Friday, February 25, 2011

The Dinosaurs lived in Stockbridge?

Some students enter high school believing—as movies have shown them—that humans and dinosaurs coexisted in the distant past. How distant, they cannot say, because to know the dates for the evolution of humanity—perhaps 4 million years ago—and the last mass extinction of dinosaurs—about 65 million years ago—leads to the simple realization that there’s no overlap here. Further, some students picture this overlap in historical time, Stone Age human beings fending off dinosaur attacks.

If we picture all of human history—about 10,000 years—on my blackboard, which is 5 feet wide, then where did the dinosaurs live? My blackboard is oriented north-south, parallel to Main Street in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Putting today, 2011, on the far right and the Neolithic revolution, around 8000 BCE, on the far left, we can then extend the timeline back, north along Main Street, and ask, where did the dinosaurs last live? And the answer is, roughly, a bit more than 6 miles north, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, home of Norman Rockwell and the Red Lion Inn. It’s amusing to picture the dinosaurs in rocking chairs on the Red Lion’s porch, perhaps smoking the cigarettes that, according to Gary Larson, may have done them in. (As one of the largest remaining wood-structure hotels, I’m sure there’s no smoking allowed on the front porch of the Red Lion.)

Comparing the distance between the end of the age of dinosaurs and the beginning of history gives a valuable and needed corrective perspective for students who suffer from too many movie images of the world.

Thursday, February 3, 2011

Steiner's so-called "Education for Adolescents"

Among my pet peeves regarding the translation and publication of Rudolf Steiner’s educational work is this:

The book Education for Adolescents is misnamed and therefore overlooked by many Waldorf teachers who might benefit from studying it.

Through about the 1960s, the book was published with the uninformative but more accurate title, The Supplementary Course. It was called this because it supplemented the course that Steiner gave for the teachers at the first Waldorf School in late summer 1919 before the school opened its doors. After one year of success and failure, ups and downs, and observation of how the students and teachers were doing in real life, Steiner gave 8 lectures, literally a course for teachers meant to supplement the course he had given the year before.

Reading through, it’s clear, too that the first four of the eight lectures basically pertain to all teachers, not simply those who teach adolescents. And, later, when he addresses the teaching of adolescents—the Waldorf school was about to open its high school grades—it’s clear that he’s speaking to teachers of all grades (except early childhood, not because he didn’t want to, but because the first Waldorf school had no early childhood or kindergarten program at that point in its life).

It’s one thing for the book to be overlooked by those who might profitably read it.

It’s another when some do read it but ignore the discussion in it because “it's for high school students,” projecting an understanding of an erroneous title onto the contents.

Finally, it’s here, in lecture 3, that Steiner lays out, clearly and beautifully, the concept of a lesson carried over two days (not three; I am not aware of any source for a three day lesson), one that is not, in fact a “threefold” lesson in the conventional way these are conceived, but in a way that calls on the whole child to begin, that then carries into imagination and will, and that then returns to judgment and conceptualization on the following day.

But don’t take my word for it, read the darn thing yourself.

Wednesday, February 2, 2011

Snow Day

Today is the best of snow days. We called it last night around 7 p.m., so no one had to get up extra-early to make phone calls or send emails. And the weather cooperated. By dawn there were six inches of new snow on the ground, and the changeover to ice, rattling my windows, was just beginning. But not all snow days are equal.

A friend used to work as a local reporter. Interviewing a school superintendent, he asked, innocently, “What’s the hardest part of your job?” The immediate answer: “Snow days.”

Snow days remind me of George Carlin’s question: “Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?”

If we close school, we’re wrong because it just wasn’t that bad.

If we don’t close school, we’re wrong because it was clearly unsafe to travel.

How do we decide? The local superintendent consults the town road crew, who are often actually awake at 4:30 in the morning, plowing, sanding, and salting. And then, based on their recommendation, he makes a decision.

Private schools, of which we are one, follow this decision because some of our students, too, travel to school on buses provided by the district. If the buses are running, we’re open. If not, we’re closed. It’s a pretty simple protocol, and it works well most of the time. But New England weather is unpredictable and so we usually end up looking like idiots or maniacs at least once a winter.