap across a previously uncrossed gap.

Mr. Kretz, one of the finest teachers I have known—patient, respectful, humorous—will tell you that many teachers, especially young, smart ones, don’t really know how to ask questions. “Don’t ask a question that you don’t actually care if the students answer,” he might say. And, once you’ve asked a question that you believe students should answer, don’t do what too many of us do. We wait a couple of seconds and then, impatient, the onrushing momentum of an un-taught curriculum or the threat of silence or of boredom upon us, we answer it for ourselves. And our students relax back into watching the teacher’s show.

“Er. Um.” A student hazards a guess, voice rising at the end, questioning. Mr. Kretz absorbs this answer and asks another question.

(Speaking of leaps, Helen Keller compared leaps of mind and dancing. Here’s Merce Cunningham from Russell Friedman’s biography of Martha Graham: “[I] felt [Helen Keller’s] two hands around my waist, like bird wings, so soft. I began to do small jumps. Her fingers, still around my waist, moved slightly as though fluttering. I stopped, and was able to understand what she said to her companion: ‘So light, like the mind.’” Sometimes, poetic truth and literal truth are the same thing.)

Two Students: Tom won't learn, Huck won't hate

A quirky student, brilliant in some respects and challenged in others, I’ll call him Tom, was given the German Seifenoper, “soap opera,” as a vocabulary word, one among many. Probably because it appeared in a story the class was reading.

Tom refused to learn it. “I know that I will never need to know the German word for soap opera, so I refuse to learn it.” No amount of pleading or reasoning would sway him, not that the German teacher tried too hard; this situation was ultimately more amusing than annoying, and she had better uses for her own time. She could have pointed out that he would learn two potentially more valuable words--for soap and for opera--in one swell foop, but she didn't.

Wow. Think of the energy, commitment, and bent of mind it takes to examine each piece of information coming at you in school in order to determine, before you engage with it, whether or not it will be of use to you in the future. As if you could really ever know such a thing. Approaching education as if packing for a trip, and knowing you have to be ruthless in order to pack light. “I’ll learn this. I won’t learn that.” There’s an admirable, ethical stance at the core of Tom’s refusal, even if the project itself is wholly questionable.

I heard about this, and spoke to Tom. “I’m tempted to write a short story,” I told him, “in which a boy in a circumstance similar to yours loses his life because he doesn’t know the German word for soap opera. In my story, he’ll live if he knows this word, but he won’t know it, and he’ll die. It’s unlikely, of course, but you have to admit it could happen.”

(So you don’t believe I’m too harsh, I had spoken with the class about how it’s the case in literature and movies that so many people die because it’s an easy way to introduce dramatic tension. We care if the hero lives or dies. It’s harder to write a story or shoot a movie in which we care if the hero… brushes his teeth or not.)

He smiled. He understood my point. But he didn’t change his ways, not then, and, maybe, not now.

Another boy, I’ll call him Huck, was very quick to solve math problems, although he did it in a remarkable way. He would read a problem, and then attack it three, four, five, or more ways, getting sometimes the right answers, if the methods were sound, and sometimes the wrong answer. He would examine all the different answers and then decide which he believed to be correct. Trial and error. Not a perfectionist, almost an imperfectionist.

A girl in the same class, I’ll call her Becky, approached problem-solving more conventionally, working carefully step-by-step until she was certain she had the right answer. A perfectionist.

One day, I set the class a problem. Huck worked quickly to the answer and announced that he had it. Becky, working methodically, looked up and said, exasperated, “I hate you, Huck.”

Huck sat back and looked at her. “Well, Becky, I don’t hate you,” he said. “I guess you suffer from unrequited hate.”

Lessons from the Tide Pools of Hermit Island, Maine

Each fall I take our senior class to Hermit Island, Maine, on the coast near Bath, to study tide pool zoology for a week. We set up camp amid birch and pine trees and within the sound of the surf—boys’ and girls’ tents, a couple of picnic tables for a “kitchen” and a couple more for a “dining room.” We stretch a tarp overhead—it rains at least once during the week—and a clothesline nearby. We circle folding chairs around the fire pit and grill steaks.

We talk late into the night. The first night, students chatter and let fall away the social and electronic world they have just left behind. The second night, more calmly, we discuss the world they are about to enter and how to make it a better place. They can allow their idealism free reign, stare into the fire, and imagine how, given a chance, they will change the world. They jump up to sing, they sit quietly to write a poem, they whittle spoons, they—hesitantly—chase skunks away from the food they have forgotten to pack away.

In the morning, students make breakfast—they’re responsible for planning, cooking, and cleaning for all meals. For some, it’s a challenge to get instant oatmeal on the table; others present a restaurant-worthy vegetarian frittata. We hike half a mile to the “Kelp Shed,” a snack bar in the summer and our classroom in the fall, where we meet about 100 seniors from other high schools across the country. Students have come from as far south as Atlanta and as far west as Chicago.

Each morning, teachers from the eight or so schools that have gathered share two-hour presentations on the animal phyla of the tide pools. (I’ve co-taught mollusks for the past three years with a teacher from Vermont.) Students take notes, make drawings, ask questions, and have a chance to examine live specimens they’ve helped collect.

Students are delighted by hermit crabs, intrigued by a sea star’s hydrodynamic tube feet, awed by the relative power of a little clam’s single foot, slightly scared of the crabs’ pinchers—although there are always a couple of students who hang as many crabs as possible from their clothes and skin. Students spend a morning with lobsters, learning about migrations, territorial disputes, mating rituals, and lobster offspring, the superlobsters. Many students name their lobsters—highly unscientific, but understandable—and one purchases it in order to give it its freedom.

The rhythm of life revolves around the tides. We wake in time to be at the tide pools near low tide, sometimes five in the morning. We coach students in walking on the sharp rocks and slippery seaweed, in watching out for rogue waves. We peer into tide pools that appear at first to contain nothing but gray-green blobs.

We’re far from home, we’re tired, we’re not necessarily dressed for the weather, we’re awake when we’d rather not be, we’re uncertain of our footing, we’re cold and wet, and we’re just not sure why we are here. “Dr. Sagarin, I feel like a clam and I don’t want to be a clam. Now I know why they call it ‘clammy.’”

Each year, it amazes me how, within about twenty minutes, our vision begins to clear, and we begin to see and then to identify plant and animal life in the pools. What was, at first, a pool of meaningless shapes and dull colors begins to teem with life. Purple sea stars, green urchins, orange anemones, red hermit crabs, blue mussels, white barnacles, transparent sea vases; once we’ve seen them, we can’t believe we didn’t see them earlier.

We forget our fatigue, our cold, wet feet, and we begin to discover our kinship with a world we have never seen before. We overcome the strangeness of the place and begin to lift rocks and reach under overhangs. With luck, we snag a young lobster or an old Jonah crab, and, gingerly, we learn to hold them so that they are calm and safe. We return them to their holes or crevices. One student finds a colony of large anemones in a tiny cave, and group after group of students approaches to admire it and snap photos. The students name the cave after the one who found it.

It seems to me that this is a lot like education: we leave our homes to go to a strange place and we’re thrown together with others our own age and a couple of adults called teachers. The world makes demands on us—chores, schedules, rhythms, work. At first, at least metaphorically, we’re cold and wet, we’re not sure why we’re here, and we’re not sure what we’re looking at. But, with time and guidance, we begin to see for ourselves and then to discover. A teacher can show us where to stand, how to look, encourage patience, demonstrate how to turn a rock over without destroying what’s beneath it. But we have to use our own eyes, our own hands, and our own minds to make sense of our experience. And then we can begin to explore on our own.

This process, which occurs in each of us to a greater or lesser degree, is transformational and transcendental. No student who has spent an hour in the tide pools will look at this part of the world the same way again; and, by extension, we hope, will learn that other apparently inaccessible, cold, wet, seemingly empty spaces are worth the trouble to get to know.

Is the Bible a Banned Book?

What do you need in order to look at Medieval art, to understand Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, speeches—or Abraham Lincoln’s speeches—or to read Moby-Dick?

Regardless of your personal beliefs, your faith, or your lack of faith, you need a knowledge of the Bible.

So, in our high school, we teach a course for 10th graders called “The Bible as Literature.” Not that this matters, but, to give some perspective, the woman who teaches it happens to be a Jew who tutors local students in Hebrew for their Bar and Bat Mitzvahs. (She has also taught an elective course in Hebrew for our students, and she teaches another seminar on World Religions.)

Each spring, as a private school, we submit a list of the books we’ll be using the following year to local districts in New York State. The districts buy these books using the money of taxpayers—the parents of our students—and send the books to us. We use them and return them at the end of the year. Our students come from Massachusetts, New York, and Connecticut, but only New York has such a law or program. Students from Massachusetts and Connecticut private schools buy their own textbooks.

Maybe you can see where this is heading. We submit a list of dozens of books that includes, say, The Great Gatsby, Dante’s Inferno, Moby-Dick, The Color Purple, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, Algebra 2, and… the Bible.

And, a few days later, a nice person from the local district calls to say that they can’t order the Bible. It’s not her job to say why or why not a book may be ordered—the computer just won’t let her do it. Software for separation of church and state.

So, presumably, the way we’re asked to teach is this: “See that man wrapped up like a mummy in that painting by Giotto? Does anyone know who he is? Well, let me tell you about Lazarus… He’s a guy whose story is told in the Bible.” “Does anyone know to whom Lincoln is referring when he speaks of the ‘better angels’ of our nature? No? Well, let me tell you about Paul… He’s a guy who wrote letters that you can find in the Bible…” And on and on and on. Good humanities teachers—literature, history, philosophy, you name it—will necessarily reveal to their students that the world in which they live is full of allusions to a book that the district is not allowed to purchase for them.

Let’s hope against hope that they’re iconoclastic enough to look into it for themselves.

Our students buy their own Bibles.

Did Dwight Schrute go to a Waldorf School?

• He speaks German and apparently knows about that awful German children’s book, Struwwelpeter.
• He plays the (fluorescent plastic) recorder.
• He believes exposure to germs strengthens your immune system.
• He wanted to teach children to make cornhusk dolls...

Did Rainn Wilson or a writer for the American version of The Office go to a Waldorf school?
Is there other evidence that Dwight Schrute did?

Inquiring minds want to know.
Comments, please!

"Earino" (Spring): Fragment of a Lost Socratic Dialogue

Socrates meets his students—Halitosis, Leukemia, Diabetes, and Osteoporosis—in the woods near Athens known as the Academia.

Socrates: It is good to see you all again. We were discussing justice and the good life... Halitosis! What are you doing?
Halitosis: One minute, Socrates. My mom texted me that I forgot my lunch and I have to text her back...
Socrates: Well, okay. But then put that thing away, whatever it is. Haven’t we established that direct communication is the only true communication? As I was saying… You know Leukemia, it’s very hard for the other students to concentrate when your toga is so short…
Leukemia: But Socrates, it’s too hot here in Athens in the spring. And I have such nice legs. You want me to wear long togas like you old people? That’s so mean…
Socrates: That’s not really the point, Leukemia. When you consider… Diabetes! Are you here to learn or to eat? I can hear you chewing like a cow and it is distracting.
Diabetes: I’m not eating, Socrates. This is a breath freshener. In chewing gum form. It’s minty fresh. Would you like one?
Socrates: No, Diabetes, although it’s kind of you to offer. But, listen, is that what I find stuck to every stump and boulder in the Academia? The gods know I walked home yesterday with a chunk of that stuck to my sandal. It’s very annoying… Where was I? Oh, yes… Yes, Osteoporosis?
Osteoporosis: I have to work this afternoon and I feel terrible and I have a headache and I really want to take a nap before I go to work, so can I go now? There’s nothing really important happening here…
Socrates: Well, it’s obvious why not, isn’t it?
(End of fragment.)

Giving a Test 101

Among the reasons for high school and middle school students to lose confidence in their teachers are simple things—organization, preparation, clarity, attention. A lack of these may become particularly evident in times of stress, and there may be no more acute case in the everyday life of a school than during the administration of a test. I believe I can hand identical tests to different teachers who will walk into classes that have been identically prepared and, depending on how the teachers handle the test-taking, from beginning to end, student attitudes and results will vary widely.

An organized, clear, attentive teacher will elicit the best behavior and results—the room will be calm, the test fair. A disorganized, unclear, inattentive teacher will elicit bad behavior—including cheating—and worse results.

So I thought I’d walk through test-administering 101.

Write a test that is fair and that allows students to demonstrate what they know. It could even be fun… Start with a cartoon or a joke (maybe an “in” joke that you and the class share). The test should should be difficult to get a perfect score on but also difficult to fail. It should test students on what they should know—what is important in your course, what you have reviewed.

Frankly, in most cases, you should be so confident of your students that giving or taking the test is just about beside the point—you should know the students well enough to know what they know, to know how well they will do on your test. (In which case, you don’t have to give it at all.) Or, if you give it, you can make it, too, into part of the learning for your course. Ask them to synthesize information in an essay. Don’t insult their intelligence. Don’t waste your own time.

Begin, perhaps, by telling the story of how you cheated in high school and how bad you feel now. Or how you got caught and learned your lesson. Or about the girl who plagiarized a Spanish paper in senior year of college and got un-accepted to law school, wrecking her life. Make it clear how seriously you take cheating. Tell students they will fail if caught cheating, and stick to your decision.

Give clear instructions for taking the test and for what to do when finished (For example: read it over, hand it to me, face down, with all essays or scrap paper stapled in order, with your name on each sheet, sit down without speaking and read a book until everyone is done).

Separate students as much as possible. Move tables and desks as necessary to create space.

Have students clear their desks except for test-taking essentials. (If they need scrap paper, you give it to them.)

Once you hand out the tests, face down on each desk, no talking. Talking gets a reduced grade.

Anyone who has a question can walk over to you and whisper, one at a time.

Sit in the back of the room, behind the students. They can’t see you, you can see them—head swivels, desk searches…

Do not talk unless absolutely necessary. Do not leave the room. Do not turn your back on the students.

Give time or progress updates if helpful; “You have ten minutes until the end of the period.” “You should be at least halfway through the test by now.”

If you are tough but fair, students will feel secure, they will perform better, results will be indicative of what you want them to be indicative of, and your life will run more smoothly.

Teachers usually don’t fail, in my experience, because they don’t know the subject they are teaching, or because they aren’t committed to the job. They fail for one of four reasons. (I teach in a small private school; teachers in other schools may amend my list.) First, young or inexperienced teachers may discover that they simply are not teachers—that their dream of teaching was a romantic one, and that the realities of teaching are simply not for them. This can be a hard lesson to learn, but one better learned sooner than later. In most cases, teachers and schools part ways peaceably and with mutual respect in circumstances like these.

The other three reasons for leaving teaching do not always results in peaceful partings. Teachers may lose the confidence of the parents of the students in their class; they may lose the confidence of their colleagues; and they may lose the confidence of the students in their class. This last may be expressed in different ways depending on the teacher and the age of the students—lack of control or discipline, disillusionment, disdain, complaints, insecurity… the student behaviors that signal that a teacher is not up to the job are myriad. And parent or colleague confidence is almost always tied to student confidence and security, which is made acutely visible when taking a test.

Turning School on its Head: Information and Experience

William Blake wrote Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Today, we could write, less poetically, Songs of Information; our children’s innocence is quickly and largely lost to the information in and with which we live.

It used to be that life gave us experience, from the school of hard knocks on up. Until recently, historically speaking, more than 9 out of 10 persons worked in agriculture, and everyone knew a great deal—how and when to plow, till, sow; how to herd and heal, how to shoe, how to hunt, trap, tan, weave, sew, dress, butcher, cook, how to mend a wagon wheel or a fence, how to build, how to clear, and on and on. Those who didn’t farm knew a trade. Experience filled a life.

But if we wanted information we had to go to school (or church, but that’s a different topic). We could say that the job of schools was to provide information that life experience did not—literacy, numeracy, the content and interpretation of books, “subjects” like history, geography, science, philosophy, theology, and on and on. Information filled a school.

Without quite realizing it, we have turned the world upside down.

For young people, especially, information is everywhere and experience is hard to come by.

This makes the job of schools and schooling different. We need to reorient—we are reorienting—education to provide experience, and trust that none of our students will suffer from too little information in the next lifetime or more.

Experience allows us to discern and sift and sort the information flowing past our eyes. It allows us to live as human beings in a world that increasingly seems not to need human input. Schools that offer experience—and trust that we no longer need primarily to be the arbiters of information—will serve their students best.

Excerpts from a Conversation on Starting a Waldorf High School

I had a stimulating conversation last week with a representative from a Waldorf school with a healthy elementary school enrollment that is interested in starting a high school. Here are some of my notes--slightly expurgated to protect the privacy of all involved.

In my experience one group—parents, teachers, or trustees—usually drives change at a school. It’s better if 2 of the 3 are ready to initiate change. The first step is to identify which group is ready to move forward. If no one group is leading and each group is somewhat split, you may have to adopt a slightly different strategy, one which may be stronger in the long run, and form a coalition of the willing among parents, teachers, and board members.

A high school committee that includes representatives of all constituencies, with a clear mandate to plan (and return to the community at each step to collect information and inform everyone of progress and possibilities), may well be the way to go. One key to our success, I believe, was our willingness to hear criticism, concern, and anxiety, and to acknowledge and deal with them as well as we could.

This group may be the same as—but doesn’t have to be the same as—a study group on adolescence. The study group, for instance, may be more teacher-centered, while a planning committee might be a joint board-faculty-parent group.

Then the question is, how to get others on board? For trustees and parents, reassurance regarding minimizing risk and forwarding the benefits—I believe, for instance, that a HS will slow middle school attrition—will work. Identifying a target class, raising money in advance, and good planning are all helpful. Teachers mostly want to be reassured that a HS won’t mean more work for them. Sorry to by cynical, but it’s often true…

(Our biggest mistake by far occurred early on. In planning, we discussed two possibilities. One was growing the school only to 9th grade for a few years—private schools in our area often have grades through 9th grade; students then transfer to boarding school or another prep school for high school. The other was to carry on adding grades (as we did) until we had a full high school. The 9th grade, as I mentioned, had a good enrollment of 13 students, and then the bottom dropped out of the school with the con man I mentioned. And some of those who had been ready to move forward then recommended stopping at 9th grade to regroup. The trustees waffled through the spring, and students who would have stayed or enrolled in a new 9th grade left to find other schools. The uncertainty was crippling. In the end, it made greater financial sense to have a combined 9th and 10th grade—with more students than 9th alone—and that’s what we did. But the hesitation and uncertainty, born of a lack of clarity, nearly killed us.)

Identify a pioneer class, then inform them and their parents with articles, talks, etc., about the value of the HS you’re planning. Make them part of the process. I think 15 students is a good goal, but it’s a bit high—10-12 might be more reasonable and attainable; crunching numbers will show what’s possible.

Given demographics in our area, we are committed to a school of no more than about 50 students; other areas could support a larger school in the long run. We believe there’s a “deadly middle ground” between about 60 and 150 students—depends on your revenue and expenses—and we’re trying to avoid it. Most Waldorf high schools fall solidly in it, which I believe is a perennial challenge—they need teachers and facilities and resources for a school that could support 200 students, but they only have, say 90 students to pay for it…

Don’t count out local homeschoolers and other feeders—it’s fine for students who haven’t been in Waldorf schools to join in 9th grade, and you may be surprised how many allies you find among those disenchanted with their options. (Many students who had left the Waldorf elementary school returned to us for high school—a year or two at other schools taught them that the grass wasn’t as green as they thought!)

Another strategy—used in Freeport, Maine, for instance—is to identify two lead classes. Graduate the 8th grade and send them off to another school for a year with the promise that they can return to a 10th grade the following year. The next year’s 8th grade then becomes the 9th grade, and you open the HS with 2 classes. Ta da!

One of the hardest things, beyond your control, is creating something where nothing exists. You have no track record, no college acceptances, no happy students, nothing to sell but a good idea and commitment…

I believe it is good to have a paid planner or consultant for a couple of years to move you from idea to reality. Other schools have used this. We didn’t and we probably should have; things came to fruition very quickly for us, and we grabbed the opportunity we had. This was less than ideal, but, given that Great Barrington had closed a high school in the late 80s, may have been our only chance.

I can hardly emphasize enough how much depends on the quality of teaching. You have to have at least one amazing high school teacher, a tough cookie with a warm heart and a good head who can lead a faculty, guide students through the years of a pioneer high school, and reassure parents that their students will be prepared for college and for life. It’s a rare elementary school teacher who can make this leap, but maybe you have one. If not, the search for one is an essential part of your planning. If everything else is in place, and parents and students don’t trust the quality of the teaching and don’t value their relationships with their teachers, it won’t work.

Planning will also include a lot of high school-appropriate topics that elementary school teachers don’t like to deal with—dress, plagiarism, substance abuse policies, and on and on and on. Maintaining school spirit in the face of all this can be challenging. You can easily find out what other high schools do, but you also have to authentically make these things your own.

A final point to emphasize, perhaps prematurely, is that a Waldorf high school is as different from the elementary school as the elementary school is from the preschool. If students perceive that the Waldorf high school is “just more Waldorf,” they won’t want to come. “Selling” the differences—a voice in making some of the rules, choosing elective courses, travel and work opportunities, challenging courses with different, expert teachers, sports, mastery in the arts, etc., etc.—has helped us a lot and continues to be a challenge for us.

Apologies

Blogger was down yesterday and today (May 12 and 13) and seems to have eaten my recent post (and many others' posts, as well). I've replaced it. If it reappears, then there will be two. C'est la, c'est la.

Waldorf School Theocracy Syndrome (WSTS)

Does your school suffer from Waldorf School Theocracy Syndrome (WSTS)? Now there may be help! Read on to learn more.

Patient complaints/Symptoms:
Checking 3 or more of the following symptoms may be a sign that your school suffers from WSTS.
___ Enrollment attrition, particularly in middle school grades.
___ Too many classes with more girls than boys.
___ “Churn” or large turnover in enrollment (even if numbers overall are holding steady).
___ Stressful parent-teacher relationships.
___ Administrative dysfunction.
___ Arguments that rationalize dysfunction as “karmic.”
___ Failure to produce an organizational chart that makes sense.
___ Parent Association dissatisfaction.
___ Parking lot gossip.
___ Teachers’ room gossip.
___ Trustee attrition.
___ Falling community reputation.

Diagnosis:
Waldorf School Theocracy Syndrome (WSTS)

Waldorf teachers act, and believe they should act, as the priest-interpreters of Rudolf Steiner’s will, allowing their appropriate classroom and pedagogical autonomy to spill over into the economic life or rights and responsibilities life of a school.

Discussion:
Theocracy—rule according to the word of a god, often interpreted according to a fundamental text (hence, fundamentalism)—contradicts Steiner’s threefold social organization, which Waldorf schools espouse as an idea found in some of their fundamental texts. This belief and its attendant behaviors contradict the tenets of anthroposophy, too.

Treatment:
▪ Acknowledge that all members of a school community have rights and responsibilities.
▪ Acknowledge that, with regard to rights and responsibilities, all members of the community are equal. In particular, teachers’ authority does not extend to this area.
▪ Consult all constituencies to create lists of rights and responsibilities for each group.
▪ Constitute a group of teachers, parents, and board members, democratically, separate from the economic life of the school and also separate from the pedagogical life of the school, to administer the life of rights and responsibilities within the community.
▪ Empower this group to recommend and set policies and procedures and mediate conflicts among constituents of the school community.
▪ Figure out where the buck stops, and stop it there.

(Note: WSTS is a condition or syndrome that does not respond to “one size fits all” or “magic bullet” treatments. Each case requires individualized, ongoing attention and care.

Hard Work for Teachers and Students

Students wrote poems and then illustrated them in the style of William Blake. E., a high school English teacher, showed me the students’ work. It was awful. I was their art teacher. “I know she can do much better than that. He can too…” Were talented students just lazy, willing to make beautiful art in art class and then shrug it off in English class? A mystery.

E. showed up at school the next morning with a sample of what she had wanted from the students. She had written her own poem and then, not a natural artist, illustrated it painstakingly. Wow.

“How long did that take you?”

“Four and a half hours.”

A hah.

Students had each spent less than an hour on an assignment that took a teacher four and a half hours to do to her own standards and expectations. They had homework for other classes, they even had other work for English, and they had been given only one night for the assignment. It wasn’t a surprise that none of them, talented or not, spent the hours necessary to fulfill the teacher’s (unspoken) expectation for the quality of the work.

E. showed the students her work, told them how long it had taken her, made her expectations for the assignment explicit, and gave them several days to complete it. Their work was beautiful.

***

Z., a bright, motivated student who seemed interested in everything in the world, one of the few teens I have taught who was willing to say publicly that something academic—the quadratic formula or the defenestration of Prague—was cool, handed in his first essay for me. It was intelligently written but brief and almost illegible. I handed it back to him with this comment: “Brief. Sloppy. Seems hastily written.”

Turns out he wrestled with dyslexia and no one had told me. He had worked as hard on his essay as anyone in the class, it just didn’t show.

I generally grade essays with a check mark if they’re acceptable, a rare “check-plus” if they’re exceptionally good, and a check-minus if they’re unacceptable and should be re-written. But I edit them, correcting every misused comma, spelling mistake, awkward phrase, poor word choice, or lack of proper paragraphing.

(One of my fundamental beliefs as a teacher is that students generally enter high school capable of writing a perfect, simple English sentence and can then, with teachers’ assistance, learn to write more complex but still perfectly grammatical sentences. They will make mistakes along the way, but these can be minimal and instructive, rather than evidence of laziness or apathy.)

The content of Z.’s essays was often excellent, but other factors, most probably due to his dyslexia, kept him from getting check-pluses.

A year later, in a different course (one of the beauties of a small school is that we teachers get to know and teach students over several years), Z. handed in yet another essay. I read it through, pencil poised. Not a single correction. Thoughtful content, as usual, and no errors. Cool!

(Basing my assignments on those I found most meaningful when I was a student, I have students write many brief essays in most of my courses; I would rather read 1-2 really well-written pages than 5-8 pages thinly cribbed from Wikipedia and then padded with adverbs and adjectives.)

I returned the papers to the students. Z. came to see me, grinning. “I decided I was tired of your corrections. I wanted to write an error-free paper, to see if I could do it.” We chatted for a bit. It turns out it had taken him time to achieve his goal, but not quite twice as much time as he normally spent on assignments.

“You’re in trouble now,” I said.

“Why?”

“Now that I know what you can do when you try, you’ll have to do this every time.”

I can’t say that he rose to the bait completely, but the standards to which he held himself did change for the better, dyslexia or no dyslexia.

***

Will, work, and time. Aren’t these the keys to mastery, for teachers and for students, regardless of personal challenges?

Don’t Look Now—Psychopathic Tendencies in (Educational) Technology

Imagine a perfectly rational, logical person, one with a perfect memory, but one who has no emotions.

Scary, huh? Sort of a psychopath? Yet we have spent countless hours and sums over the past century or so developing a machine that embodies exactly this fantasy, and many of us now spend hours each day interacting with these devices—perfect logic, perfect memory, and no emotions. In fact… don’t turn around… you’re probably reading this on one right now.

Real psychopaths have a will of their own and present obvious danger to those around them. Machines represent the will of their creators and users, and so computers—fortunately—act only as psychopaths in the movies (2001, A Space Odyssey) or in the hands of actual psychopaths. (Whether or not a device with latent psychopathic tendencies magnifies psychopathic tendencies in each of us would be an interesting area of study.)

Further, as Joseph Weizenbaum (Computer Power and Human Reason) and others have pointed out, tools are not merely the embodiments of instrumental reason. (Instrumental reason, you could say, arises when we generalize the values of technology to all values.) Tools embody the values of their creators and they become part of the human world in which they are used—once created, they become part of the way we picture the world and our role in that world.

Consequently, as Weizenbaum also points out, all technology is educational—one function of education is cultural transmission, and technology is intimately bound up with any culture.

Once upon a time, a human being grabbed a rock and used it as a hammer. She may have put it down, looked around, and thought, “Gee, I never realized how many hammers are lying around here.” Technology begins—and ends—not with devices external to us, but in our own minds and in our perceptions of the world.

Further, in the long run, the devices we create may replace an older version of the world with a new version in which the values of the device may be mistaken for reality itself. A simple instance will suffice. Experience used to be seamless and whole, one with the rhythms of nature—sunrise, sunset, the cycle of the moon, the seasons. Eventually, European monks decided to build a mechanical bell ringer to remind them of the time to pray. This precursor of our modern clocks (from the French cloche, bell) had no face and simply established a mechanical rhythm, roughly correlated with the times during the day and night when a bell should ring to call the monks to prayer.

Over the past 800 years, we have so internalized and enhanced the mechanism of the clock that most of us would agree that clocks “measure time.” A moment’s reflection will show that they do no such thing. What do they do? Like a metronome, they establish a mechanical rhythm. That’s all. Any interpretation of time with regard to the rhythm of the device belongs to us, although we have largely forgotten this.

Clocks, then, despite their obvious advantages, have also served to mechanize, standardize, and fragment our experience of time.

(Similarly, the moveable type printing press mechanized, standardized, and fragmented our experience of texts.)

Leaping ahead, we may say that computers, because of their astonishing malleability—what do you want the computer to do? We’ll program it to make it do that—don’t simply introduce psychotic rationalism to one portion of reality—say, our experience of time or of a text—they co-opt, rationalize and standardize experience itself. The experience of the computer is the illusion of experience.

Now, Jill or Johnny, I want you to go upstairs and don’t come down until you’ve spent at least one hour doing your homework on your psychopath.

Teaching 8th grade history in a Waldorf school in a nutshell…

I produced the following BRIEF outline for my adult students. I have others on other grades that I'll post soon. Hope it's helpful to some; if it's not, ignore it!

Tell stories of cultural changes—in the arts, science and technology—from 1600 to the present. This focuses on the Industrial Revolution and Romanticism (which, of course, should be considered not only as an anti-industrial response, but as the seed of everything from the environmental movement to anthroposophy, not that you’ll tell the students this—see Barfield’s “Romanticism Come of Age.”)

NOTE: Many schools call this a “Revolutions” block and focus also on the American, French, and even Soviet Revolutions. This is fine, but this topic can also wait for 9th grade. (I believe that because many Waldorf schools do not have high schools, they seek to push some high school material—especially cultural history—into the 8th grade curriculum. This may not be a bad thing.)

NOTE: Many schools teach U.S. history in 8th grade. If this is done according to the theme of “human transformation of the world”—the inner world of human consciousness and, more important for 8th graders, the outer world of politics, economy, and technology—and not as “mere” U.S. history, then this is fine (but not an ideological necessity). From this point of view—the cultural—wars are less important than they would be from a different point of view.

Depending on the direction you choose you will have an endless supply of fascinating biographies from which to choose (and you can create a longer list from which students may choose projects). Because you have honed your techniques in teaching history in grades 5, 6, and 7, the practice of using human lives to narrate events and illustrate themes will come easily to you. Whittle down the number of lives with which you will contend and don’t belabor any too much (presentation and review for each; no need to spend days and days on John and Abigail Adams, for goodness sake; but, if you love John and Abigail Adams, then have at it).

The lives of inventors and industrialists point to the themes of urbanization, industrialization, transportation, and communication. The world moves rapidly from a perennial simplicity to the acceleration we experience today (Henry Adams, tongue in cheek, saw such an acceleration in human use of energy that he predicted the end of the world in 1926. He was right.) But be on the lookout for the quirks and foibles of your characters (the quirky, foible-full eighth graders love them)—James Watt was so terrified of steam power that he never built an industrial steam engine—he worked on table-top models.

Revolutions, again, point to a larger question about teaching history to youth in general. Life has always been brutal (nasty, brutish and short, in Hobbes’s formulation), from ancient slaughter through torture to modern genocide and holocaust. You can easily acknowledge this—and other forms of human suffering, as in the story of Buddha—without indulging it. Please choose biographies that inspire by example, and mention brutality matter-of-factly in passing. An experienced teacher I know assigned Schindler’s List as a class reader in 8th grade; I believe this is wrong—not that individual 8th graders won’t pick up such books on their own, or that students shouldn’t read exactly this in a few years—because we shouldn’t expose students to the brutality of human existence before they can contend with it in their own emotional lives. To ask them to do so stunts their inner growth, and may—in the presence of other life-factors—express itself in unhealthy, risky behaviors like cutting, drug abuse, or eating disorders.

Main Lesson or Seminar Teaching in a Waldorf School (...or Anywhere You Care to Teach)

Waldorf schools begin each day with what has come to be called a “main lesson”—an unfortunate term in that it subtly denigrates all the other classes of the day, although this was not Rudolf Steiner’s intention.

The high school at which I teach calls these classes “seminars” because that’s descriptive of the way we teach them, it doesn’t connote elementary education, and it doesn’t denigrate other classes.

Many of the ideas and practices recorded here have evolved over my twenty-six years of teaching; what seems simple and obvious to me now in some cases took more than ten years to become so. But slow learning is better than none at all, and it is sometimes deeper than faster learning.

I wrote the following for my teacher education students, and I share it here for the reason I initially started this blog—to provide access to things I had written for which I occasionally get requests. It saves time if they’re here to read or copy—no offprints or email attachments. This document presents main lesson primarily as a middle school history teacher might approach it because the course in which I present it is Teaching History in a Waldorf School, Grades 5-8. Teachers of other grades and other subjects will make their own adjustments.

Finally, I refer in here to doodling and to note-taking, both of which I've written about elsewhere on this blog.

Business
I begin by calling the class to order and getting business out of the way—announcements, attendance, and so forth. To say the morning verse before this—as I once did—now strikes me as bizarre. The verse prepares us to learn. So why prepare to learn and then spend ten minutes on trivial matters?

Morning Verse
Once business is accomplished, I usually say the verse with my class, although, given that many of them often arrive half asleep and malnourished, I sometimes ask them to walk or run around the school building (I used to teach in a room that had a running track just outside the back door, and a lap around this—even if calmly walked—usually brought the students back to me calmer and more alert). Then we say the verse together.

I ask politely for quiet before we begin. I never insist that students say the verse, only that they are quiet and respectful to those who do. If necessary, if no one chooses to say it, I say it myself and students listen. That’s fine. It happens perhaps once with a new group, but usually not again.

I also usually ask a student to begin the verse. If I begin it every morning, I am the one with initiative, my voice is heard, and I may be the only one who utters the word “I” that begins the verse—students joining gradually, “…into the world,” leaving off the “I look.” There are other ways to accomplish this—through regimentation and discipline—but I’ve chosen this different way. I believe this practice is fine to use with students beginning in roughly sixth grade. Before this, I wouldn’t call on their “I” so much.

For Middle School Only
After the verse, perhaps 10 minutes of singing, recorder playing, or speech. I don’t do “mental math” unless we are in a math block. If I did happen to decide to do it, I wouldn’t do it on the same day as recorder or singing or anything else. I don’t find anything about “circle time” in Steiner’s work, and I believe that his request for economy in teaching asks me to get on with my history lesson. (Math requires extra practice, it’s true, but this can be scheduled at a different point in the day, not during main lesson.) In high school classes, I don’t even do any of this, but proceed right to the lesson.

Main Lesson or Seminar
First review (feeling, judgment, discussion), then new material (thinking—but warm and interested thinking), then, if time remains (which I believe it should in middle school, perhaps less in high school), work (will).

Review
The review has three functions. The first is to come to some judgment, conclusion, or opinion regarding the material of the previous day (or previous days; there are clearly times when a “summing up” involves matter learned over several days—observing the changes in form and feeling as we pass from Egyptian through archaic Greek to classical Greek postures in sculpture, for example). This may take five minutes, and it may take nearly an hour. It’s good for me to have a plan for the day, but I am almost always willing to stray from it if student questions (legitimate questions) ask for a longer discussion or review.

A more mundane function of the review is to give notes from the day before, which I put on the board and then answer questions while students copy them. I developed this technique as I became increasingly aware of the strangeness of the process of asking students to pay careful attention to what I am saying while also remembering and writing down what I just said fifteen seconds ago. This splitting of consciousness, I believe, works against actual learning (it’s a necessary skill in college, but can be developed quickly late in high school). By giving notes the day after a presentation, we cover the material twice, and students can listen without interruption to new material.

The third function of the review is to address a question with which I have left the class on the previous day (see below). Again, doing this may take a couple of sentences, shedding a little light in the darkness, or it may yield a full-blown discussion.

(Steiner: “When they return on the following day they again have the spiritual photographs of the previous day’s lesson in their heads. I connect today’s lesson with them by a reflective, contemplative approach—for example, a discussion on whether Alcibiades or Mithradates was a decent or an immoral person.

When I make an objective, characterizing approach on the first day, followed on the next day by reflection, by judgments, I shall allow the three parts of the threefold human being to interact, to harmonize in the right way.” Education for Adolescence, p. 52)

New Material
Following the review, I present new material. I ask students to listen quietly. I ask them NOT to take notes (see review above).* I ask them to hold all questions, and to jot down any questions while I am speaking in order to ask them at the end of my presentation (which my students have taken to calling “Story Time with Steve”). Student questions can turn a twenty minute story into an hour’s drudgery as they ask about what I was just about to address, or they ask interesting but digressive questions. I resolve not to digress too much or to interrupt myself during this time, too. Unless behavior absolutely requires it, I won’t stop the class for an elbow bump or a giggle. The start-stop of “regular” discipline can lead to greater chaos than overlooking small slights. If necessary, I can make a note and address it later. If I can and need to, I can calmly walk over to a student without breaking my speech and turn him around, or remove a note from her hand, or otherwise indicate that a behavior is unnecessary.

I allow students to doodle, to knit, or otherwise to quietly, privately occupy their hands. I fought this for more than ten years before I awoke to the fact that I had been a good, attentive student my entire life, through graduate school, and had doodled incessantly, despite all attempts to make me stop. As long as my students are listening and not distracting each other, their quiet activity doesn’t bother me.**

A history presentation involves four basic elements:
1. Creating distance in time, a sense of time;
2. Creating a sense of space—how far is it from here to there; how would you travel in those times? And of place—what is the geography, how would someone living then experience it, how did it influence these people? What is the climate?
3. Creating a sense of character—what we often call “biography,” although really I’m simply telling stories of different lives (birth dates, father’s occupation, and other such trivia are usually inconsequential and the students and I know it; or these things can be included easily in notes on the following day if it is necessary to have some record of them).
4. And creating a sense of an event or happening. Any more than this is unnecessary in middle school, and much more than this is not even necessary in high school; discussions bring out 5. the larger themes—I don’t “teach” them, we discover them in conversation, usually in review. (See Steiner’s work for specific indications for themes and topics for each year, including approaches to history in high school years.)

(Steiner: “Let us take another example, a history lesson. In the teaching of history there is no apparatus, no experiment. I must find a way of again adapting the lesson to the life processes, and I can do this as follows. I give the children the mere facts that occur in space and time. The whole being is again addressed just as during an experiment, because the children are called upon to make themselves a mental picture of space. We should see to it that they do this, that they see what we tell them, in their minds. They should also have a mental picture of the corresponding time. When I have brought this about, I shall try to add details about the people and events—not in a narrative way, but merely by characterization.” Education for Adolescence, p. 52)

Questions
Following story time, I ask for questions. Sometimes there are none; students bask in what they have just heard. Other times, I haven’t said what I thought I said, or been heard as I meant to be heard, and I have to explain or present something again. I generally try to answer all questions, but, if necessary, I end the section by promising to answer questions privately or address them in the future.

Details, Recapitulation
If there are details I need to add that weren’t central to my presentation—a perspective on life in those times, an anecdote that isn’t central but that illuminates something relevant, and so on—I add them at this point. If we’re short on time, I keep it short. If the review and presentation have gone quickly, I can “digress” and add a lot. This time also allows me to briefly recapitulate or synopsize the material I have presented.

(Steiner: “I now describe and draw the children’s attention to what they heard in the first part of the lesson. In the first part, I occupied their whole being; in the second, it is the rhythmic part of their being that must make an effort. I then dismiss them.” Education for Adolescence, p. 52)

A Last Question
I complete my presentation in two important ways, ways that, although they may take only a few seconds of time, lay the foundation for my future teaching, give the students something to chew on overnight, and lay the ground for good discipline (which is to say, good behavior, which is to say, an attitude of wanting to learn, to hear what I have to say). I ask an open-ended, discussion question, such as, “You learned today about all the different characteristics of cave paintings. What do you make of these? In particular, why is it important—I’ll tell you that I believe it’s very significant—that these paintings have a black outline around them?” Students may leap to answer immediately, but they know I won’t say more until the next day. They can talk on the playground, ask mom and dad at dinner, or forget the question until I remind them the next day, but they’ve heard it and taken it in. The question previews the next day’s review.

Anticipation
I also make a statement about what we’ll learn the next day. It may be prosaic—“Tomorrow we’ll move on to the study of ancient Egypt”—but it’s better if I can make it slightly mysterious—“Tomorrow you’ll learn about people who gave coffins as great gifts.” Whether they remember or not, these questions work in the students overnight and they enter the classroom ready to learn (and ready not to misbehave). I believe these few seconds are the single greatest discipline technique I know. I also know that if I don’t write down my question and topic, I will likely forget them until the class is dismissed. Even if I can conduct the lesson without notes, I write down these items in order to remember them.

Work
Then we get to work on essays, drawings, or paintings. We may go to the library to do research. The longer I teach, the less necessary I believe homework to be, and I try, especially in middle school, to have students complete their work, or at least the bulk of it, in class. We clean up our work (“Mr. Sagarin, can I keep working during recess?” “Yes, you may”), stand quietly behind our chairs, and are dismissed for snack and recess.

Attention
So this is what I aim at. It rarely goes as planned and never perfectly. But more important than anything listed above is attention to the students. Do I need to shorten my presentation because the students are exhausted? Fine. Does something I read inspire them, and I keep reading for an extra twenty minutes, and continue the next day? An example: One year I read a portion of Voltaire’s Candide to a class, simply to give them the flavor of his writing and thinking. They were so taken by it that we read a chapter a day for the rest of the block. I had not intended to do anything like this, but see great value in attending to students’ actual interests. Does my review fall on deaf ears? I’ll cut it short and spend an evening thinking about how to present it in a way that these students can hear.

Also, and this is tough to write about clearly, I try to be specifically aware of each student—I’m not good at this, but I try to make sure each student speaks at least once in each class (and that some students don’t speak too much). I try to pay attention to those who need attention and leave alone those who seem to need to be left alone. Also, if something I’m teaching relates to the circumstances of one of the students, directly (parent dies in real life; parent of historical figure died young) or indirectly (this student is obsessed with fairness, and someone I’m teaching about was known for being extremely fair), I keep the student in mind. I don’t blurt out, “Oh, and Johnny, didn’t your father die young, too?” In fact, I’m likely to try to be more tactful in discussing the historical circumstances, rather than less, given what I know. These may not be the best examples, but I think the point—lessons meet real life, we hope tactfully, in a classroom—is clear.

“Typical” Main Lesson (That is, one that never actually occurs)
10 min.: Class business.
3 min.: Verse.
15 min.: Music, but not in high school (I still wonder how necessary this really is in a main lesson period).
20 min.: Review (highly variable; and I increasingly think of this as the period of “real” learning—new material is an introduction…); discussion; note-taking.
20-30 min.: New material, including questions and added description (longer in HS).
1 min.: Question.
1 min.: Preview.
30-40 min.: Work; giving and collecting assignments. If everyone’s doing well, I can get some work done, too. (Shorter, but still present, in HS.)
Dismissal.

Breakfast in Jail: Unintended Consequences of an Attempt to Educate Me

In second grade, our teacher took us to the local police station for a tour. I’m not sure why she did it, but I recall enough to surmise that the effect on me wasn’t what she had in mind.

We were shown around the small offices. I remember dark wood and the govern-mint green walls. We stepped down a short hallway, and there was the lock-up, green painted steel bars, a tile floor, a cot, a toilet. A large officer talked to us. “And if you have to spend a night with us, here’s where you’ll sleep, and there’s where you’ll have to go to the bathroom. In the morning, we’ll bring you coffee and donuts.”

Donuts! We never had donuts for breakfast at home, and, as someone who really enjoyed (enjoys) food, the idea of donuts for breakfast was just about enough to make me volunteer to stay. An adventure with a donut at the end of it. What could be better?

I’m happy to report that I haven’t spent a night in jail and I don’t believe I ever will. But donuts for breakfast are still a real treat.

Thinking about Scientology's "Study Tech"

According to Lawrence Wright, in a New Yorker profile (Feb. 14 & 21, 2011, pp. 95-96) of Paul Haggis, “The Apostate: A former Scientologist speaks out,” and corroborated on a Scientology FAQ, education in schools established by Scientologists is based on three principles, together known as “study technology” or “study tech.” According to the Scientologists, “the impediment to students’ ability to retain and effectively use data [prior to L. Ron Hubbard’s discovery of ‘study tech’] was the absence of a technology of how to study.” Study tech rests on three principles: the use of clay or other materials to model concepts that are otherwise abstract or difficult to understand; the use of dictionaries and other sources to clarify precise word meanings; and the teaching of a topic as completely as possible to avoid “too steep a gradient” in learning.

These principles sound innocuous, but I believe reflection yields some reservations.

In the article, Haggis’s daughter is cited regarding the helpful use of clay to model an atom. But this takes a complex, easily misunderstood and still not completely understood phenomenon—an atom—and renders it in crude material terms. Clay cannot hold an electrical charge, or act like a wave and a particle simultaneously, or evince entanglement, or demonstrate statistical probabilities or quantum states. Most of what’s important or interesting about atoms is necessarily left out, glossed over, or caricatured. Like those annoying silver balls and hoops on the credits for the amusing TV show, The Big Bang Theory, the clay is just sort of “there,” reinforcing our lack of understanding of the matter of the universe, or, more worrying, reinforcing a false materialism.

Similarly, dictionaries, while helpful, offer only a low-level consensus on conventional meanings with, at best, a historical look at word origins and usages. Definition is among the lowest order of understanding and interpretation, often necessary but rarely enough. Taken to an extreme, a dictionary or definition-based approach to learning yields knowledge as a sort of butterfly collection, each specimen pinned and identified. Something is missing here: life.

The concept of “too steep a gradient” seems the least objectionable; Vygotsky’s concept of a “zone of proximal development” may apply here, the idea that we start from where we are and then, with the guidance of teachers or of experience, move beyond our current state at a rate that is not so slow that it causes boredom and not so rapid that it causes confusion. There is probably “too steep a gradient” for each of us. On the other hand, we are only capable of learning “completely” within the limits of our developmental stage. How much science can, say, a 3rd grader learn completely? Clearly, very little, and with very little understanding of the actual creative work of a scientist. Effective learning clearly builds on what comes before, but, also, on anticipation of what is still unknown.