How I Almost Got Fired Before I Had a Chance to Teach

You know you’re in trouble when the President of the Board of Trustees faxes the school to say that his son will not return to school until you’re fired.

What had I done to provoke this terse fax? That’s a longer story. I was reminded of it recently while teaching teachers. My adult students, many in their first year or two of teaching, too often assume that my colleagues and I must have it all figured out, that we have stepped from success to success in our own teaching and haven’t shared their struggles, travails, and challenges. False.

About twelve years ago, as I was finishing my dissertation and planning a career as an academic, I was offered a 7^th grade class at the Steiner School that my children attended. The 6^th grade teacher’s husband had a terminal illness, and she took a leave of absence to care for him. I took the job in early June, ready to start in September.

The teacher’s husband died a few weeks later. I offered to return the class to her. I told the committee that hired me that they could give her the class, no hard feelings. I didn’t want to take her job, I was doing the school a favor, I could easily go elsewhere and do other things. The teacher and the committee assured me that she didn’t want the class back. Her husband had just died. There may have been other reasons, too.

For her own reasons, however, she was unable to tell the parents that she wouldn’t return. I don’t understand it—somehow, she listened to the parents plead for her return, but was unable to state simply that she wouldn’t return. Before I even stepped into the class, then, a group of them saw me as a usurper, someone who took away their beloved teacher’s job just after her husband had died. I was unaware of this at the time.

I stepped into the classroom, the antithesis of this thin, sincere, quiet woman; a thick, glib, loud man.

The school year started. I spent hours before the first day of school making nameplates for the students’ desks in calligraphy, but I didn’t put a chalk drawing on the blackboard. School started, and I discovered that the 7^th graders needed lots of work on their writing. We started the year with Marco Polo, Henry the Navigator, the Age of Exploration. I decided that, rather than draw lots of pictures (as might be more customary in Waldorf schools), we would write. Summaries, essays, dialogues, poems, you name it.

The Board President and his wife had a child in my class. Within a week, mom asked for a meeting after school. She had a list of my transgressions on a small piece of colored paper. We met with her husband and a representative of the teachers’ Council and went through her list, item by item.

“You didn’t have a drawing on the blackboard to start the year.”

“No, the nameplates took so long I didn’t have time. There’s a nice picture there now.”

“There are no drawings in the students’ good books.”

“That’s true. I decided we needed to work on writing.”

“But Waldorf education is about making pictures.”

“Yes, and we’ll make ours in words. We’ll do plenty of drawings later on.”

“I can’t imagine going on a ship without drawing a picture first.”

I bit my tongue. Really? There were other items on the list. I can’t remember them all. I was polite and tried to explain myself, but I gradually became aware that no explanation was necessary or sufficient. The real source of feeling was the loss of the teacher on leave, and the real agenda was to get rid of me. I’m reporting this, years later, dispassionately, but it was a tense, difficult meeting, and I left it—as I’m sure Mr. President and his wife did—reeling and with a knot in my stomach.

We parted without resolution, and, later that afternoon or evening, the Board President faxed the school to say that his son would not return until I was gone.

I offered, again, to resign. I didn’t need fraught meetings after hours and hidden agendas. If I wasn’t fitting the culture of the school, I’d gladly go and save the school the tension and bad feeling. My colleagues reassured me that they wanted me to continue. An experienced retired teacher sat in my class and reported that all was well; he and I are now friends.

The son of the Board President returned to school after an absence of three days. He was a nice, normal, quiet, polite, diligent student, caught between his parents and me. We had a good enough year—I always felt sorry for his having to be in the middle of this—and his parents withdrew him at the end of the year.

I was lucky in several ways. Although this was a new job, I already had a dozen years of experience as a teacher. I had the support of my colleagues, and, as it turned out, most of the parents in the class, too. I was confident in what I was doing and could explain myself. I was willing to let the job go, to be fired or to resign. I didn’t require the job to support my family or for my own sense of self-worth.

Many, many colleagues, especially those just starting out in teaching, work themselves into similar situations but aren’t so lucky. They find themselves, months or years into a sincere commitment, without support and, in the end, without a job. As George Hoffecker, an educational consultant, put it: “If you want to make economic compromises, work in a private school.” Too often, tuition-paying parents hold the reins, and can force schools to remove teachers they don’t like. I escaped. Many don’t.

Organic Free-range Schooling, or, How to Start a Waldorf High School the Hard Way and Keep it Going Despite Many Obstacles

Our German teacher, a Jew whose family escaped from Germany prior to World War II, attended the Munich-Schwabing Rudolf Steiner School after the war, and remembers carrying bricks to school in the morning, as many children did, to assist in building the school.

Earlier this week, I learned that an east coast Waldorf high school will close this spring after about five brief years of operation. As I understand it, the school has only about 20 students enrolled for next year, and the powers that be can’t support it. One consultant apparently told the school that is would need to find $2 million in the next few years while it tried to grow to full strength, and advocated closing it if this amount could not be found.

I don’t know that the school made the right decision or the wrong decision, but I do know that a school of only 20 students does not necessarily need $2 million to succeed and grow, given time, creative thinking, appropriate resources, commitment, and a conservative model or business plan. I know that the high school with which I have been involved for the past ten years has graduated five classes; operated in the black for six of ten years—including the past four; paid its debts from the years it was in the red; and hasn’t spent $2 million total in that whole time.

The story of how we built our “organic, free-range” Waldorf high school is worth telling. As a farmer friend of mine, an organic vegetable grower, said toward the beginning of our enterprise, “Someone can tell me how much it costs to grow corn, but that presupposes that I’m going to grow corn according to the prevailing model of corn growing. If I do it in a different way, his assessment of the costs will simply be wrong. Growing corn is the easy part; if I want to succeed and not to pay his costs, my job is to figure out a different way of growing corn.”

It only costs millions of dollars to educate a few private school kids, Waldorf or other, if that’s the model you use to build your school.

Here are the key points that have enabled us to succeed against the odds. (And, don’t be fooled: The odds aren’t very good even if you have pots of money. A day school near us started a high school around the same time we did, poured a few million dollars into it, and, unable to attract sustainable numbers—which, given its model, were much higher than ours—closed it four years later. The only way—the only way—to try to beat the odds is to have an endowment of such size that the existence of the school is ensured regardless of enrollment. And this model, almost impossible to attain, brings a huge and different set of challenges with it.)

1. Independence:

We began as an outgrowth of the Great Barrington Rudolf Steiner School, a pre-K to grade 8 school, and, during our second year, the Board of Trustees voted to close us. We had enrolled 13 students in our pioneer class, but could enroll only 4 for the following year. Our choice was to close or to incorporate independently. We chose the latter, and, as difficult as this separation was, have been grateful for it ever since. Although we recognize the ideological value of being “one school,” this ideology rarely seems to serve practical necessity. We have been able to make our own decisions, stand on our own feet, take our own risks, write our own budget, and not contend with or worry about elementary school teachers, parents, trustees, decision-making, or governance. We incorporated, formed a small board of committed members, found a building in town in which we could rent the second floor, and set to work.

2. Community resources:

We had a building, a used school bus, some blackboards that were hand-made by a trustee’s husband, and a core faculty. What about a library, a science lab, athletic facilities, art studios, and so on? We found them. Students obtained community-use library cards at a local college for $5. The college rented us use of a chem. lab in January and May when their students were on break. All we provided was an insurance waiver and our own chemicals. We scheduled use of the elementary school playing fields for soccer, and, with the elementary school, rented a basketball court at a local athletic center. We rent a performance space and have a “real” theater for our annual play. We mined the area for local artists who could teach in their own studios—pottery, blacksmithing, glass-blowing. Without intending this, exactly, this “practical arts” program became one of the strongest in the school. Yes, there were some disasters. A wonderful weaver turned out not to have the touch with adolescent students. All escaped with their lives.

We may grow to the point at which we no longer require such involvement in the community, but we have grown to value this integration. We plan to continue it long after it is mere necessity. Our students gain immeasurably from having teachers who are professional artists, from meeting community standards of behavior when they’re out of our building, from being treated not like immature teens but like members of a community.

3. Big world:

One of our first ads, copied almost immediately by another school in the area, read “Small school, Big world.” Because we were so small, we deliberately sought to get out into the world, not just in our integration in the local community (see above), but in trips to New York, Montreal, Boston, and, in our third year, Munich and Lima. Students and families raised money, and, ever since, every student has traveled abroad at least once in high school, regardless of ability to pay. Every student at our school can take a semester abroad; what big school can say that?

4. Part-time teachers:

We currently have one full-time teacher/administrator (me), two ¾ time teachers (one in English and drama, one in math and physical science), and two 3/8 time teachers (our foreign language teachers). The rest are paid smaller salaries or work hourly—arts and physical education, mostly, although some itinerant humanities or science teachers. If we had had to wait until we could afford 3-4 full time teachers, we never would have begun. We plan to add full-time teachers as we grow, another possibly next year, and 2-3 more in the next five years. Fortunately, we have found excellent, committed, experienced teachers, many with experience in Waldorf schools, some of good will who otherwise have no prior experience in Waldorf schools, to help us.

5. Combined classes:

With the exception of math sections, we have combined grades or classes throughout our history. Sometimes, as in a foreign language class, this is a compromise—it’s difficult (difficult, but not impossible) to teach two sections simultaneously. Sometimes, as in, say, history or science seminars, it’s a compromise—students have occasionally learned courses out of sequence (modern lit. before medieval history, for example). Sometimes, students have had a course a year earlier or a year later than “the” Waldorf curriculum “says” they should. We have found that our students have thrived, regardless. Their enthusiasm for their school and their education has not been compromised.

Basically, in seminars (what other Waldorf schools call “main lessons”) and other classes, combining classes introduces an economy in that we’re generally paying two teachers where other schools might pay four. We rotate the curriculum every year, so every student graduates having completed every course.

We have found that the educational costs of combining classes are minimal and that the social benefits of combining classes are enormous. We have decided that, even when we can afford not to combine classes, we will still combine many because to do so introduces a healthy cross-class dialogue and understanding that introduces social harmony far outside the classroom. We simply do not have “class consciousness” in our school, and students are as likely to have school friends two years older or younger as they are to have them in their own class.

6. Conservative planning:

By writing a budget based on actual money received, we have crept forward, growing each year from a low of 13 to a current high of 35. When we were in the red, it was because of unforeseen circumstances. In each case, we have been able to adapt, cut our losses, carry debt for a while, and pay it off. Every teacher has deliberately made sacrifices to work here. In at least two cases, teachers worked for a year for no salary in order to support our effort. It could have been different. We came close to closing many times, but, each time, asked ourselves if we could go forward one more semester, one more year. We cannot underestimate the flexibility our small size and conservative view has given us. We have no debt, and we have run a small surplus each of the past three years.

7. Commitment:

Between our first and second year, one parent, committed to our endeavor, announced to what I call the “game of chicken” meeting, that her daughter would be in the school the following year even if she was the only student and the meeting place was someone’s living room. Fortunately, it didn’t come to that.

I call it the game of chicken because you have a room full of people each of whom would like to send a student to the school, but very few of whom are happy to be the first to commit.

The intense commitment required characterizes our early years, necessarily, because the commitment was to an idea, not yet to a school—we had yet to demonstrate that we could educate students and send them off to college and out into life. (This is the Catch-22 of any school start-up: You have nothing to sell but a vision and those committed to it.)

From the start, we saw no conflict between academic excellence and Waldorf education. We are committed to preparing those students who wish to attend highly selective colleges to do so. Teaching bright, motivated students is easy; the challenge is to teach to the top of each class and then work like heck to bring the rest along.

We also believed completely in the value of the creative, humanistic aspects of Waldorf education. We are committed to educating students to think for themselves and to think of their own lives, responsibly, as creative works-in-progress.

We are not a private school because we believe in private education; if we believed we could teach as we like in a public school, we might do so. But our experience is otherwise. Similarly, we are not a Waldorf school because we believe in Waldorf education. We have found, individually, and for as many reasons as there are teachers who teach here, that the principles of Waldorf education are healthy for adolescents. We do not see ourselves as implementing some already thought-through program, handed down by Steiner or AWSNA, but as educating students according to the best practices and best principles we can find.

8. Small is beautiful:

At first, we apologized for our small size. People believed in us anyway. After a few years, however, we began to discover the value of being small. Small schools are incredibly flexible—fiscally, educationally, you name it. Want photography class? Give us three weeks to locate some equipment and a teacher, and you have it.

Small schools are highly individualized. No one falls between the cracks because there are none. Want to come for one class? We can arrange that. We’ll take your little bit of money, give you a great course, and you’ll contribute to the social life of our school.

Small schools are inclusive. Everyone plays on the sports team or the team doesn’t exist. There’s no room for cliques. The students don’t even date each other—as one boy said to me, “it would be like dating your sister.”

Small schools, necessarily, are creative. If necessity is the mother of invention, at this point we are practically Thomas Edison, and not just the teachers and board members, the students, too. How do you have a Student Council in a school of 35? How can you raise money to go to Germany in such a small community? Many, many of the rules the govern our day—eating out, computer and cell phone policies—were written by the students and approved by the teachers.

9. Miscellaneous

This list could go on and on, and I’d be happy to answer questions for anyone who is interested. We have never had tuition remission. We can’t afford it, and we are all in the same boat. A teacher should pay whatever he or she can, just like everyone else. Fundraising happens because of volunteers and passion. Our business manager has been a volunteer; next year will be the first year we pay someone to oversee accounts. (We have had a paid bookkeeper since the beginning.)

At the graduation of our third senior class, one of our trustees reminded me that this was the first graduation—in our seventh year—that we closed up for the summer knowing that we would reopen in September. He was right; every previous June brought the uncertainty of wondering if we could get everything in place—especially including enough students—to open again in September. Since then, however, we haven’t looked back.

One of our first graduates made a short film about our first three years. She called it “The Pioneers.” By the looks of it, we were all laughing all the time. It was great fun, an adventure. We laughed all day, perhaps, and stared into the darkness at 3 in the morning, when her camera wasn’t running, wondering how long we could keep things going.

She’s now in graduate school in creative writing. Three of our first seven graduates are in graduate school, soon to be four. We’re no longer so young; our board will meet later this week to discuss accreditation and our first five year strategic plan (our strategic plan to date has been, “All hands on deck!”). We have survived, even thrived, so far. In doing so, we’ve learned a lot.

We hope our experience can encourage other small, committed schools and groups to make a go of it, a rational, hard, risky go of it. Adolescents need the best education we can give them, and we can’t rely on one model or one vision to provide this for them.