tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-60009033787864845482024-03-08T10:24:21.035-08:00upselvasAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15511432864734182961noreply@blogger.comBlogger155125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000903378786484548.post-14313923168587677832012-11-08T12:42:00.000-08:002012-11-16T09:27:05.207-08:00How to Lose Your Teaching Job: The Big ThreeWhy do teachers get fired?<br /><br /><div class="MsoNormal">An old joke in Waldorf schools goes like this:</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">A new teacher meets the teacher she’s replacing as he packs up his belongings. He gives her three envelopes. “When you’re in trouble,” he says, “open one of these envelopes.” He wishes her luck and leaves. She starts to teach. After a few weeks, she receives a summons from the school’s governing body (Council, College of Teachers, whatever). Seems they’re concerned about her class. Quaking, she opens the first envelope and reads, “Blame the parents.” Fortified, she enters the meeting and talks about the parents who let their kids eat sugary cereal, watch TV, stay up too late, dress inappropriately, and on and on. The College calms down and offers support. Our teacher returns to her classroom. A couple of months go by, and she receives another summons. She opens the second envelope and reads, “Blame the kids.” She goes to the meeting and describes how Jill needs special attention, how Johnny suffers from anxiety, how Brad is a bully, how Samantha tries to run away. The College understands, and offers renewed support. She returns to the classroom, but, a couple of months later, receives yet another summons. Curious, she opens the third envelope and reads… “Prepare three envelopes.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Maybe you believe teachers don’t get fired often enough, but they do, in fact, get fired. The rule of thumb is that half of all those who enter teaching are gone in 5 years. About half of these leave of their own volition—it’s not the job for them—and about half don’t. Maybe they get to resign before they’re actually fired, but they’re gone. This is true pretty much across the board—large public school, small Waldorf school, you name it.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In my experience, which is in small private schools, mostly Waldorf schools, teachers are fired for one of three related reasons. I’ve come to think of these as “The Big Three,” and, to the extent that we can, we in teacher education should address these so that promising young teachers don’t get fired before they find their feet in a classroom.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In no particular order, these are the three: Parent relations, collegial relations, and classroom management. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">A promising young teacher runs afoul of the tuition-paying parents and, before Thanksgiving, despite whatever gifts she may have, they’ve banded together against her, written ultimatums to the school, and she’s gone. Maybe she’s great with kids but tongue-tied around adults. Too late. Doesn’t matter.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Or the parents love her, but she’s too strident in faculty meetings, has ideas that don’t match the culture of her school, insists on doing things her own way, and, again, she’s gone.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Or the parents are on board, colleagues are hopeful, but our naïve young teacher—brilliant, personable, well educated, and well liked as she may be—can’t command the respect and decent behavior of her students. Eventually, this becomes common knowledge, and parents or colleagues or both together arrange her swift exit. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">One sweet graduate student told me, “I’ll just love my students and they’ll just love me.” I said that they’d eat her alive by Thanksgiving. She was offended, but so be it. Teaching is wonderful, but it is not an easy job, and sentimental feelings give way to hard realities pretty quickly.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">It rarely happens, by the way, that someone makes it into the classroom who actually just can’t teach—can’t teach reading or arithmetic, or, later, history or botany. In my experience, teachers aren’t fired for a fundamental lack of knowledge or teaching skill, but for the reasons listed above.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">So, what can we do about this?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Some of my colleagues in teacher education maintain that students can’t be taught to address these things, that each teacher has his or her own style, that what works for one teacher won’t work for another. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">This is true, but I believe two things are also true: First, forewarned is forearmed, and we can at least raise this topic for discussion so that our students enter the classroom with eyes open, more alert and more likely to seek help quickly. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Second, we can give our teacher education students tools that they can use, at least for the first few months, until they begin to develop their own styles (and then they can decide what to use and what to discard). Students can be taught to set expectations from the beginning, to begin a class only when it’s quiet, to establish small rituals to begin and end a class, and on and on. Students can be taught such things as “I” language for conversations with parents and colleagues to avoid creating defensive reactions. Role play, student teaching, group discussions, checklists, the number of ways to fortify our teachers before they enter a classroom is large, and we only serve them well if we make our best attempt to ensure their success in every way.</div><!--EndFragment-->Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15511432864734182961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000903378786484548.post-55685501870126388882012-10-21T14:12:00.000-07:002012-11-16T09:27:05.222-08:00Free the Math Gnomes<br /><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I was part of a panel discussion on the future of Waldorf education last week. The moderator asked me to identify a “myth” about Waldorf education. My go-to myth is math gnomes (first appearing here: <a href="http://ssagarin.blogspot.com/2008/12/playing-steiner-says-twenty-two-myths.html">Playing "Steiner Says"</a>).</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">In the 1940s, Dorothy Harrer, then a teacher at the Steiner School in New York, needed an imaginative way to teach her students math. She couldn’t turn to Europe—most, if not all, of the continental European Waldorf schools were closed during the war. She couldn’t turn to colleagues at other schools in the U.S.—there weren’t really any. She couldn’t easily turn to Steiner’s works; many of them hadn’t yet been published, let alone imported or translated. She couldn’t turn to experts at a Waldorf teacher education program; such programs didn’t exist in the U.S. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There were probably resources from Rudolf Steiner and Hermann von Baravalle—Steiner’s colleague, then in the U.S., and a mathematician—but who knows if she could put her hands on these, was aware of them, and so on?</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">She was a humanities person and a former public school teacher, I believe, hired and trained on-the-job at the Steiner School. (She married a European anthroposophist—William Harrer—faculty chair at the Steiner School before Henry Barnes. I knew them both slightly; I worked in their garden in New Hampshire one summer, across the road from Camp Glen Brook.)</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Anyway, Mrs. Harrer dreamed up the math gnomes, wrote them down, and, eventually, published them. Here’s a link to her book: <a href="http://www.awsnabooks.org/store/product_info.php?products_id=394">Math Lessons for Elementary Grades</a>. I don’t recommend it. I wish it would go out of print. But if you want to see what I’m talking about, this is the source.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Her math gnomes, which have no basis in Steiner’s work, and which actually contradict his recommendations for teaching math, have become the default position for many or most Waldorf elementary school teachers. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">I asked Ernst Schubert, a German Waldorf teacher and teacher educator with a doctorate in mathematics, if he had heard about them. He smiled and said, “No, vat are zees mass gnomes?” They do not exist in Germany or, probably, in other countries. Here’s an elementary math book I recommend, and Schubert has written several others: <a href="http://www.awsnabooks.org/store/product_info.php?products_id=581">Teaching Mathematics.</a><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">After the panel discussion, a friend and former Waldorf school teacher and I chatted. He related how he had not used gnomes, he had invented a prince, instead. (I’m honestly not sure if it was a prince—I was tired, we were talking about other things, and I didn’t necessarily register it properly.)</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Then, a couple of days later, I received a sincere email from a former student, now teaching second grade, wrestling with how to bring some math concepts to her students. She knows my position on the gnomes, and was wondering about possibly using fairy-tale animals.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">So here’s the point, guys.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">It’s not about the gnomes, the princes, the animals, the characters of whatever size or shape or background!</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Math brings the immaterial, the conceptual, the spiritual into the material world. Steiner recommends beginning with a pile of mulberries. Or beans. Or pieces of paper. These are real. Fairy-tale anything—gnomes, animals, princes, whatever—are not, at least not when it comes to teaching math. (If you don’t believe in gnomes, then why on earth would you introduce them in math class? If you do believe in gnomes, why on earth would you trivialize them by asking them to teach arithmetic to young children?)</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There are lots of sources, beginning with Steiner and Baravalle, and continuing through Schubert, that are intelligent, thoughtful, anthroposophical, true to math and true to the world into which we bring math, that do not personify what should really not be personified.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">This is not to make anyone who used or uses gnomes, princes, or animals feel bad. We are all doing the best we can. I mean that sincerely. A former trustee with whom I worked, to avoid saying that something was bad or wrong, would jokingly say that it was “suboptimal.” When we recognize that our performance is suboptimal, then we should change. We don’t need to feel bad, we just need to do better. There’s no shame in being wrong. We’re all wrong much of the time.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">There is shame, however, in rationalizing bad practices as good practices because of history or ideology. There is shame in not doing the research once a practice has been seriously called into question to decide for yourself whether or not you will continue, knowing all that you can know. There is shame in continuing stubbornly because it’s easier than to change.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">Free the math gnomes.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;">(I’m indebted to Christine Cox, a former student at Sunbridge College, for tracking the math gnomes to their source in her unpublished 2006 MSEd thesis, <u>In Search of Math Gnomes</u>.)</span></div><!--EndFragment-->Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15511432864734182961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000903378786484548.post-25894248448518192292012-10-20T09:14:00.000-07:002012-11-16T09:27:05.236-08:00Elevator Speech--Part 3My own attempt at an elevator speech to describe Waldorf education. Waddaya think?<br /><br />Education inheres in the relationship of student and teacher. A teacher’s job is to connect the student in a developmentally appropriate way to the world—the world of nature and the world of culture (human beings participate in and link these two worlds). To do this, given the individuality of each student, teachers require insight. Through self-development via a contemplative, meditative path, teachers may increase their capacity to know their students and obtain the insights that will assist them in their task. Rudolf Steiner outlined Waldorf education according to these principles, and his method of inquiry, known as anthroposophy, describes a path of self-development toward insight.<br /><br />(Click for links to <a href="http://ssagarin.blogspot.com/2011/10/elevator-speech-what-is-waldorf.html">Elevator Speech</a> and <a href="http://ssagarin.blogspot.com/2011/11/elevator-speech-part-ii.html">Elevator Speech, Part 2</a>)Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15511432864734182961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000903378786484548.post-44446564034856676012012-10-20T05:16:00.001-07:002012-10-20T05:16:59.352-07:00upselvasupselvasAnonymousnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000903378786484548.post-18500454977482618052012-09-03T10:28:00.000-07:002012-11-16T09:27:05.249-08:00An Unintended Consequence of Reading Aquinas with High School Students<br /><div class="MsoNormal">I assigned my Medieval History students Thomas Aquinas’ proofs for the existence of God from his <i>Summa Theologiae</i>. It was not my intention to convert students to Catholicism or even really to raise the question of faith. I wanted them to understand and appreciate the mind of Aquinas as representative of the late Middle Ages and to understand his style of dialectical argument.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">My students didn’t let me off the hook. “I don’t believe in God,” Erica (name changed) volunteered. “So why do I have to read this?” I explained my purpose. She agreed to read it.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The next day, she still didn’t believe in God. Neither did Josh (name also changed). “There’s no old white man with a white beard in the sky who cares about what I do,” he said. Others murmured agreement.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">“Is that what you read in Aquinas?” I asked. “You’ve let your conventional notions of God interfere with your reading.” We talked it through—prime mover, first cause, and so on. Not a white man, not even a mention of a human form. “You have to enlarge your conception of what you mean by ‘God’ if you’re going to read Aquinas,” I told them.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">After we finished our discussion, I asked the class, “So, what do you think? Is this how you discuss the existence (or nonexistence) of God when you’re sitting around your room with your friends late at night?” Clearly not. Formal dialectical arguments, rigorous logic based on assumptions that modern people no longer make, imagining the objections of your opponents and then addressing them, one by one. There is a crystalline beauty to Aquinas’ thought—a cathedral of the mind—that we may learn to appreciate, even if it no longer really speaks to us.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I didn’t ask them if they (now) believed in God—it wasn’t my purpose, and, anyway, I didn’t imagine Aquinas’ arguments would address modern concerns.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">We left it there and moved on to the 14<sup>th</sup>century—plague, the Great Schism, the 100 Years’ War. Lots to take our minds off Aquinas’ precision and rigor.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Weeks later, I ran into Erica’s mom in town. “Erica believes in God now,” she told me, “and somehow it’s because of your history class. Her devout grandmother’s very happy.” I explained what we had done. “Oh,” mom said. “That’s why she keeps telling us we have to enlarge our conception of God. But she still refuses to go church.”</div><!--EndFragment-->Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15511432864734182961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000903378786484548.post-29389998463984494822012-08-26T17:28:00.000-07:002012-11-16T09:27:05.263-08:00One World, Two Worlds, False Worlds, True World: Why the Education of Adolescents is so Important<br /><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">We live in one world, but we act like we live in two.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">We characterize these two worlds in many different ways: Mind and body, “inner life” and “outer life,” subjective and objective, quantity and quality, scientific truth and religious faith, and so on. We recognize truth claims in each of these worlds, but we act as if and believe that these worlds are irreconcilable. God will not reveal itself in a particle accelerator, and interpretation of a work of art will not assume the objective truth of natural law. We live, it may be said, with a “two-realm theory” of truth.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">But any two-realm theory of truth is profoundly unsatisfying: What is the relationship between these realms? What is the relationship of science to ethics? Can the gulf between them, in fact, be crossed, or are we destined simply to suffer a tear in the fabric of the universe, a consciousness split in two?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">(This is not the place to go deeply into the consequences of two-realm theories of truth, but we could indicate the importance of this by pointing out the way religious fundamentalists—sticking to the truths of faith—may use weapons that brutally demonstrate the truths of science.)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">First, I acknowledge that some on each side will dispute my characterization and claim that we actually live only in one world, that the other is illusion, or that one is built on the first.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Some believe we live in one, material, physical world, but they then have to create a (religious) belief that mind, consciousness, value, and so on will ultimately be explicable through material and material processes.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Some believe we live in one, spiritual world—that matter is some sort of illusion—but they will still break their ankles when they trip over Dr. Johnson’s rock. (“After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it—‘I refute it<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span><i>thus</i>.’ -James Boswell, <i>Life of Johnson</i>)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">If we acknowledge, at least, that we live with two realms of truth, and that it is unsatisfying to do so, then we may seek a larger view of the world, one that unites seemingly objective scientific truth with seemingly subjective artistic or poetic or ethical truth. This is one of the fundamental tasks of anthropsophy, and represents one of Rudolf Steiner’s primary aims.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">One of Rudolf Steiner’s most acute insights, found in his <i>Philosophy of Freedom</i></span><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">, is that thinking precedes any experience of the possibly dual nature of the world. In thinking, we may say, we create the possibility of seeing the world in subjective and objective terms. Thinking exists before this division. We think, and, in thinking, discover that the world seems two-fold.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Only thinking, therefore, can potentially unite any division that we ourselves introduce into the world.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">This insight does not answer all questions, does not address all objections, does not immediately stitch up a rent in the fabric of the universe. But it points the way—perhaps the only possible way—out of the prison of a split consciousness.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">It’s tempting to believe, therefore, that the reconciliation of the so-called mind-body problem, the resolution of a two-realm theory of truth into a unified view of the world, because it is based in thinking, is work for the intellects of brilliant academics.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">A moment’s reflection, however, will show that this is false. Who are and who have been the greatest proponents of this two-realm theory of truth? The most brilliant persons of modern history—Descartes, Kant, you name it. Who are most susceptible to see the world as constituted of two apparently irreconcilable realms of truth? The highly educated and the scientifically-minded. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Yet children are untroubled by this apparent division. We could say that children are ignorant of the truth, or, with greater respect, we could say that they still perceive the world as one and have not yet employed their thinking to divide it. “<span style="color: #001320;">Except ye turn, and become as little children, ye shall in no wise enter into the kingdom of heaven</span>.” (Matthew 18:3)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Although it is not a common insight that human thinking precedes a division of the world into two realms, each with its own apparent truth, it is also not difficult insight. An average middle-schooler can comprehend it, I believe. And high school students can, if posed appropriate questions, acknowledge and wrestle with it. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Recognizing the importance of thinking, the point is not then to continue thinking in what Henri Bortoft calls a “downstream” way, sticking to the channels and canals of convention—we do plenty of that, day in and day out. The point is to work to think in new ways, ways that lead to an active unification of the world. At each moment, especially moments of choice and decision, we can resolve to recognize that the world is one, and to bring into being thoughts, feelings, and actions that honor this simple truth. There is, then, no once-and-for-all statement that reconciles the halves of the world. There is the hard work of generations to sew up the rift we may all acknowledge, stitch by stitch.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">I’ve made my point, briefly, so now let me address the reason for writing this.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">The course of an education, from early childhood through elementary school to high school, covers the introduction of a child into the world in which we all live. He or she will necessarily grow from an unconscious unity with the world into our present split consciousness. Even if a child’s parents have a different view of the world, it is not possible to escape the modern, two-realm mindset. School, playmates, advertisers, books, a flood of influences will ensure that we all become modern people. (And I have no problem with this. I love being a modern person, and wouldn’t want it any other way.)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">But what happens then? In high school and college, we generally continue to indoctrinate students into our unexamined two-realm theory of truth. We ask them to specialize, to fit themselves for a world without asking too many questions about the unexamined assumptions on which our world is built. Chief among these, I maintain, is this untenable treatment of the world as if there are two separate realms of truth.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">Adolescents and young adults, however, at the same time that they are learning—as they should learn—about the triumphs of science and technology and art and literature—are capable of learning that there are views, historically and philosophically based views, that our current assumptions about the world are not the only ones, nor are they necessarily true. And they are capable of learning that our two-realm theory is just that—a supposition, an assumption. And they are capable of learning that thinking introduces this division into the world. And they are capable of learning that creative thinking may be able to show us ways to overcome this split.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: 11.0pt;">For these reasons, more than many other more mundane reasons, I believe that Waldorf high schools—and the teaching that teachers in any school could impart if they chose to—can offer a valuable service to young men and young women growing into a world with which they will have to live for the rest of their lives.<o:p></o:p></span></div><!--EndFragment-->Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15511432864734182961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000903378786484548.post-53591761500361293072012-08-02T17:18:00.000-07:002012-11-16T09:27:05.276-08:00Playing “Steiner Says” Again: Nine More Myths about Waldorf Education<span style="font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">(Click <a href="http://ssagarin.blogspot.com/2008/12/playing-steiner-says-twenty-two-myths.html">here to read the first installment of “Playing ‘Steiner Says.’”)</a></span></span><br /><span style="font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: small;"></span><br /><span style="font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: small;"></span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">I started writing this essay following a re-reading this summer of Rudolf Steiner’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Education for Adolescence</i> during which I was reminded of a pet peeve: Waldorf teachers, at least in the U.S., talk about a three-day rhythm to “main lesson” classes. Steiner is clear, however, that the rhythm of a lesson occurs over two days and in no real way can be construed to be divided into three parts (thinking, feeling, will). I was then pleased to discover that Christof Wiechert, leader of the Pedagogical Section of the Anthroposophical Society, and a Waldorf school graduate, has written about this as well. He does not address what Steiner does say about such a lesson, but he identifies the myth of the three-part lesson. He also raises several other myths in two related articles. These myths have been on my list for a while, so it’s time to write them up.</span></span></div><span style="font-family: Times New Roman; font-size: small;"><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">The point is not to castigate those who have adopted these practices, but to point out that these practices have little or no basis in Steiner’s work, cannot be said to be essential to our practices, and may well be replaced with other, more healthful, more educational, more effective practices. And all this speaks again to the importance of 1.) continued immersion in Steiner’s work as the foundation for our thinking about Waldorf education and 2.) continued research in teaching (remember, that’s the point of our weekly faculty meetings). Four or five generations in, word-of-mouth, oversimplification, static, and all manner of other distractions are bound to enter the domain of our work, and it’s up to us to review and renew it.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">1. “Three-part” Lessons.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">How do you teach in a Waldorf School? <o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">You teach a lesson over three days, addressing thinking, feeling, and will, right? Or you make sure to address thinking, feeling, and will—the order varies depending on the lesson and on whom you read—in every lesson, a “threefold” [abuse of the word; three parts does not make threefold] lesson? <o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">WRONG. So wrong. There is no reference in Steiner’s work to anything like this. I’d like to be corrected, but I doubt that such a reference exists.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Don’t just take it from me. <a href="http://www.waldorftoday.com/2011/01/rethinking-the-threefold-division-of-the-main-lesson-christof-weichert/">Wiechert writes</a>, “<i>There are no grounds to be found </i>for dividing the main lesson into three parts <i>in Steiner’s work,</i> <i>neither in the lectures nor in the books of the</i> <i>teachers’ meetings.” </i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">(Italics in original.)</span> Later, “…this three-fold structure does not belong to the essential characteristics of Waldorf education. On the contrary, it can be a hindrance to the development of a teacher-pupil relationship which breathes between teaching and learning.” <o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">A slightly longer version of <a href="http://www.waldorflibrary.org/images/stories/Journal_Articles/NZjournalApril_2011wiechert.pdf">Wiechert's article may be found here</a>.</span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">So what does Steiner suggest? Well, one primary source is in the third lecture of the mistitled <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Education for Adolescence</i>, formerly <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Supplementary Course, </i>given in the spring of 1921 for ALL teachers at the original Waldorf School. Here Steiner discusses a two day rhythm, and one that addresses students first in “their whole being,” and then in imagination, then in sleep, and then in judgment, discernment, or conclusion-forming. To be clear, the imaginative and the judgment-oriented portions of the lesson, separated by sleep, both address the realm that we may call “feeling.” Feeling isn’t just one capacity among three; it is the gateway between which thinking and will must pass on the journey from one to the other, in either direction. <o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">(Which leads me to the following digression: All those “threefold” logos that Waldorf schools adopt aren’t actually threefold. A lemniscate [think of an 8 on its side]</span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">, the symbol of infinity, is threefold in that the two “lobes” on either side are connected by a crossing, the third, connecting part. Any form with three lobes is minimally four-fold.)<o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">In this passage, Steiner doesn’t address class work or homework. (Dogmatists will say that Steiner was “against” homework, but this clearly isn’t true. Briefly, we can say he was in favor of meaningful work.)<o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Steiner’s description of a lesson is more beautiful, more real, more practical, and less fragmented, less schematic, less pedantic, than some easier-to-remember but false idea of a lesson. <o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">For Wiechert, “The real rhythm, which we must always heed, is not between parts of the main lesson, but rather the rhythm which reveals itself with the children or pupils. When do they get tired, when do they waken up? That is the essential consideration. Whoever teaches according to this principle, will dissolve half the discipline problems just through doing this.” Recall that for Steiner, spirit, consciousness, expresses itself in states of waking, dreaming, and sleeping.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Waldorf teachers, if you have bought the three-part lesson, I urge you to reconsider. September is right around the corner. No time like the present.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">2. Recorder (flute) Playing. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Here is Wiechert: “Thus, I dare to question whether playing the recorder in the first part of the morning is the right activity. Just watch a group of children that plays the recorder in the early morning and a group of children who do this in the music lesson later in the morning. A great difference is to be noticed; (a difference which, strangely enough, is not to be noticed with singing).”<o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">3. Clapping, Stomping Math Games. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Wiechert, again: “How about the much praised stamping, what does that achieve? You can see that it makes the children tired instead of awake. Stamping makes them tired, not awake.” Later, “The idea is very widespread that you stamp around vigorously with a group of children in order to get them awake. In fact, it has the opposite effect. You can observe it with the practicing of the times table when it is linked to movements. Then you will see the pupils carrying out the procedure ‘as in a dream.’ Spoken in chorus a kind of ‘trance’ ensues: it is carried out as in sleep. Teachers will do well to lose no time in breaking this link between <i>movement in sleep</i> and <i>knowledge gained through wakefulness</i>.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">If we conduct our research as we should, we will discover, I have little doubt, that rhythmical repetition of math times-tables is actually a poor way to teach them, whether with clapping, with stomping, or with beanbag tossing. Students are resilient and usually learn what we have to teach them despite our poor methods. But there are plenty of children who simply don’t easily make the conceptual leap from the chanting and stamping to the beauty, patterns, and concepts of math. I wrote this when I wrote about freeing the math gnomes, and I’ll write it again: Read Steiner on math teaching. Read von Baravalle on math teaching. There’s nothing trance-inducing there.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">4. Too Many Stories. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Wiechert’s on a roll. Here is a myth that had not occurred to me, but, reading him, I concur. “How many tales and stories can people ‘stand’ in a day, in a week? The handwork teacher reads something as the children are so hard-working, on the same day there is a religion lesson and the stand-in teacher has brought a story from his ‘emergency reserves ’ with him. Have the teachers in the college meeting concerned themselves with the issue of how many stories a certain class hears in the course of a day?” <o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">(Note: German schools may have a religion lesson as part of the school week. Not just for the children of anthroposophists, for whom Steiner created the “independent religion lesson,” but for all denominations. U.S. schools generally do not, unless they are religious academies. Waldorf schools in the U.S. do not have such lessons.)<o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">School ended at lunchtime in Steiner’s day, and “main lesson” was followed by classes in which teachers were not necessarily expected to tell stories or use verses. <o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Can we address Wiechert’s questions? Or are we too set in our ways?<o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">5. Annual Class Play. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Drama is important in the lives of children. Doing a play every year is not, nor can any reference to such a practice be found in Steiner’s work. <a href="http://www.paedagogik-goetheanum.ch/uploads/media/RB_39_english_05.pdf">In another article, Wiechert writes</a> in some detail of the history of plays, and Steiner’s words on drama in schools.</span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">6. Block Crayons. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">These are not suited to anyone’s hand for writing, and are designed for and convenient for creating washes of color. Here’s Wiechert: “In Waldorf schools worldwide there is an established custom that colored wax crayon blocks, then later on colored wax crayons are used for the first lessons in writing.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">The question of the ergonomics of the wax crayon blocks was settled a long time ago: they were never thought of as instruments of writing, but for laying on expanses of color. Of course, you can make straight lines and bent lines with blocks too. However, a glance at the children’s hands shows that they hold the blocks in an unnatural and cramped way. It makes sense to get their little hands used to the wax crayons that nestle better in their hands from the very outset. (Yet the question needs to be raised - and allowed – as to how it would be if people in far off countries would look around to see what the local markets offer by way of writing equipment and other implements before falling back on these particular items. This gesture of looking to see what is available in the topical culture of the country concerned, that can be connected with, is a gesture to be positively affirmed in principle).”<o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">7. Borders in Main Lesson Books. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Wiechert says it all: “One result of the use of the wax crayon blocks is that before use a page is framed first in colored borders. When this occurs for a definite and appropriate purpose and it is carried out carefully, there can be no objection: it will draw attention to what is being presented. However, when it happens automatically, as you will find in nearly all schools in the world (!), and when you hear, upon enquiring, it belongs to Waldorf schools, or else it is the way it was taught in the Seminar, or else has been discovered in other main lesson books, which have been shown as exemplary, then a habit has been established once again which shoots wide of its target. For as a rule these borders are anything but beautiful. A fine, purposeful knack, the striving to shape the main lesson book aesthetically gives birth to the opposite.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">8. Main Lesson Books. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Some classes, courses, and students benefit from them, if they are produced by good teachers teaching well, but the idea that they belong to Waldorf schools or Waldorf education—or, that, if a teacher does not choose to have the students make such books, he or she is not a Waldorf teacher—is wrong.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Wiechert: “Nonetheless, this use of the main lesson book must be in keeping with the dynamics of the child’s development. For younger children the main lesson book can almost represent a threat on account of its defining character: every mistake is written permanently, is there for good, can no longer be put right. The white sheet can instill fear. In the first few years of school there should be main lesson books with removable pages or else a system consisting of loose leaves.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">"If we look at the middle school classes, we see the main lesson book in an intense battle of competition with knowledge available on the internet. In these new circumstances, the keeping of the main lesson book as an aesthetic-artistic task can be reduced to the ‘sticking in’ of facts that more or less belong to the lesson, which have been ‘Googled’ or downloaded from Wikipedia. The balancing between what is heard and seen becomes skewed. However, this balancing of what is heard and seen is the instrument of the flexible-musical study of man.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">"The core of Steiner’s pedagogy was not meant as an object of study, but as an application for every day teaching. The work in the main lesson books in a meaningful balance is such an application in the day to day work.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">9. Building Projects in 3<sup>rd</sup> Grade.<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Many schools in Germany and the U.S. more or less insist that 3<sup>rd</sup> graders build something, consonant with their study of housing. It’s just not necessary nor does it accord with Steiner’s words.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Wiechert: “[Steiner] makes it clear not everyone <b>has to </b>build on the school grounds! … Whoever’s school is on the coast can concern themselves with fishing, whoever is in the mountains with his school, where possible with quarrying, whoever has his school near a car factory, where possible with metalwork or forging. The freedom to shape it is huge, in the Richter Curriculum it is pointed out with great clarity by Tobias Richter.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">“Why this great detail? There are two motives behind it; firstly, because there is the danger that a class three that does not leave behind something they have built on the school grounds will easily be considered as not conforming to the curriculum. Yet, such an insinuation has no basis whatsoever.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">Secondly, you cannot help wondering whether it is right that year after year pupils pass by something on the school grounds that only in the rarest cases (with a bench or a functioning oven) has some practical purpose. Steiner attached great value to the practical aspect particularly with all crafts; it should be something that makes sense. Even a tree house, beautifully made with the industrious participation of the parents with the pupils, is something dead for the following school year.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">***</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;"></span><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; font-size: 12pt;">I’m sure this article, as my previous “Playing ‘Steiner Says,’” will arouse objections from some and dismay in others. I welcome debate about these important matters. But can we admit we were wrong, working from faulty understanding? Can we serve the children we teach by examining our habits and practices and changing them when they are deficient? If we don’t, if we can’t, can we really say we’re practicing “Waldorf education”?</span></div></span><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; mso-layout-grid-align: none;"></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15511432864734182961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000903378786484548.post-35589684030068318652012-07-29T09:21:00.000-07:002012-11-16T09:27:05.292-08:00Waldorf Education is Deeply Strange<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Because Waldorf education is deeply strange, we need not make it superficially strange.<o:p></o:p></span><br /> <br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Strangeness can be good because it can shock us into awareness. Without strangeness, perhaps, we drowsily stay our courses, despite the imbalances, flaws, or contradictions they may hold. Deep strangeness shocks us deeply, provoking, perhaps, deep thought and real change. Superficial strangeness shocks us superficially, and we recoil, irritated and none the wiser for it.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">For Waldorf education, deep strangeness arises from Rudolf Steiner’s request that we consider the questions of what it means to be a growing, developing human being and how those of us who choose to teach or who are called to teach can assist in the humanizing task we undertake. We are asked to take seriously ideas about angels, about existence beyond the bounds of this life, about human destiny, about human capacities that unfold across a lifetime, and about human consciousness. In a world that denies the value of questions of meaning beyond the personal, trivializes the humanities, and raises a caricature of science to the status of a new religion, these are deeply strange considerations.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">For Waldorf education, superficial strangeness arises in prohibitions on black crayons, abuse of gnomes to teach profound world processes in mathematics, wool socks and Birkenstocks, pseudo-neo-German expressionist typefaces, meandering, watery paintings, book jackets, and name tags. The list goes on and on. One version of this list is now known as Steve’s pet peeves.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">The superficial strangeness that we cast over the deep strangeness of our work is not just amusing, however, nor is it inconsequential. It replaces a deep, silent regard for the mysteries of existence, for example, with sectarian chatter about half-understood Christianity and an imported, alienating crypto-Protestant culture. Things like this create a shell around us. Because we are not clams, this is not useful to us or good for us. We may feel warm and safe inside, but then we shouldn’t wonder that we’re alone.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">Hindus do not rub your face in reincarnation. Nuns do not need to fake reverence by moving and speaking really slowly. You can’t tell a true shaman by his dress. Those who have truly seen the light carry it quietly within.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman","serif";">If we live only what we know to be true, authentically, no matter how little this may seem, and trust that we can live in not-yet-knowing about many, many things, we can avoid joining a movement of superficial strangeness and begin to contend with the real strangeness, the real mysteries at the root of Waldorf education. These are mysteries that may bring health to our students, health to the world, and even health to us.<o:p></o:p></span></div><br /><em>(These remarks were part of an address to the Class of 2012 of the Certificate Program in Waldorf Elementary Teacher Education at Sunbridge Institute, July 28, 2012.)</em>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15511432864734182961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000903378786484548.post-85496106423051033142012-06-25T17:24:00.000-07:002012-11-16T09:27:05.304-08:00How Many Waldorf Teachers Actually Take an Elementary School Class for Eight Years?<br /><div class="MsoNormal">About six years ago, one of my MSEd students, Ashwini Pawar, wrote her thesis on this question. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">You cannot find Rudolf Steiner saying that teachers should take a class for so many years—“several,” yes. Precisely eight? No. And Mark Riccio has suggested that even Steiner’s conception of elementary school was really <a href="http://ssagarin.blogspot.com/2008/12/playing-steiner-says-twenty-two-myths.html">only seven years</a> (the eighth year a requirement of Swiss school law).</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">So Pawar examined ten years of class teaching at six different Waldorf schools and discovered that only 1 in 4 teachers actually takes a class in a Waldorf school from first through eighth grade.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">She also asked about what led to teachers leaving a class—burn-out, family changes (moving, childbirth), termination? This is much harder to assess. Teachers don’t necessarily leave for one reason alone. Teachers don’t necessarily confess to burn-out, or, especially, to being fired. Schools and administrators, too, on the advice of their lawyers, won’t necessarily discuss employee termination. And, even if they would, teachers are often allowed or asked to resign before actually being fired. Regardless, as far as Pawar could tell (in my recollection—I’m sorry to say I didn’t keep a copy of her thesis), reasons for leaving a class teaching job were roughly half positive—having a child, for instance—and half negative—burning out or being fired.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In this, Waldorf school teachers mirror all teachers. Approximately half of all teachers leave the profession within the first five years. (Research by <a href="http://depts.washington.edu/ctpmail/PDFs/Shortage-RI-09-2003.pdf">Richard Ingersoll</a>.) It’s not a job for everyone, Waldorf or not.<o:p></o:p></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">What does this mean? Waldorf schools might do well to avoid presenting this ideal as a reality. If parents are “sold” on the ideal, and, in the process, unhealthily attached to a particular teacher, it can be a real blow to their affection for the school if a teacher leaves midstream. This assumes<span style="background-color: white;"> that schools continue to hold it as an ideal—at least a few Waldorf schools now deliberately divide elementary faculties between lower elementary and middle school.</span></div><!--EndFragment-->Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15511432864734182961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000903378786484548.post-50576498432514418352012-06-14T14:25:00.000-07:002012-11-16T09:27:05.316-08:00A Glance at Discipline Methods in Waldorf Schools<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Disclaimer—This is a blog post. It is off-the-cuff, not scholarly, from memory, etc., etc. Hope it provokes discussion. Not intended to be more than the beginning of a conversation.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">A commenter on a previous post, “Steve P,” asked about the line “pedagogical methods used in dealing with discipline” in a document called “<a href="http://www.paedagogik-goetheanum.ch/uploads/media/Principles_01.PDF">Description of the Main Characteristics of Waldorf Education</a>.” He kindly posted a link to the English version, which I’ve copied here. My response here is too long to post as a comment on a comment, and the conversation is worth bringing out in the open, so I thought I’d make it a new post.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In my experience, there are few consistently used methods for discipline issues—including bullying and teasing—in Waldorf elementary schools. (Kim John Payne has done a lot of work with Waldorf schools in this area, but I don’t know how many schools use his methods, much about them, how much of it seeps in after he’s gone, etc. Comments, anyone?)</span><br /><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Some teachers are kind and gentle, others are “old school” and harsh. I have known teachers who have used methods indistinguishable from those my teachers used in public school in the 1960s and 1970s—shaming, sending a student out of the room, changing a student’s seat, giving a demerit or “white” or “pink” slip (varies by school), yelling or shouting, meeting with students who are involved in a fracas, having students write repeatedly that they will not (or will) do something, requiring written or face-to-face apologies, calling or threatening to call parents, and, in cases that resulted in teachers being fired, hitting a student or tying a student to a chair.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">The one “method” of which I know that may be different from that used in other schools is what teachers often call “pedagogical stories.” Say two students have a conflict because one student calls another names and the second student responds by hitting. Of course, the teacher should stop this behavior immediately, demand apologies, explain that the students know that this is not right, call parents if necessary, and so on. But teachers in Waldorf schools will then often make up (or find) a story in which two characters behave in a way analogous to the way the children (mis) behaved, including, perhaps, egregious or dire or ridiculous consequences in the story for those who do not reform their behavior. I’m not saying this is what Steiner intended (I’m pretty sure it’s not quite right), but I know it goes on. My son was on to it early, and would tell us at the dinner table in 2<sup>nd</sup> grade, “Well, everyone knows that the frog is Daniel, who hit Christopher yesterday, who’s the other frog, because they were fighting over a toy truck, which is the lily pad in the story.” Perhaps his teacher was particularly obvious. Perhaps such stories have an effect even when they’re transparent. Anyway, that’s how it goes.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I’ve also heard of—but not witnessed—teachers’ non-intervention because they believe in “letting the children work it out (perhaps karmically).” If there is karma, it works forward and backward, applies at all times to all circumstances, and inaction is as karmically loaded as action would be.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Which reminds me of some of Steiner’s remarks on seating children according to temperament (would it help, skeptics, if we said personality? The “big five” personality traits—openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion—that many developmentalists discuss mirror some aspects of temperament, and then add “neurotic,” which I think of as a personality disorder, rather than a personality in its own right). One idea was that children seated with “like” children would temper their own personalities (temperaments) in reaction to those around them. Frankly, isn’t that how many of us change our behavior and personality over time? If we do at all? Anyway, I suppose this could be called a disciplinary method in some way.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Continuing with class discipline, it’s important to focus on the positive, too. The best teachers I’ve known—the ones I aim to emulate in my own teaching—rarely, if ever, have discipline problems in their classrooms.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Harry Kretz comes to mind, a gentleman so dignified, so respectful of his students, so careful of his time in the classroom, and with such a dry wit, that he could teach for years without a hint of a discipline problem. Not everyone can or should be Harry—each of us has his or her own qualities as a person and as a teacher—but he was fully himself and could therefore allow students to be fully themselves, without the need to “act out.”</span><br /><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">As my friend George McWilliam points out, student misbehavior is often due to unease or anxiety and should fundamentally be addressed by a change in the teacher, not imposed on the student by the teacher. Any teacher facing misbehavior may ask, why does this student believe that this is an acceptable way to behave? It’s rare that students misbehave simply for the sake of being “bad.” Students may be bored, anxious, unsettled, overtaxed, insecure, confused, and on and on. It’s the teachers job to address these issues without making them the problems of the student.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Separate from individuality and from addressing nagging unresolved issues in a class, the most positive steps I believe I can take toward classroom discipline are in creating anticipation and expectation at the end of a class so that students enter the next day focused on learning what I’ve hinted at the day before. And, in class, working to generate and maintain interest and to engage students in learning so that they are so focused on what we’re doing (and not on what they could do that would disrupt or distract) that it simply doesn’t occur to them to misbehave. Ideally, if someone does begin to misbehave, the students are allies in helping him or her quickly restore order to get on with what we’re about.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This last point can be taken to a sentimental or spectacular extreme—one of the reasons I so detest the movie “Dead Poets Society”—and must be deep and authentic to be sustained and healthful. Lots of room for error, lots of time for practice. Never a dull moment.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">To end, I continue to resist the archaic word “pedagogical.” In U.S. English (and maybe in British English, as well), the word should be “educational.” A pedagogue is not just a teacher—as he or she may have been a couple of centuries ago—but, in caricature, an old, dried-out, unchanging, unfeeling, know-it-all. Yuck.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15511432864734182961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000903378786484548.post-91841592049949704012012-06-12T14:53:00.000-07:002012-11-16T09:27:05.330-08:00Crisis in the History of Education in the United States<br /><div class="MsoNormal">From one point of view, the growth and development of education in the United States has been formed by perceptions of crisis. This “change-because-something-is-wrong” mentality may exist elsewhere, as well, but others will have to decide whether or not this is so.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Here is a brief and incomplete look at this history.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">It begins with compulsory schooling in Massachusetts, instituted, in part, because of the perceived threat of Irish Catholics—their illiteracy, alternate Bible (not the Church of England’s King James) and its interpretation (salvation through works, not faith), alcohol abuse, and devotion to an authority (the Pope) other than the republic in which they stood.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">It continues through the restrictions of professionalism and unionizing, including the founding of the NEA in 1857. Michael Katz calls this the rise of “incipient bureaucracy,” which serves administrators, budgeters, and record-keepers more than it does students in schools. Nothing wrong with professionals or unions; changes in this direction were clearly necessary in the late 19<sup>th</sup> century, but they quickly come to serve themselves and not the children in their care.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In the 1870s, “manual training” attempts to mold a (lower) class of students into a work force. Reconstruction sees the rise of public education in the south to address, in part, the new threat of the children of formerly enslaved persons. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The Blaine amendments in many states prevent taxpayers’ money from supporting parochial schools in any way. Those who take the separation of church and state in education for an entirely good and entirely given interpretation of the first amendment would do well to look at the anti-Catholic sentiment behind these laws (which were passed in reactionary states because they could not pass the U.S. Congress).</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Kindergartens are wonderful places for children—maybe, mostly—but their rise in the 1880s is, in part, due to further waves of immigrants in need of assimilation to a mostly white, Anglo-American culture.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In the 1890s, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) promotes vocational education to continue to deal with immigrant labor in factories and because of the unintended consequences of the industrial revolution in producing unskilled laborers.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Plessy v. Ferguson, 1896, institutionalizes “separate but equal” racism for the next sixty years, including in the construction, funding, and staffing of schools.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The progressive era derives from Jane Addams’ work at Hull House and her attempt to educate young female immigrants. Clearly, turning immigrants into Americans may be said to be a primary driving force in the creation of systematic public education in this country. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Terman, Hall, and the Stanford-Binet IQ tests seek to sort first soldiers for World War I, and, shortly thereafter, students, based on innate and quantifiable “intelligence.” Brave new world, here we go. Despite a century of subtle manipulation, SAT tests are still no more than IQ tests.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The Scopes trial of 1925 brings the creationists’ challenge to science, marking a struggle that continues today in which religious extremists attempt to influence curricula and textbook publishers.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In the 1930s, it seemed to many in the U.S. that capitalism was in decline and that, without socialism or a strong, perhaps fascist, leader in the mold of Hitler or Mussolini, we would fail politically and economically. George Counts’ “Dare the School Build a New Social Order?” is a work wrought by a late, chastened “progressive” thinker who cannot foresee the dehumanizing excesses of fascism and totalitarianism.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Rudolf Flesch, an Austrian, introduces phonetics and fear with “Why Johnny Can’t Read” in the 1950s. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Brown v. Topeka, KS, Board of Ed. overturns Plessy v. Ferguson, marks the rise of civil rights, but leads, eventually, to busing and other questionable (if honorable) attempts to level an uneven playing field and their unintended consequences (“white flight,” etc.).</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">The Space Race, a creation, again, of fear of the perceived successes of totalitarian socialism, leads to post-Sputnik educational reform and the National Defense Education Act (NDEA), which quickly gives us so-called “New Math.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Since 1983’s “A Nation at Risk,” followed by “America 2000,” “Goals 2000,” and “No Child Left Behind,” we have participated in the questionable rise of standardized testing and all the ballyhoo and anti-education that accompanies it.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Assuming there’s some truth to my interpretation, we should ask ourselves some questions about this century and a half of haphazard history. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Are our children well served by an educational system born out of and continually reformed by perceptions of failure and crisis? </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Who is served by the fear and foment of this mode? Is it our children and those who know them best—teachers, parents, psychologists—or is it, more likely, politicians, textbook publishers, educational technologists, and interest groups led by extremists?</div><!--EndFragment-->Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15511432864734182961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000903378786484548.post-2346301951285424232012-06-02T12:49:00.000-07:002012-11-16T09:27:05.343-08:00Waldorf Critics—The FAQ You’ve Been Waiting For<br /><div class="MsoNormal">So you’re interested in Waldorf education and you’re doing your due diligence, looking into it, trying to figure out if it’s right for your child. And you come across the Waldorf critics—the website of People for Legal and Non-sectarian Schools (PLANS)—or the Waldorf critics Yahoo group. And you read and read and wonder what to make of it all. Here are some FAQs, as I imagine them.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Q. Who are the Waldorf critics?</b></div><div class="MsoNormal">A. They’re individuals. Spend a bit of time on their sites, and you’ll see that some are calm and clear, others are rabid and manic, some are funny, some bitter, some wistful, some scornful. Many, but not all, are former students or parents at Waldorf schools. Methinks many protest too much, and could as easily be great friends of Waldorf education as critics. Some used to be, and may be again; others aren’t, but given their sincerity, may yet be. Some have had negative experiences at Waldorf schools. In my opinion, they too often generalize these experiences to cover “all” Waldorf schools or Waldorf education. Some actually have no experience of Waldorf schools whatsoever, and really are more critical of anthroposophy than of Waldorf education.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Q. They’re so critical! Is there any basis to their criticisms?</b></div><div class="MsoNormal">A. Their criticisms and arguments range from the astute and accurate to the twisted and just plain wrong. Anyone who has worked in or been associated with a Waldorf school for more than a few months will recognize some of the problems and tendencies that critics point out. Often, the difference is not that Waldorf critics see something that Waldorfers don’t, it’s that critics see problem X, let’s say, as pervasive, making Waldorf education rotten to the core, while Waldorfers see problem X as an aberration in an otherwise healthful educational paradigm.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Q. What are their actual criticisms?</b></div><div class="MsoNormal">A. The PLANS site is pretty clear about these; the Yahoo group and blogs, as ongoing forums, less so. I’ll restate them, as I understand them, in my own terms.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .25in; text-indent: -0.25in;">1.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;"> </span>Waldorf schools are the missionary arm of anthroposophy, an occult, cult-like religious sect founded by the misguided guru Rudolf Steiner. Waldorf schools lie about or obfuscate this connection in order to appear independent of it.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .25in; text-indent: -0.25in;">2.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;"> </span>Because of their beliefs, following Steiner, they espouse a racist ideology;</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .25in; text-indent: -0.25in;">3.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;"> </span>They teach discredited “bad” science;</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .25in; text-indent: -0.25in;">4.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;"> </span>They allow students to bully one another (it’s their destiny, or “karma”);</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .25in; text-indent: -0.25in;">5.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;"> </span>They shun technology; and </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list .25in; text-indent: -0.25in;">6.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;"> </span>They subscribe to outdated or incorrect theories of child development.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Q. But this doesn’t sound like what I read in Steiner or what I see when I visit a Waldorf school; isn’t this based on experience of small samples and selectively taking quotations out of context?</b></div><div class="MsoNormal">A. Yes. </div><div class="MsoNormal">If Rudolf Steiner…</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .25in; text-indent: -0.25in;">1.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;"> </span>believed strongly in and spoke and wrote about human freedom;</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .25in; text-indent: -0.25in;">2.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;"> </span>believed in non-sectarian education;</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .25in; text-indent: -0.25in;">3.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;"> </span>in overcoming distinctions of race and in the highest ethics;</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .25in; text-indent: -0.25in;">4.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;"> </span>in re-humanizing a dehumanizing thrall to scientism and technological optimism;</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .25in; text-indent: -0.25in;">5.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;"> </span>in teaching according to human development, even as this changes from time to time and place to place; </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .25in; text-indent: -0.25in;">6.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;"> </span>in re-attaching human beings to what <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/search/ref=sr_tc_2_0?rh=i%3Astripbooks%2Ck%3AHuston+Smith&keywords=Huston+Smith&ie=UTF8&qid=1338666166&sr=8-2-ent&field-contributor_id=B000APX9CG">Huston Smith</a> calls “the perennial philosophy;”</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .25in; text-indent: -0.25in;">7.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;"> </span>and if <a href="http://ssagarin.blogspot.com/2011/10/is-waldorf-education-religion.html">anthroposophy is not a religion</a>;</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; tab-stops: list .25in; text-indent: -0.25in;">8.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;"> </span>and if Waldorf schools and Waldorf teachers are doing their best to implement an education according to these principles;</div><div class="MsoNormal">then the critics are not so much wrong—although I believe they’re frequently and fundamentally wrong about many things—as they are looking through the wrong end of the binoculars, or looking at a funhouse mirror. They perceive—and then represent—a diminished and distorted view of Waldorf education and anthroposophy.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Q. So their criticisms are groundless?</b></div><div class="MsoNormal">A. No, of course not. Each contains some truth, or it wouldn’t be worth typing about. Let me be clear. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .25in; text-indent: -0.25in;">1.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;"> </span>Some Waldorf teachers and anthroposophists turn anthroposophy into a sect and act in a cult-like manner. But they’re a minority and they’re wrong to do so.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .25in; text-indent: -0.25in;">2.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;"> </span>There is bad science teaching and bad history teaching in some Waldorf schools and by some Waldorf teachers. The critics are fond of referencing the work of those, like Roy Wilkinson, who are pretty extreme and whom I steer my education students away from. They seem to ignore the deep and thoughtful teachers and writers about anthroposophy and Waldorf education—<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Wholeness-Nature-Henri-Bortoft/dp/0863152384/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1338664991&sr=1-1">Henri Bortoft</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Saving-Appearances-A-Study-Idolatry/dp/0955958288/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1338665055&sr=1-1">Owen Barfield</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Genetics-Manipulation-Life-Forgotten-Context/dp/0940262770/ref=sr_1_4?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1338665096&sr=1-4">Craig Holdrege</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Marriage-Sense-Thought-Renewal-Science/dp/0940262827/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1338664893&sr=1-1">Stephen Edelglass</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Insight-Imagination-Emancipation-Thought-Modern-World/dp/1597311170/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1338664856&sr=1-1">Douglas Sloan</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Goethe-History-Science-Studies-Literature/dp/0820410764/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1338664748&sr=1-1">Fred Amrine</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=arthur+zajonc">Arthur Zajonc</a>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Emersons-Demanding-Optimism-Gertrude-Hughes/dp/0807111805/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1338665267&sr=1-1">Gertrude Reif Hughes</a>; the list goes on and on, and anyone sincerely interested can add to it easily. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .25in; text-indent: -0.25in;">3.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;"> </span>Sometimes, curricula in Waldorf schools are based too much on a literal reading of a translation of general remarks made in Europe in the early 20<sup>th</sup> century. No doubt. But Waldorf schools have come a long way, especially in the United States, in updating curricula and methods.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .25in; text-indent: -0.25in;">4.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;"> </span>Sometimes Waldorf teachers make bad decisions and sometimes these are based on a misunderstanding of Steiner or of anthroposophy and sometimes these are supported by an insecure or ideological school culture, but, again, in my experience, these are rare and, for most students and parents most of the time, are greatly outweighed by the humanizing, creative, warm, supportive, good education in a Waldorf school.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .25in; text-indent: -0.25in;">5.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;"> </span>Some anthroposophists, including those in Waldorf schools, have used a selective reading of Steiner or other anthroposophists as the basis for a racist view of the world. I believe there are fewer of these each generation, and, in my experience, examples of anthroposophically-based or Waldorf-institutionalized racism are rare (see <a href="http://ssagarin.blogspot.com/2009/05/accusations-of-racism-and-waldorf.html">“Accusations of Racism,”</a> which I stand by despite the objections of some critics. Were I to write this again, I would probably change the title to “allegations” instead of “accusations,” a more neutral word, but so be it).</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .25in; text-indent: -0.25in;">6.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;"> </span>Waldorf schools could be more open to parents and visitors—although I believe they’re generally more open than critics give them credit for being, and each school is different, anyway.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 0.25in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list .25in; text-indent: -0.25in;">7.<span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 7pt;"> </span>In the age of the Internet, I simply don’t believe schools could get away with “hiding” Steiner or anthroposophy from prospective parents, even if they wanted to. And, in my experience, they don’t.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Q. Say, didn’t you go to a Waldorf high school after 8 years of public school, and haven’t you spent much of your career teaching in Waldorf schools? Doesn’t that make you biased?</b></div><div class="MsoNormal">A. Yes. Or else I know what I’m talking about. Or both.<br /><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b>Q. I’ve read all this. What now?</b></div><div class="MsoNormal">A. If you’re looking for a school, visit, spend time there (as you would at any school, right?), and meet your child’s future teachers. Research shows that it’s better to have a good teacher in a bad school than a bad teacher in a good school. So much comes down to teaching. Talk to parents and students. Gather information and make the decision based on your own experience and your own thinking. Don’t let critics dissuade you, and don’t let Waldorfers convince you. </div><div class="MsoNormal">If you’re just surfing the Web, looking for truth, good luck to you.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15511432864734182961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000903378786484548.post-35051316567171239472012-05-30T16:46:00.000-07:002012-11-16T09:27:05.377-08:00Part of a Waldorf Teacher Education Reading List<span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Yes, we read lots of Rudolf Steiner's educational work at Sunbridge Institute in our teacher education programs. But that's not all we read, not by a long shot.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Here's a reading list for a course on the history and philosophy of education in the United States that I have taught at Teachers College and at Sunbridge. Different institutions, same course.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I believe anyone wanting to teach in any school--public, private, Waldorf, Montessori, you name it--in the U.S. should have some foundation in the history and philosophy of education in the U.S. I hope you agree.</span><br /><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span><br /><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Cremin, L. (1977) </span><u style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Traditions of American Education</u><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">. New York: Basic Books.</span><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Sloan, D. “Introduction [Part II].” [pp. 20-48] In <u>The Great Awakening and American Education.</u><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Edwards, J. (1746/1989) “Selection from ‘A Treatise Concerning Religious Affection.’ ” [pp. 71-88] In <u>The American Intellectual Tradition</u>, vol. 1, 2nd ed. Hollinger, D. and C. Capper, eds. New York: Oxford University Press.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Kaestle, C. (1983) “Prologue: The Founding Fathers and Education.” [pp. 3-13] In <u>Pillars of the Republic</u>. New York: Hill and Wang.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Lemisch, L. (1961). Selection from <u>Benjamin Franklin: The Autobiography and Other Writings</u>. [pp. 92-104] New York: Penguin Books.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Jefferson, T. (1973) “Thomas Jefferson’s Bill for the Diffusion of Knowledge.” [pp. 230-239] In Smith, W., ed. <u>Theories of Education in Early America, 1655-1819</u>. New York: Bobbs-Merrill<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Katz, M. (1968) “Introduction.” [pp. 1-17]; “The True Idea of Education.” [pp. 124-130]; and “Conclusion. Educational Reform: Myths and Limits.” [pp. 213-218] In <u>The Irony of Early School Reform</u>. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Kaestle, C. (1983) “Social Change and Education in the American Northeast, 1830-1860.” [pp. 62-74] In <u>Pillars of the Republic</u>. New York: Hill and Wang.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Mann, H. Selections from “Twelfth Annual Report (1848)” [pp. 79-112] In <u>The Republic and the School.</u><b><o:p></o:p></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Katz, M. “Alternative Models for American Education.” [pp. 24-57] In <u>Reconstructing American Education</u>.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Emerson, R. “Education.” [pp. 1-34] In <u>Education, An Essay, and Other Selections</u>.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Haefner, G. (1937/1970) “Alcott’s Philosophy of Education” and “Rote Versus Rational Learning.” [pp. 45-47 and 78-98] In <u>A Critical Estimate of the Educational Theories and Practices of A. Bronson Alcott</u>. New York: Greenwood Press.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Alcott, A. B. (1877) Selection from <u>Table-Talk</u> [pp.127-138]. Philadelphia: Albert Saifer.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Anderson, J. (1988) “Ex-Slaves and the Rise of Universal Education, 1860-1880.” [pp. 4-32] In <u>The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860-1935</u>. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Gould, S. (1981) Selections from “Introduction” and “American Polygeny and Craniometry Before Darwin: Blacks and Indians as Separate, Inferior Species.” In <u>The Mismeasure of Man</u>. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. <b><o:p></o:p></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Douglass, F. (1845/1986) Selection from <u>Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave</u>. [pp. 77-87] New York: Penguin.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Washington, B. (1903) “Industrial Education for the Negro.” [pp. 59-62] In Lazerson, M. (1987) <u>American Education in the Twentieth Century</u>. New York: Teachers College Press.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">DuBois, W. (1903) “The Talented Tenth.” [pp. 62-66] In Lazerson, M. (1987) <u>American Education in the Twentieth Century</u>. New York: Teachers College Press.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Myrdal, G. (1944) “The Negro School.” [pp. 879-907] In <u>An American Dilemma</u>.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Gates, Jr., H. (1992) “The Master’s Pieces: On Canon Formation and the African-American Tradition.” [pp. 17-42] In <u>Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars</u>. New York: Oxford University Press.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Cott, N. (1977) “Conclusion: On ‘Women’s Sphere’ and Feminism.” [197-208] In <u>The Bonds of Womanhood: “Women’s Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835</u>. New Haven: Yale University Press.<u><o:p></o:p></u></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Flexner, E. (1975) “The Intellectual Progress of Women, 1860-1875.” [115-118] In <u>Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the U.S.</u> Cambridge: Harvard University Press.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Sexton, P. (1976) “The American Experience.” [39-52] In <u>Women In Education.</u> Bloomington: Phi Delta Kappa.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Tyack, D. (1974) “Teachers and the Male Mystique.” [59-65] In <u>The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education.</u> Cambridge: Harvard University Press.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Beecher, C. (1835) “The Education of Female Teachers.” [pp. 67-75] In <u>The Educated Woman in America</u>, B. Cross, ed. New York: Teachers College Press.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Gilligan, C. (1982) “Woman’s Place in Man’s Life Cycle.” [pp. 5-23] In <u>In a Different Voice</u>. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Spring, J. (1972) “The Classroom as Factory and Community.” [pp. 44-61] In <u>Education and the Rise of the Corporate State</u>. Boston: Beacon Press.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Tyack, D. (1974) Selection from “Inside the System: The Character of Urban Schools, 1890-1940.” [177-216] In <u>The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education.</u>Cambridge: Harvard University Press.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Spencer, H. (1966) “Political Education.” [pp. 113-118] In <u>Herbert Spencer on Education</u>. NY: TC Press.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Sumner, W. (1919/1963) “Who Win By Progress?” [pp. 158-162] <u>In Social Darwinism: Selected Essays of William Graham Sumner</u>. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall.<b><o:p></o:p></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Dewey, J. (1981) “The Child and the Curriculum.” [467-483] In <u>The Philosophy of John Dewey</u>. J. McDermott. 2 vol. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Piaget, J. (1995) “The Stages of Intellectual Development in Childhood and Adolescence” and selections from “Science of Education and the Psychology of the Child.” [814-819; 695-700; 710-719] In H. Gruber and J. Vonneche, eds., <u>The Essential Piaget.<o:p></o:p></u></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Addams, J. (1994) “Educational Methods (1902).” [98-119] In <u>On Education,</u> Lagemann, E., ed. New York: Transaction Publishing Co.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoHeader"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Counts, G. (1987) “Dare the School Build a New Social Order? (1932)” [97-99] In <u>American Education in the Twentieth Century,</u> Lazerson, M., ed. New York: Teachers College Press.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoHeader"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoHeader"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Dewey, J. (1980) “The School in the Life of the Child.” [21-38] In <u>The School and Society</u>. Carbondale: S. Illinois University Press. Not included in readings.)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Watson, J. (1913) “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It.” [396-402] In L. Benjamin, ed., <u>A History of Psychology</u>. NY: McGraw-Hill.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Crain, W. (1984) “Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Development.” [147-169] In <u>Theories of Development</u>.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoHeader"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Burman, E. (1990) “The Production of Piagetian Psychology.” [151-161] <u>In Deconstructing </u>Developmental Psychology. NY: Routledge.)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoHeader"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Cuban, L. (1986) “Film and Radio: The Promise of Bringing the World into the Classroom.” [9-26] and “Epilogue.” [104-109] In <u>Teachers and Machines: The Classroom Use of Technology Since 1920</u>. New York: Teachers College Press.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Papert, S. (1980) “Introduction: Computers for Children.” [3-18] In <u>Mindstorms: Children, Computers and Powerful Ideas.</u> New York: HarperCollins.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Davy, J. (1984) “Mindstorms in the Lamplight.” [11-20] In <u>The Computer in Education: A Critical Perspective</u>, D. Sloan, ed. New York: Teachers College Press.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoHeader"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoHeader"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Miller, E. (2001) “Seven Disconnections in Our Thinking About Educational Technology.” [1-6] In Sloan, D. and S. Sagarin, eds., <u>Computers, the Internet and Education: Seeking the Human Essentials</u>. NY: Teachers College Press; forthcoming<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Talbott, S. (1997) "Why is the Moon Getting Farther Away?" Netfuture 70, 1-5. <a href="http://www.ora.com/people/staff/stevet/netfuture/1998/Apr3098"><span style="color: black;">http://www.ora.com/people/staff/stevet/netfuture/1998/Apr3098</span></a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=810184829371559104" name="_Hlt520103556"></a><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=810184829371559104" name="_Hlt520103541"></a>.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Spring, J. (1990) "The Conservative Reaction and the Politics of Education” [352-382] In <u>The American School, 1642-1990,</u> 2nd ed. New York: Longman Publishing Company.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Selection from “A Nation At Risk” (1983). [5-36]<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">“Goals 2000: National Educational Goals” (1996). http://inet.ed.gov/legislation/GOALS2000<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">(1999) Karp, S. “Equity Suits Clog the Courts” [4-9] and Morales, J. et. al.,“The Courts and Equity: A State-by-State Overview.” [61-67] In <u>Funding For Justice</u>.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Illich, I. (1970) “Why We Must Disestablish School.” [1-24] In <u>Deschooling Society</u>. NY: Harper & Row.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Gatto, J. (1992) "The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher." [1-21] In <u>Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling.</u> Philadelphia: New Society Pub.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoHeader"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Weil, S. (2001) “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies With a View to the Love of God.” [57-66] In <u>Waiting for God</u>. New York: Harper Perennial.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Miller, R. (1990) “Imported Holistic Movements.”[121-139] In <u>What Are Schools For? Holistic Education in the United States.</u> Brandon, VT: Holistic Education Press.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Sloan, D. (1992) “Imagination, Education, and Our Postmodern Possibilities.” <u>Revision</u>, 15, 2, Fall.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1; page-break-after: avoid;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-outline-level: 1; page-break-after: avoid;"><span style="font-family: Times, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Lusseyran, J. (1958) “The Blind In Society.” [pp. 9-20] <u>Proceedings</u>, No. 27, Fall 1973. New York: The Myrin Institute.</span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15511432864734182961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000903378786484548.post-44845433022970872172012-05-07T18:21:00.000-07:002012-11-16T09:27:05.412-08:00If you could change one thing about Waldorf schools, what would it be?If you could change one thing about Waldorf schools, what would it be?<br /><br />One thing. Be as specific and as detailed as you like.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15511432864734182961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000903378786484548.post-80100376246322232382012-05-05T19:05:00.000-07:002012-11-16T09:27:05.447-08:00The Winch, The Toilet, and the Bus: Concrete Answers to Fuzzy Questions<br /><div class="MsoNormal">Sometimes, fuzzy questions have practical and specific answers. You just have to see them. Here are three examples.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">1.) A friend of a friend wanted to start an ocean sailing school, and wasn’t sure how many students to plan for. A dozen? Thirty? How would he decide? After a few weeks of contemplation, buttonholing friends to ask opinions, making assumptions and questioning them, he struck the answer that worked. What is the largest readily available winch by which to raise and lower the sails? This determined the largest practical line, which determined the largest practical sheet or sail size, which limited the size of the ship, which determined the number of berths on the ship. Dividing these among instructors and students, he had his answer. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">2.) A summer camp at which I used to work wanted to increase capacity, building new cabins, adding staff, planning for more seats in the dining hall, and so on. But how many to add? Again, after considering several different scenarios, each of which had its advantages and disadvantages, the answer became clear: The leech field for the septic system could handle only so many toilets, and that number of toilets restricted the number and size of cabins that the camp could add, which determined the increase in the number of campers. To add any more than this would entail a large expense to reconstruct the septic system, a cost and project the camp was not willing to undertake. Problem solved.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">3.) In planning for our high school eight years ago, we knew we were limited by geography—we couldn’t build a sustainable school of 200; there aren’t enough students within commuting distance of our school to make this feasible. Crunching numbers, we saw another limit around 60. Between roughly 60 and 200, we saw what a friend called a “deadly middle ground,” in which we would have to add teachers, facilities, and resources that wouldn’t pay for themselves. So, was 60 our number? We thought so for a while, but then realized that there was a more specific and more practical answer. Given our location and our reliance on and commitment to community resources, we drove our students to a theater for rehearsals, a library for research, a blacksmith or pottery studio for art classes, and so on. Each bus holds 14 passengers, and can be driven by someone with a regular license, no commercial driver’s license necessary. We had our answer, specific and practical: A school of 56. Four vans, four classes of fourteen students each.</div><!--EndFragment-->Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15511432864734182961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000903378786484548.post-696599670699399512012-05-02T17:52:00.000-07:002012-11-16T09:27:05.479-08:00Waldorf Schools and Perfection<span style="background-color: white; color: #454545;">The following comment was submitted anonymously to the last post (</span><a href="http://ssagarin.blogspot.com/2012/05/waldorf-education-and-theory-induced.html">“Theory-Induced Blindness”</a><span style="background-color: white; color: #454545;">), but, since it doesn’t address the content of the post, I’ve decided to place it here and reply below.</span><br /><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #454545;">“Steve, I think that the 'perfection' vibe that Waldorf gives off is more about how parents need to adhere to the 'rules' they give to parents about how to raise their children (no television, plastic toys, eat organic food, no media and on and on) This only creates an 'us' versus 'them' mentality.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #454545;">The other piece is trying to lead an Anthroposophical based lifestyle ~ which seems to be confusing to those who have the belief and those who care nothing about it.<span class="apple-converted-space"> </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #454545;">Basically it seems to me that Waldorf has an on going identity crisis.<span class="apple-converted-space">”<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #454545;">Many years ago I attended a weekend seminar for young school administrators. I was the only attendee from a Waldorf school. One of the keynote speakers, a well-known psychologist, heard I was from a Waldorf school and commented, tongue-in-cheek, “Well, they [Waldorf schools] must be approaching perfection about now.” Clearly, even in the 1980s, Waldorf schools had a reputation for (pretending to) perfection.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #454545;">I believe, like dogmatism, this derives primarily from insecurity, and have written about it before (<a href="http://ssagarin.blogspot.com/2010/06/rigidity-and-dogma-in-waldorf-schools.html">“Rigidity and Dogma in WaldorfSchools—Some Theories”</a>).<o:p></o:p></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: white;"><br /></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #454545;">I’m not sure what the writer means by “identity crisis”—Erik Erikson, who coined the term, saw it as a challenge to the achievement of a healthy ego in adolescence. As a metaphor for the insecure and unfinished state of Waldorf education, it may be accurate. In that “Waldorf” is profoundly decentralized, however, it’s hard for me to think or write about it in such generalities. </span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #454545;"><br /></span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="background-color: white;"><span class="apple-converted-space"><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; color: #454545;">Ditto with an "anthroposophical lifestyle."</span><span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial;"> </span></span><span style="color: #454545;">I do believe, however, that excesses by some should not lead to the too-easy dismissal of thoughtful positions on television (even the American Pediatric Association agrees that TV is harmful to small kids!), media, toys, and food.</span></span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15511432864734182961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000903378786484548.post-737708172462185982012-05-01T06:25:00.000-07:002012-11-16T09:27:05.512-08:00Waldorf Education and Theory-Induced Blindness<br /><div class="MsoNormal">In the early 1600s, the Church believed it knew all it needed to know about celestial motion. The earth sat at the center of the cosmos, and everything revolved around it. That was the theory. Because of belief in this theory, virtually all who looked at the heavens were blind to alternatives, blind to data that didn’t quite fit, blind even to questions about the theory. In his brilliant book, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374275637/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1335878607&sr=1-1">Thinking, Fast & Slow</a></i>, Daniel Kahneman calls such an attitude “theory-induced blindness.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Many of those who work in Waldorf schools, unfortunately, suffer from “theory-induced blindness.” Because they “believe in” anthroposophy and Waldorf education, they are virtually immune not only to the areas in which their theory falls short, but even to Rudolf Steiner’s injunctions against such theorizing! Waldorf education, correctly practiced, is a theory only in the anti-theoretical way that Goethe famously stated: “The phenomenon is the theory.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">It comes down to this, by analogy: Say you are a Freudian psychoanalyst. You have a patient whom you know well, but who does not fit your theory of psychoanalysis. Is your allegiance to the theory, damn the patient? Or do you take your cues from the human being in front of you? Is your allegiance to Waldorf education? Or to children and their education?</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Much harm has been done by so-called Waldorf educators in the (sometimes unspoken) name of Waldorf education.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Unfortunately, too, many Waldorf critics suffer from exactly the same theory-induced blindness. They, in fact, accept the same theory that Waldorf-lovers accept, they just don’t like it. They criticize it.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Waldorf education raises interesting and valid questions about the very areas that Waldorf critics rail: about science (vs. “scientism,” a belief in science), about values and religion, about the developmental effects of early learning, and on and on. But, as long as we approach what we call Waldorf education with theory-induced blindness, we will fail to understand it, whether we endorse it or criticize it, and our dialogue will be simple polemics and rhetoric.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I could say to many of my colleagues, paraphrasing a rabbi whose name is lost to me, “The Waldorf education you believe in, I don’t believe in.” And I could say the same to many of the Waldorf critics.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15511432864734182961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000903378786484548.post-90625320158822494802012-05-01T06:09:00.000-07:002012-11-16T09:27:05.544-08:00Should I Stay or Should I Go? Education as Liberation and Constraint<br /><div class="MsoNormal">Education constrains us. Education guards us. In the transmission of culture and the production of citizens, education works to fence things as they are.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Education liberates us. Education frees us. In the power of literacy and numeracy, in exposure to the ideas of others, education pushes us out of the nest. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Education always occurs between these two poles, simultaneously guarding and liberating. I believe it was the historian Bernard Bailyn who first pointed this out.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">In the past few days, I’ve had occasion to enlarge this conception beyond the education of an individual, a Horace Mann, a Frederick Douglass, a you, or a me.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Take an independent (private) elementary school that decides to add a high school. The elementary school has spent years, even decades, growing to a sustainable size. It has a lot to protect, and now it is considering taking a large risk in growing to include grades 9-12. It has to, deliberately, shift its school culture and the appropriate activities of its board of trustees from guarding to liberating. This is asking a lot.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Waldorf schools are relatively unique in the U.S., at least, in that they see themselves, often, as comprehensive schools that include pre-K through high school grades. In their growth from risky beginnings to stable elementary schools, they shift, at an institutional level, from the entrepreneurial, creative work of liberating to the stability and risk-minimizing work of guarding what they have developed, what they have. This is good and healthy—trustees are responsible for safeguarding the institution they hold in trust. But if this institution now tries to grow again—to add a high school—the institution may well find itself at war with itself, a civil war of guards against liberators. Will the high school receive full support, or conditional support? Enough to survive it’s own risky growth? Good luck to it.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Or, think more broadly of an organization like the Association of Waldorf Schools of North America (AWSNA), which assumes responsibility for guarding the trademarks “Waldorf” and “Steiner” as they apply to education. In guarding what has developed over the past decades in the couple of hundred independent Waldorf schools, is it possible that AWSNA will decline to assume the risk inherent in promoting all the growth it might? I would say it’s not only possible, it’s almost inevitable. In the 1990s, AWSNA deliberately decided not to include charter or public Waldorf schools as members, and, ever since then, has had an uncertain relationship to this new approach to the Waldorf method.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Enlarging a conversation about guarding and liberating to an institutional or associational level necessarily generalizes but the general drift and potential conflicts among constituents, remain, I believe.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">And, when times are tight, we are apt to guard more and risk less, even if tough times call for greater risk.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">We recognize that the work of liberation is risky.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">We should recognize that constraint is risky, too.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">We can do ourselves in by overreaching. And we can do ourselves in by failing to grow. By maintaining a healthy and necessary tension between the poles of liberation or growth, and constraint or stasis, we actually minimize risk.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><!--EndFragment-->Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15511432864734182961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000903378786484548.post-47391294141710598342012-04-13T15:53:00.000-07:002012-11-16T09:27:05.576-08:00The Clam and the Butterfly: The Effect of a Little Interest<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;"><b></b>William, I’ll call him, wasn’t interested in anything. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">–What do you want to be when you grow up? </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">–I don’t know… </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">–Any ideas?</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">–No. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">–What about college. Any idea what you want to study?</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">–No. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">–Where you want to go? </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">–No. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">Fascinating, huh? That’s how his teachers felt. Like trying to teach a clam.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">I can’t recall a less motivated student. Bright, talented, but a C student and not interested in doing any better. No hobbies. Coordinated, but no real interest in sports. A reader, but no discernible passion. Other teachers and I shook our heads. Such possibilities going to waste. How to reach someone like this? Dismissive of most literature, dismissive of opinions different from his own, a bit of a know-it-all. A year. A year and a half.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">He was on scholarship, and the chair of the board met with him to try to help him recognize the opportunity he was wasting. Not a lot of movement. The board questioned continuing his scholarship. Mom was tearing her hair out. Dad was done with him. Teachers rolled their eyes. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">And then he signed up for a photography elective. He could have taken it earlier, but, really, we gave other students priority because they were better students, they had earned it. </div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">He and another student spent one afternoon a week in our darkroom. At the same time, he was enrolled in a filmmaking class that we instituted this year, for the first time, because our school has grown so large that not every student can participate in the school play. William enjoyed photography. He loved filmmaking. We closed school early for a snowstorm, and William, for the first time, expressed an emotion. He was crestfallen. He would miss photography.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">So far, so good. A student without apparent interest found an interest. But here’s where it gets interesting.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">William started making eye contact, even smiling from time to time. He went out of his way to talk to the woman with whom he carpooled to school each morning—earlier, he sat in silence. His attitude improved, his effort improved, his work improved, his grades improved, his relationships with teachers and schoolmates improved. A tough, experienced teacher commented on his new life. He started to open, like a clam.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">I remember a similar student—this one, Guy, I’ll call him, had a different personality. He wasn’t dismissive and apathetic, he was just goofy. His grades were terrible, his effort was lacking, his attitude—if he paid attention long enough to have an attitude—was, well, like the attitude of a stone skipping over a pond.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">And then, who knows why, he started taking flying lessons. (Our school is a couple of miles from a rural airstrip for propeller planes.) He got a job to pay for them. He decided he wanted to be a pilot. He knew he’d have to improve his grades, to learn some math. And he did it, rapidly. It was like watching a butterfly emerge from a chrysalis in speeded-up nature documentary style. He applied to aeronautic colleges and was admitted to every one. And he’s now a commercial pilot.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">It’s one thing to believe that we are whole beings. It’s another thing to see how one little movement toward interest gradually opens us like a chrysalis. Or like a clam.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15511432864734182961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000903378786484548.post-30242672170109956462012-04-01T13:54:00.000-07:002012-11-16T09:27:05.608-08:00Shoplifting, or, the Little Joys of Teaching Teens are Almost Without Number<div class="MsoNormal"><style><!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"Times New Roman"; panose-1:0 2 2 6 3 5 4 5 2 3; mso-font-charset:0; mso-generic-font-family:auto; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:50331648 0 0 0 1 0;} /* Style Definitions */ p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal {mso-style-parent:""; margin:0in; margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:12.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-parent:""; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} @page Section1 {size:8.5in 11.0in; margin:1.0in 1.25in 1.0in 1.25in; mso-header-margin:.5in; mso-footer-margin:.5in; mso-paper-source:0;} div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --></style>“I heard the manager say he’s going to catch him tomorrow and have him arrested.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">One of our more Norman-Rockwell-looking students, I’ll call him Joe, had been shoplifting on his lunch hour from one of the Norman-Rockwell-looking shops in town, a small pharmacy that sold snack food, close to our school building. Another student overheard the manager after Joe left, and reported what she’d heard.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Now what? Stand back and let things take their course? We—the other teachers and I—talked about the pros and cons of this inaction and decided that wouldn’t be right.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">We announced to the school that that shop was off-limits to our students until further notice. Eyebrows around the room made it clear that several students knew why. Was Joe alone? Probably not, but he was the one who got caught.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">We met with Joe and his mom after school.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">“The manager of the pharmacy knows you’ve been shoplifting. When you went in there tomorrow he was going to have you arrested. What should we do?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I wasn’t going to pretend not to know what had happened. I’ve learned over the years not to compound trouble by asking someone, say, a thief, to become a liar. This wasn’t an inquisition. It wasn’t a court of law. It was an attempt to help a young man grow up. And, if somehow he was innocent and wrongly accused, his reaction would make that clear.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Joe, to his credit, didn’t try to lie. “I still have some of the stuff I stole. I could return it and pay for the rest.” His mom sat silent.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">“And what about an apology?”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">“I’ll write an apology,” he said.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">“And deliver it to the manager by hand tomorrow,” we said.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">He agreed, and walked into the shop alone the next afternoon with a fist full of gum and candy, some money, and his letter. We learned later that the manager was pretty gruff with him, as he had every right to be, and let Joe know he’d be keeping an eye on him if he came into the store again.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">Incident concluded, we let the other students return to shopping there, but asked Joe not to—probably to his relief—for the rest of the year. We also put him on behavioral probation for the rest of the year, and, as far as we can tell, he lived up to our requirements.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">You hear, sometimes, the kids are “asking” to be caught. I’m not cynical enough to doubt it. But, after our first meeting as we were leaving, before Joe wrote or delivered the apology, we shook hands. He looked each of us in the eye and what he said startled me. He said, “Thank you.”</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15511432864734182961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000903378786484548.post-2720588642753444692012-03-29T19:55:00.000-07:002012-11-16T09:27:05.640-08:00How I Almost Got Fired Before I Had a Chance to Teach<div class="MsoNormal"><b></b>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. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">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.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">About twelve years ago, as I was finishing my dissertation and planning a career as an academic, I was offered a 7<sup>th</sup> grade class at the Steiner School that my children attended. The 6<sup>th</sup> 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. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">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.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">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.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">I stepped into the classroom, the antithesis of this thin, sincere, quiet woman; a thick, glib, loud man.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">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<sup>th</sup> 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.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">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.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">“You didn’t have a drawing on the blackboard to start the year.”</div><div class="MsoNormal">“No, the nameplates took so long I didn’t have time. There’s a nice picture there now.”</div><div class="MsoNormal">“There are no drawings in the students’ good books.”</div><div class="MsoNormal">“That’s true. I decided we needed to work on writing.”</div><div class="MsoNormal">“But Waldorf education is about making pictures.”</div><div class="MsoNormal">“Yes, and we’ll make ours in words. We’ll do plenty of drawings later on.”</div><div class="MsoNormal">“I can’t imagine going on a ship without drawing a picture first.”</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">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.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">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. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">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. </div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">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.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">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.</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br /></div><div class="MsoNormal">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.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15511432864734182961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000903378786484548.post-2707526859930153262012-03-22T09:34:00.000-07:002012-11-16T09:27:05.674-08:00Organic Free-range Schooling, or, How to Start a Waldorf High School the Hard Way and Keep it Going Despite Many ObstaclesOur 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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.”<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.)<br /><br />1. Independence:<br /><br />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.<br /><br />2. Community resources:<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />3. Big world:<br /><br />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?<br /><br />4. Part-time teachers:<br /><br />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.<br /><br />5. Combined classes:<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />6. Conservative planning:<br /><br />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.<br /><br />7. Commitment:<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.)<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.<br /><br />8. Small is beautiful:<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.”<br /><br />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. <br /><br />9. Miscellaneous<br /><br />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.)<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15511432864734182961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000903378786484548.post-42794058024213109932012-02-29T09:36:00.000-08:002012-11-16T09:27:05.711-08:00U.S. History in a NutshellWhen ranchers and rangers drove a large, closed General Motors/Chevrolet vehicle based on a truck chassis, the vehicle was called a "Suburban." As soon as actual suburban moms and dads started driving the same vehicle, its name was changed to the range-friendly "Yukon XL." Fantasy becomes reality becomes fantasy. U.S. history in a nutshell.<br /><br />Please send other pithy illustrations of our great nation in fantastic action. What about us tickles you?Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15511432864734182961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000903378786484548.post-77031461954742226622012-02-27T17:30:00.000-08:002012-11-16T09:27:05.744-08:00Today<style>@font-face { font-family: "Times New Roman"; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }table.MsoNormalTable { font-size: 10pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } </style> <br /><div class="MsoNormal">Arrive at school a few minutes before 8. Greet teachers, students, staff. Some students have work for me—late, but better than never. One teacher is planning a field trip to the Holocaust Museum, and needs to check arrangements. We gather for a teachers’ verse at 8:15, then disperse. I don’t teach first period, so I can check weekend email, make photocopies for my two morning classes, answer the Office Manager’s questions. We have applications on which to follow up, an upcoming visit from the building inspector, a fundraising dinner, a tennis team to put together. A parent shows up, unannounced, to ask for a few minutes. I just don’t have them, so we agree to meet tomorrow morning. 9:05, precalculus class. We just finished sequences and series, so we’ll take a couple of weeks for SAT review—mostly strategy and tactics, but it will also show what topics we could fruitfully review before the end of the year. The kids are in a good mood, first day back from a week off, colds mostly healed, happy to see each other again. Then Morning Meeting at 10—students circle the room and shake each teacher’s hand; announcements for the day and the week; sign-ups for a parent-provided hot lunch two days a week; welcome a new student who joined our 11<sup>th</sup> grade—that’s three new students for the spring semester. Our little school is growing. Then Robert Frost’s “Choose Something Like a Star,” which we’re learning as a school, students and teachers together, and Rudolf Steiner’s morning verse. Then fifteen minutes to sip coffee and review notes for a seminar (100 min. class) in cell biology. Class starts, everyone present, and we’re off. Prokaryotes, eukaryotes, bacterial diseases, oil-spill clean-up, fermentation, surface-area-to-volume ratios. An unplanned digression to discuss scale, to try to give some sense of a micrometer and then a nanometer. Then another digression into meaning—a cell is a “unit,” but only has meaning if we understand the context in which it functions. I used to stop class for misbehavior. Now I move kids around if necessary, and don’t stop the class for much. Pick up the pace and everyone has to pay attention. Then lunch time. I’m alone at the desk for a few minutes, and can catch up on phone messages and email, then 15 minutes, literally, to eat some egg salad and have another cup of coffee. Then pile the 9<sup>th</sup> and 10<sup>th</sup> graders into the bus to drive to a nearby athletic center for volleyball. I drop them, and head for the local community college for a meeting with the director and one of our trustees—we’re looking into renting space from them as we grow. They have an art room we could use. What’s the rent? Can we use storage in the back? Will our schedule mesh with theirs? I worked for this college ten years ago, and the director is the same. We chat—her son was a part-time policeman then, now a chief-of-police. The director will retire next year. Then a brief strategic planning meeting, and off to pick up the kids from volleyball. They spend the last fifteen minutes of the day cleaning the school, so I walk around checking their work. No paper towels in the downstairs bathroom. Who’s job is that? We need a substitute to clean the blackboards. The senior class is in charge, and they find someone to do it. Then handshakes good-bye all around, lock the school, and drive six students to the elementary school to catch buses home. I get home around 3:15 to snack and spend another hour and a half returning phone calls and answering emails. I change, drive to the gym for an hour and a half, then home to cook and eat. Janis is here to help, but she has a planning board meeting this evening, followed by a case study for grad school, which she started this spring. I have notes to write for classes tomorrow, but, because it’s the start of a new seminar, no student work to correct for a change. Hence, time to write this. The TV is on in the background—I love 30 Rock re-runs. Bed around 10:30—I’m reading Jesse Ball’s <i>The Way Through Doors</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> and Barbara Tuchman’s </span><i>A Distant Mirror</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> and Rudolf Steiner’s </span><i>The Christian Mystery </i><span style="font-style: normal;">and this week’s</span><i> New Yorker. </i><span style="font-style: normal;">Lights out before eleven. With luck, I’ll sleep most of the way through the night and do it all again tomorrow.</span></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15511432864734182961noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6000903378786484548.post-63119385664834101602012-02-23T11:33:00.000-08:002012-11-16T09:27:05.781-08:00What I Learned at the GymFor the past couple of years, I’ve been a regular at a <a href="http://www.crossfit.com/">“Cross Fit”</a> <a href="http://www.bizfitcrossfit.com/">gym</a> in my town. My experience there has me thinking about teaching and learning. (To a hammer, the world looks like a nail; to a teacher, the world looks like a lesson?) Here are some of the areas in which I believe work at the gym informs work in a school:<br /><br />1. Our gym is not full of testosterone and abs; I don’t know the exact split, but it seems that at least half the members are women. Ages range from high school students to retirees in their 70s. Abilities range from outstanding college athletes to some for whom “working out” is their first experience of exercise since high school gym class. Regardless, everyone does the same workout. Each does not do it with the same weights or expectations—workouts are scaled or modified to suit the individual.<br /><br />Can we teach, say, math classes this way? Every teacher knows that every class has a range of abilities and a range of prior experiences and a range of learning speeds and learning styles. Everyone is learning the same material, but some master it easily and do more, while others move more slowly and focus on the basics. In the gym, one coach works with the whole group, regardless of age or ability. Can teachers handle such a range, or is it necessary to track students by (perceived) ability, teach them one curriculum, expect them to perform on one set of expectations and problems, and then censure them in some way when they don’t measure up? (Really, despite political or administrative expectations, no real teacher does this anyway; we’re all human beings.)<br /><br />2. We can all deadlift—lift weight from the ground to hang at arm’s length. We can learn proper technique to maximize efficiency and minimize the risk of injury. If we are inflexible, we can work on flexibility and, in the meanwhile, start a lift with the weights raised on blocks. Regardless of where we start, we can learn, practice, and develop technique, flexibility, and strength to improve.<br /><br />This begs a question about educational standards. I’m very strong, but I can hardly jump at all. I would do very well on a standard that asked me to pick up a heavy weight, and very poorly on any standard that asked me to jump over a bar. To the extent that physical gifts mirror gifts of intelligence or memory—the sorts of things we pretend to write academic standards about—the same criticism clearly applies. The important thing is not that I jump over some arbitrary high jump bar, but that I work hard with good coaching to improve my jumping. And, needless to say, I simply cannot improve every year. I will reach my limit, I will plateau several times in approaching this limit, and, with time, I will decline.<br /><br />Clearly, we could write a standard that says that everyone—or nearly everyone—must be able to jump, let’s say, four feet. We could study ourselves to learn what percentage of us can already do this, and then set a goal that a higher percentage will be able to do this next year. We can train everyone in the high jump. This is all very reasonable on a macro scale. It’s unreasonable on a micro scale. All the training in the world may not enable me to meet the standard, and no training at all may be necessary for someone else to exceed the standard.<br /><br />3. This raises another point, one made well in Baumeister and Tierney’s recent book <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Willpower-Rediscovering-Greatest-Human-Strength/dp/1594203075/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1330023541&sr=8-1">Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength</a></em>. We suffer too often from two (additional) fallacies in our approach to education. The first is the prejudice that intelligence is innate—I’m born “able” to do math, or not, to draw pictures, or not. Other cultures—Baumeister focuses on Japan—take a different approach (one that is closer to Thomas Jefferson’s understanding of talent than to our own, by the way; something that we can improve with effort, not something somehow genetically programmed into us): intelligence is malleable. With willpower, and help, you can learn stuff. Yes, there are prodigies, but the vast majority of us simply need to apply ourselves to learn something. Once we are old enough that we have to think for ourselves, spoon feeding won’t work. As I’ve said to algebra students for years, tongue in cheek, “Millions of students dumber than you have learned this stuff.” No one in the gym says, “I can’t.” The point is to start where you are and learn.<br /><br />4. The second fallacy is the belief that we can learn without error, that we can learn by stepping only from success to success. We won’t try a math problem until we know how to do it and know that we’ll get the right answer. It’s embarrassing to the point of being unacceptable to struggle or fail, or to be seen to struggle or fail.<br /><br />In the gym we fail all the time—often (not always), the point is to work to the point of failure. That’s where real learning and real progress are made. (I’ve taught skiing and swimming in the past, and this is true for these, as well. Do drills with your students until their technique begins to fall apart, and you pinpoint what needs working on—balance, weight distribution, head position, you name it. If it was easy, everyone would do it. And they wouldn’t call it work.) Trying to learn math? If you’ll only attempt a problem you know already that you can do, your progress will be slow. If the expectations of your school and your teachers and your classmates and you of yourself are that there’s something wrong with getting the wrong answer, you’re simply not in a situation that can maximize learning.<br /><br />Imagine that, as an infant, you said to yourself, “learning to walk and to talk are too difficult. I’m not good at them. I give up.” You’d crawl through life, babbling gibberish. Well, it may come to that. In the meanwhile, we can recognize—as the gym does—that learning and improving include hard work and lots of failure.<br /><br />5. At the gym, we write our names on a white board and post our results for the day—times, rounds, weights, whatever measure is appropriate. We acknowledge publicly our achievements. Some are successes—including personal records, “PRs,” which friends post with exclamation marks—and some are less-than-stellar. We all have bad days and bad weeks; we all need to take it easy once in a while. The posts are objective statements—there’s no particular shame or triumph in them; they are what they are. <br /><br />Imagine if we had the same approach to school work. Instead of glancing at a test grade, then hiding the test in your book bag, the teacher posted all grades, all achievements, daily, next to your name. You could see how you did and how everyone else did. You might have to develop a more realistic view of your own achievements, and you might develop the resolve to do better next time. You and your classmates could see each other striving and support each other, while recognizing that some are better at some things and others have to work harder for small gains.<br /><br />6. Work at the gym is not boring or repetitive. It is, by design, “constantly varied.” Imagine a classroom that was constantly varied. You know walking in, within limits, what will happen, but you have no idea what. At a Cross Fit gym, you don’t know what you’ll face each day. A long run? Power lifting practice? Gymnastics? A combination of all three? Your body and mind can’t grow too complacent or settle into a deadening routine that will drive you to skip a workout and routinize your body so that it’s actually more prone to injury, not less. Work at the gym involves learning—learning new techniques, honing new neurological pathways. Practice is necessary, but routine is a killer.<br /><br />There are no fancy machines, no gimmicks or fads. Weights, pull-up bars, gymnastic rings, lots of open floor space, some rowing machines. That’s about it. There’s a parallel with education here, too. Just as we are not more physically fit than our ancestors, despite elliptical weight machines, programmable stationary bicycles, and fad diets, our education is not better for computerized learning, expensive textbooks, and faddish trends. At a certain point, close to the source, education is about the relationship of a knowledgeable teacher and a willing pupil, and not much more.<br /><br />7. Work at the gym is holistic, at least physically. Good diet and sleep demonstrably improve strength, endurance, and fitness. When a coach talks about diet and sleep, we listen. We participated in a 40 day “clean eating” challenge that might better have been described as a “clean living” challenge—we earned points for sleeping eight hours or more, eating right, and drinking enough water. Yet, when teachers try to talk to parents or students about the same issues—sleep deprivation is equivalent to a reduction in IQ; low blood glucose is directly connected to a loss of impulse control—their pleas often fall on deaf ears. Why are you trying to control my life, or my child’s life?<br /><br />Good teachers know lots of this already, and lots of teaching is not like a gym at all. Work in a gym may be quantified—weight lifted, time run. Important aspects of our work with our students are not quantifiable—how do you measure initiative, creativity, character, diligence, open-mindedness? Even aspects of teaching that we treat as quantifiable—learning algebra, for instance, are not as clear-cut as we might wish. A good student with a high grade is not necessarily the most insightful. Getting all the problems right may not demonstrate conceptual understanding. It’s possible to win a spelling bee without knowing the definition of any words. <br /><br />On the other hand, it’s good to remind ourselves, especially in the bleak days of February, of what we can learn at the gym: <br /><br />• We’re not all the same but we can still share a classroom, a curriculum, the enterprise of education. We don’t need to segregate students based on ability in order to teach them.<br />• External standards can be idiotic.<br />• It’s good to be objective. It’s okay to quantify what is quantifiable.<br />• Failure, in the right context, demonstrates limits, not shame.<br />• At a certain point, routine is the enemy of growth.<br />• We are wholes. What is good for the body is good for the mind.<br />• If we put our minds to it, we can improve.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/15511432864734182961noreply@blogger.com0