Among my pet peeves regarding the translation and publication of Rudolf Steiner’s educational work is this:
The book Education for Adolescents is misnamed and therefore overlooked by many Waldorf teachers who might benefit from studying it.
Through about the 1960s, the book was published with the uninformative but more accurate title, The Supplementary Course. It was called this because it supplemented the course that Steiner gave for the teachers at the first Waldorf School in late summer 1919 before the school opened its doors. After one year of success and failure, ups and downs, and observation of how the students and teachers were doing in real life, Steiner gave 8 lectures, literally a course for teachers meant to supplement the course he had given the year before.
Reading through, it’s clear, too that the first four of the eight lectures basically pertain to all teachers, not simply those who teach adolescents. And, later, when he addresses the teaching of adolescents—the Waldorf school was about to open its high school grades—it’s clear that he’s speaking to teachers of all grades (except early childhood, not because he didn’t want to, but because the first Waldorf school had no early childhood or kindergarten program at that point in its life).
It’s one thing for the book to be overlooked by those who might profitably read it.
It’s another when some do read it but ignore the discussion in it because “it's for high school students,” projecting an understanding of an erroneous title onto the contents.
Finally, it’s here, in lecture 3, that Steiner lays out, clearly and beautifully, the concept of a lesson carried over two days (not three; I am not aware of any source for a three day lesson), one that is not, in fact a “threefold” lesson in the conventional way these are conceived, but in a way that calls on the whole child to begin, that then carries into imagination and will, and that then returns to judgment and conceptualization on the following day.
But don’t take my word for it, read the darn thing yourself.
Showing posts with label adolescence. Show all posts
Showing posts with label adolescence. Show all posts
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Thursday, December 11, 2008
In Defense of Unwholesome, Disaffected Risk-Takers
Granville Stanley Hall, turn-of-the-century psychologist and founder and first president of the American Psychological Association, helped to establish the contemporary view of adolescents as unwholesome, disaffected risk-takers. Since then, piles of research and popular opinion have helped to create the underclass of teens that annoy, scare, and puzzle us grownups. We too often say good-bye to our children as they enter, say, seventh grade, hoping to see them again as human beings when they reach their late teens or early twenties.
No doubt teens are an enigma in our adolescent age—advertisers wish to sexualize and accelerate the development of children to that point in adolescence in which they realize their desires, can argue for them, but haven’t developed the forebrain skill of judgment necessary for the beginnings of wisdom. Advertisers then wish to keep all of us in this adolescent state until we die, consuming without thinking. You could say we are a culture obsessed with adolescence because we understand it so little, and that we understand it so little because we have created a culture that keeps us too close to it.
Because of their developmental stage, teens will usually act as we expect they will. Treat them with fear, and they’ll repay your trust; treat them with respect, and you’ll discover that they are more respectable than many of the adults you know. (These statements hold true for adults, too, but adults have enough self-control occasionally to ignore your trust—or your censure—if they choose.)
Teens, on the threshold of adulthood, defend themselves as they enter this new territory. Risk-taking is a mirror of idealism; what task or quest is worth putting myself on the line for? Disaffection is a mirror of feeling—life means so much; I can’t let it show. If we can see through the fronts that teens present, we discover intelligent, sensitive, thoughtful young men and women. I’ve taught four-year olds to swim and fifty-year olds social science research methods, but I enjoy and am privileged to teach open-minded, energetic, idealistic, humorous teenagers. Thanks, kids.
No doubt teens are an enigma in our adolescent age—advertisers wish to sexualize and accelerate the development of children to that point in adolescence in which they realize their desires, can argue for them, but haven’t developed the forebrain skill of judgment necessary for the beginnings of wisdom. Advertisers then wish to keep all of us in this adolescent state until we die, consuming without thinking. You could say we are a culture obsessed with adolescence because we understand it so little, and that we understand it so little because we have created a culture that keeps us too close to it.
Because of their developmental stage, teens will usually act as we expect they will. Treat them with fear, and they’ll repay your trust; treat them with respect, and you’ll discover that they are more respectable than many of the adults you know. (These statements hold true for adults, too, but adults have enough self-control occasionally to ignore your trust—or your censure—if they choose.)
Teens, on the threshold of adulthood, defend themselves as they enter this new territory. Risk-taking is a mirror of idealism; what task or quest is worth putting myself on the line for? Disaffection is a mirror of feeling—life means so much; I can’t let it show. If we can see through the fronts that teens present, we discover intelligent, sensitive, thoughtful young men and women. I’ve taught four-year olds to swim and fifty-year olds social science research methods, but I enjoy and am privileged to teach open-minded, energetic, idealistic, humorous teenagers. Thanks, kids.
Saturday, December 6, 2008
My Name is Steve, and I'm a Cheater
“Surveys show that cheating in school… has soared since researchers first measured the phenomenon on a broad scale at 99 colleges in the mid-1960s.”
—Maura J. Casey, “Digging out Roots of Cheating in High School,” NY Times, Oct. 13, 2008
In high school—I went to a Waldorf high school—I cheated all the time. I gave out lots of answers, and received plenty, including in a German class that consisted of two students and an excellent teacher.
We loved Dr. Macht, his warmth, his war stories. But when it came to testing, he was terrible. He’d doze off, or leave the room. He wouldn’t notice that we’d written all the answers on the blackboard and then patted the eraser lightly over them. The board looked clean, but it was filthy with vocabulary.
I acknowledge my moral failing in cheating in his class. But Dr. Macht didn’t really care, so we didn’t care. The whole thing seems to have been a collusion between Dr. Macht and us—“I have to test you, but this won’t really do much to improve your language skills, so I’ll disengage myself, and you can do what you like.” I learned German anyway, passing a translation exam for my doctorate fifteen years later without studying. But the learning and the testing were clearly in different categories.
In middle school we taught each other cool ways to cheat. You can take a penknife, carve a bit of the paint off a pencil, and write a few helpful answers in tiny letters on the bare wood. You can tape a cheat-sheet to the back of the chair of the student in front of you. You can write on the white rubber of your converse sneakers, or on your jeans, or on your hand, although that’s the first and, often, only place a teacher will look. This was before cell phones and texting.
In high school we were just brazen—we whispered or mouthed answers across the rows, exchanged papers or tests, or just talked to each other when a teacher left the room. We prepared answer sheets in advance, then slipped them into our test booklets or piles of scrap paper.
Not everyone cheated, but most did, regardless of intelligence. I’d say more boys than girls cheated, but, then, I was a boy.
After high school, I went to a college that had a strict honor code. To this day, I remember it—we had to write it and sign it on every exam: “I pledge my honor that I have not violated the Honor Code during this examination.” I didn’t cheat in college, I wasn’t tempted to, and I never witnessed anyone else cheating. Professors placed piles of exams at the front of the room, then left. We students took the exams in the allotted time and handed them in. We could stretch out in the hall, return to our rooms, do what we liked, as long as the exam was in on time.
What was the difference? I was older in college, possibly more mature (although, living away from home, possible less), and the stakes may have been higher. But, really, the difference was in school and teacher expectations.
The consequences for cheating in high school were minimal—warning, admonishment, a lower grade. In high school, teachers—even good teachers, of which I had more than my fair share—were too self-involved or too careless. If they didn’t really care, neither did we. Why did they give tests? To appease parents or colleagues? Because it was something that teachers do? Usually, their hearts weren’t in it.
Those teachers who cared made it clear, and, for the most part, we took them seriously. “Hey. You really have to study for Mr. Madsen’s tests.” We did study, and we didn’t cheat, and we respected Mr. Madsen.
In college, it was clear, we could be expelled for cheating or plagiarizing. In college, the teachers weren’t necessarily less self-involved or careless, they didn’t necessarily believe in the educational efficacy of testing. The institution, the community of the school, however, made expectations and consequences clear, beyond any idiosyncrasies of our (sometimes very) idiosyncratic teachers. The school cared, so the individual teachers didn’t have to. The community of the school—teachers, students, administrators—took the question of cheating seriously, wrote a simple code, empanelled students and teachers to deal with violations, and secured “buy in” from everyone.
Today I work in a tiny high school of twenty students. It’s easy to police a test or exam, but I suspect some students still cheat. I tell my students about my high school experience, however, and also about my college experience. I let them know that I take cheating seriously, and that I will fail them for the course (not just for the test or the assignment) if they cheat. I also tell them that if I give them a test it will be designed fairly to allow them to demonstrate what they know, not to trip them up or to require cramming irrelevant facts. I also sit in the back of the room, behind them, so I can see them and they can’t see me. This makes illicit behavior easier to spot.
Writing a “real” test, one that fairly assesses knowledge and ability and that makes cheating difficult, is a chore, but it’s a worthwhile chore. If the answers aren’t things that can be whispered between students, or copied onto a crib sheet, students will find it harder to cheat, even if they want to. If they know that their teachers respect them and their mutual educational work, they’ll be less prone to cheating. If they know that teachers and school take cheating seriously, too, they’ll be less willing to risk the consequences.
The Internet has made it easier to cheat on papers—copying and pasting replace thinking and writing—but it’s also made it easy to catch cheaters. A few years ago, one of my students wrote a biography of Che Guevara. I suspected that the work wasn’t the student’s own. I chose five words from his paper that seemed like words he might not use, typed them into Google, and was directed instantly to the obscure paper, posted to the web, from which he had copied. It took me about fifteen seconds. I tell my current students this story, too.
I don’t know for certain that my students don’t cheat on tests, but I’m pretty sure they’re better behaved than I was at their age. Part of my teaching today is to avoid the mistakes my own teachers and I made a long time ago.
—Maura J. Casey, “Digging out Roots of Cheating in High School,” NY Times, Oct. 13, 2008
In high school—I went to a Waldorf high school—I cheated all the time. I gave out lots of answers, and received plenty, including in a German class that consisted of two students and an excellent teacher.
We loved Dr. Macht, his warmth, his war stories. But when it came to testing, he was terrible. He’d doze off, or leave the room. He wouldn’t notice that we’d written all the answers on the blackboard and then patted the eraser lightly over them. The board looked clean, but it was filthy with vocabulary.
I acknowledge my moral failing in cheating in his class. But Dr. Macht didn’t really care, so we didn’t care. The whole thing seems to have been a collusion between Dr. Macht and us—“I have to test you, but this won’t really do much to improve your language skills, so I’ll disengage myself, and you can do what you like.” I learned German anyway, passing a translation exam for my doctorate fifteen years later without studying. But the learning and the testing were clearly in different categories.
In middle school we taught each other cool ways to cheat. You can take a penknife, carve a bit of the paint off a pencil, and write a few helpful answers in tiny letters on the bare wood. You can tape a cheat-sheet to the back of the chair of the student in front of you. You can write on the white rubber of your converse sneakers, or on your jeans, or on your hand, although that’s the first and, often, only place a teacher will look. This was before cell phones and texting.
In high school we were just brazen—we whispered or mouthed answers across the rows, exchanged papers or tests, or just talked to each other when a teacher left the room. We prepared answer sheets in advance, then slipped them into our test booklets or piles of scrap paper.
Not everyone cheated, but most did, regardless of intelligence. I’d say more boys than girls cheated, but, then, I was a boy.
After high school, I went to a college that had a strict honor code. To this day, I remember it—we had to write it and sign it on every exam: “I pledge my honor that I have not violated the Honor Code during this examination.” I didn’t cheat in college, I wasn’t tempted to, and I never witnessed anyone else cheating. Professors placed piles of exams at the front of the room, then left. We students took the exams in the allotted time and handed them in. We could stretch out in the hall, return to our rooms, do what we liked, as long as the exam was in on time.
What was the difference? I was older in college, possibly more mature (although, living away from home, possible less), and the stakes may have been higher. But, really, the difference was in school and teacher expectations.
The consequences for cheating in high school were minimal—warning, admonishment, a lower grade. In high school, teachers—even good teachers, of which I had more than my fair share—were too self-involved or too careless. If they didn’t really care, neither did we. Why did they give tests? To appease parents or colleagues? Because it was something that teachers do? Usually, their hearts weren’t in it.
Those teachers who cared made it clear, and, for the most part, we took them seriously. “Hey. You really have to study for Mr. Madsen’s tests.” We did study, and we didn’t cheat, and we respected Mr. Madsen.
In college, it was clear, we could be expelled for cheating or plagiarizing. In college, the teachers weren’t necessarily less self-involved or careless, they didn’t necessarily believe in the educational efficacy of testing. The institution, the community of the school, however, made expectations and consequences clear, beyond any idiosyncrasies of our (sometimes very) idiosyncratic teachers. The school cared, so the individual teachers didn’t have to. The community of the school—teachers, students, administrators—took the question of cheating seriously, wrote a simple code, empanelled students and teachers to deal with violations, and secured “buy in” from everyone.
Today I work in a tiny high school of twenty students. It’s easy to police a test or exam, but I suspect some students still cheat. I tell my students about my high school experience, however, and also about my college experience. I let them know that I take cheating seriously, and that I will fail them for the course (not just for the test or the assignment) if they cheat. I also tell them that if I give them a test it will be designed fairly to allow them to demonstrate what they know, not to trip them up or to require cramming irrelevant facts. I also sit in the back of the room, behind them, so I can see them and they can’t see me. This makes illicit behavior easier to spot.
Writing a “real” test, one that fairly assesses knowledge and ability and that makes cheating difficult, is a chore, but it’s a worthwhile chore. If the answers aren’t things that can be whispered between students, or copied onto a crib sheet, students will find it harder to cheat, even if they want to. If they know that their teachers respect them and their mutual educational work, they’ll be less prone to cheating. If they know that teachers and school take cheating seriously, too, they’ll be less willing to risk the consequences.
The Internet has made it easier to cheat on papers—copying and pasting replace thinking and writing—but it’s also made it easy to catch cheaters. A few years ago, one of my students wrote a biography of Che Guevara. I suspected that the work wasn’t the student’s own. I chose five words from his paper that seemed like words he might not use, typed them into Google, and was directed instantly to the obscure paper, posted to the web, from which he had copied. It took me about fifteen seconds. I tell my current students this story, too.
I don’t know for certain that my students don’t cheat on tests, but I’m pretty sure they’re better behaved than I was at their age. Part of my teaching today is to avoid the mistakes my own teachers and I made a long time ago.
Friday, December 5, 2008
A Strong Stand Against Drug Use
Warning teenagers about the physiological and even the emotional effects of drug use has little value; who feels more immortal and invincible than a teen? Over twenty years of teaching, I have come to believe strongly, however, that a description of the spiritual effects of drug experimentation can help teenagers choose not to use mind-altering drugs.
Regardless of points of view and interpretation, we teachers in Waldorf schools and Steiner schools share a unity of purpose and vision, and this centers around an understanding of the existence of a spiritual dimension to our world. When we experience truth—as in the truth of a geometric proof –or beauty—as in a piece of music—we partake of the non-physical, of the spiritual. A piano produces vibrations, but a human being hears music.
Our perceptions of the world can lead us to understand spiritual perception. Anything we do, then, that distorts our perception of the world makes it more difficult to follow a path that will lead to understanding of the truly spiritual. This is especially true if the distortion has the quality of spiritual experience, as it does under the influence of mind-altering drugs. It is not that hallucinations, mild or profound, are illusory because they are false. They are dangerous precisely because they are unearned, unmoored openings into truth and beauty. And who, shown an easy path, will choose the harder one, especially if the ends are unknown?
Some students are open to the ideas expressed above but then assume that anyone who shares my view must judge harshly anyone who uses drugs—a relative, a friend. I point out, then, that you needn’t love someone less who has a different view of the world, and you needn’t enter that person’s experience in order to love or support them—this is the value of imagination. If a friend suffers from epilepsy, we don’t love her less because of it or feel the need to induce seizures in ourselves in order to share her experience. This analogy is not perfect because the illusions of drug use lead to disagreements about their value, whereas we mutually agree that we should not be sick if that is not our lot.
Regardless of points of view and interpretation, we teachers in Waldorf schools and Steiner schools share a unity of purpose and vision, and this centers around an understanding of the existence of a spiritual dimension to our world. When we experience truth—as in the truth of a geometric proof –or beauty—as in a piece of music—we partake of the non-physical, of the spiritual. A piano produces vibrations, but a human being hears music.
Our perceptions of the world can lead us to understand spiritual perception. Anything we do, then, that distorts our perception of the world makes it more difficult to follow a path that will lead to understanding of the truly spiritual. This is especially true if the distortion has the quality of spiritual experience, as it does under the influence of mind-altering drugs. It is not that hallucinations, mild or profound, are illusory because they are false. They are dangerous precisely because they are unearned, unmoored openings into truth and beauty. And who, shown an easy path, will choose the harder one, especially if the ends are unknown?
Some students are open to the ideas expressed above but then assume that anyone who shares my view must judge harshly anyone who uses drugs—a relative, a friend. I point out, then, that you needn’t love someone less who has a different view of the world, and you needn’t enter that person’s experience in order to love or support them—this is the value of imagination. If a friend suffers from epilepsy, we don’t love her less because of it or feel the need to induce seizures in ourselves in order to share her experience. This analogy is not perfect because the illusions of drug use lead to disagreements about their value, whereas we mutually agree that we should not be sick if that is not our lot.
Please Grow Up
Won’t you please grow up?
Oh, by the way, don’t you dare grow up.
You, and I, and our children, are pressured to grow up too quickly and then, as soon as we get close to maturity, we are pressured not to grow up at all.
From our first moments of consciousness, advertisers ask us to grow up faster—buy, consume, conform to the image we provide you; be sexy, be hip, and be cool. Also, be very, very self-conscious; be afraid to be yourself without our products.
And from our first moments of maturity, we are told not to grow up. Stay young, impressionable, incomplete, malleable, and insecure—buy, consume, be sexy, be hip, and be cool. Just, please, continue to be a teenager and buy our products. Products that will help you to continue to feel young and vibrant. Be afraid to be yourself without them.
You and I are the filling in an adolescent sandwich.
Why are we subject to these mutually supportive pressures to grow up fast, then stagnate and stay forever young? Because teens are in that in-between place, that nowhere land in which they have enough freedom, power, maturity, mobility and intelligence to make choices but not the developed judgment always to make wise or rational decisions. Recent research on teen brains shows this, although clearly advertisers have been aware of it for decades.
I don’t mean to slander young people. Adolescence is a wonderful thing. Teens are insightful and idealistic. They are innovative, eager, and open-minded. They promote change, are drawn to new ideas. They have little tolerance for the disingenuous. They have a powerful sense for what is fair, if not always reasonable.
An image of adolescence is not simply an image of teenagers, by the way. It is an image of the United States. As a nation we are hypocritical and dangerous, and callow, naïve and unconsciously selfish consumers. But we are also fair, idealistic, open-minded, and innovative. Maybe if we understand ourselves as an adolescent culture we can understand how the world can see us in two very different ways at the same time.
I don’t mean to slander advertisers, either. Their efforts are successful because we allow them to be. And, through our increasing sophistication, we force them into ever-more self-referential, ironic stances, but these work on us, too. No matter how savvy or critical you are, let me ask you: don’t you believe, maybe secretly, that the products you use are the best? Maybe your teeth won’t be the whitest, you’ve seen through that scam, but then maybe your teeth will be happier in a progressive mouth, coddled by baking soda, organic sea-salt and sage. Is your choice of car or clothes the absolutely most rational? Or, like the rest of us, do you just have a rationale?
Also, who are these advertisers, these conniving image merchants? Nike, McDonalds, Coke and GM? Wal-mart or K-mart? They are certainly not separate from you and me; they are you and me. They are local and worldwide employers, they drive globalization, they transcend national governments. On average and by default, they represent us. And they are exquisitely sensitive to us and to our desires.
Advertisers have a technical term for our emotional attachment to their products—they call it “salience,” and it’s reflected in your blood pressure, your sweat glands, your respiration rate, and the dilation of your pupils. You can decide not to patronize a company, say, Nike, with your mind, but your body still wants it. What you see isn’t only what you get, it’s also who you are.
Even if you shun certain products, buy locally and responsibly (but where did your jeans come from? Your car?) you are complicit in and responsible for the world that advertisers, in part, have created. Sorry, there’s nowhere else to go. Our world is a reflection of who we are collectively. What we truly don’t tolerate doesn’t last long.
Things will change. This fear drives corporations and advertisers harder, pushing you harder to get hooked on their products earlier, be less conscious of your affinity for their image. Here’s how they will change, not tomorrow, but eventually. It’s what the Germans used to call an “immanent critique.” It may look like a fair fight, but it’s not. Moral imagination and idealism are poles to which we are inevitably drawn. Advertisers play on just these qualities—pleasure, the good things in life, great ideas, human values—in whatever twisted fashion.
We will wake from the voracious dream of more and better things, of remaining young and unformed, and, when we do, we will enjoy a better life. We will decide to protect our children from the world that we have made, a world that doesn’t yet belong to them. We will allow them grow up as we could not, quietly maturing into the adults we wish we could be. In doing this, in giving our children’s childhoods back to them, we ourselves will shed our adolescence. We will finally grow up.
Oh, by the way, don’t you dare grow up.
You, and I, and our children, are pressured to grow up too quickly and then, as soon as we get close to maturity, we are pressured not to grow up at all.
From our first moments of consciousness, advertisers ask us to grow up faster—buy, consume, conform to the image we provide you; be sexy, be hip, and be cool. Also, be very, very self-conscious; be afraid to be yourself without our products.
And from our first moments of maturity, we are told not to grow up. Stay young, impressionable, incomplete, malleable, and insecure—buy, consume, be sexy, be hip, and be cool. Just, please, continue to be a teenager and buy our products. Products that will help you to continue to feel young and vibrant. Be afraid to be yourself without them.
You and I are the filling in an adolescent sandwich.
Why are we subject to these mutually supportive pressures to grow up fast, then stagnate and stay forever young? Because teens are in that in-between place, that nowhere land in which they have enough freedom, power, maturity, mobility and intelligence to make choices but not the developed judgment always to make wise or rational decisions. Recent research on teen brains shows this, although clearly advertisers have been aware of it for decades.
I don’t mean to slander young people. Adolescence is a wonderful thing. Teens are insightful and idealistic. They are innovative, eager, and open-minded. They promote change, are drawn to new ideas. They have little tolerance for the disingenuous. They have a powerful sense for what is fair, if not always reasonable.
An image of adolescence is not simply an image of teenagers, by the way. It is an image of the United States. As a nation we are hypocritical and dangerous, and callow, naïve and unconsciously selfish consumers. But we are also fair, idealistic, open-minded, and innovative. Maybe if we understand ourselves as an adolescent culture we can understand how the world can see us in two very different ways at the same time.
I don’t mean to slander advertisers, either. Their efforts are successful because we allow them to be. And, through our increasing sophistication, we force them into ever-more self-referential, ironic stances, but these work on us, too. No matter how savvy or critical you are, let me ask you: don’t you believe, maybe secretly, that the products you use are the best? Maybe your teeth won’t be the whitest, you’ve seen through that scam, but then maybe your teeth will be happier in a progressive mouth, coddled by baking soda, organic sea-salt and sage. Is your choice of car or clothes the absolutely most rational? Or, like the rest of us, do you just have a rationale?
Also, who are these advertisers, these conniving image merchants? Nike, McDonalds, Coke and GM? Wal-mart or K-mart? They are certainly not separate from you and me; they are you and me. They are local and worldwide employers, they drive globalization, they transcend national governments. On average and by default, they represent us. And they are exquisitely sensitive to us and to our desires.
Advertisers have a technical term for our emotional attachment to their products—they call it “salience,” and it’s reflected in your blood pressure, your sweat glands, your respiration rate, and the dilation of your pupils. You can decide not to patronize a company, say, Nike, with your mind, but your body still wants it. What you see isn’t only what you get, it’s also who you are.
Even if you shun certain products, buy locally and responsibly (but where did your jeans come from? Your car?) you are complicit in and responsible for the world that advertisers, in part, have created. Sorry, there’s nowhere else to go. Our world is a reflection of who we are collectively. What we truly don’t tolerate doesn’t last long.
Things will change. This fear drives corporations and advertisers harder, pushing you harder to get hooked on their products earlier, be less conscious of your affinity for their image. Here’s how they will change, not tomorrow, but eventually. It’s what the Germans used to call an “immanent critique.” It may look like a fair fight, but it’s not. Moral imagination and idealism are poles to which we are inevitably drawn. Advertisers play on just these qualities—pleasure, the good things in life, great ideas, human values—in whatever twisted fashion.
We will wake from the voracious dream of more and better things, of remaining young and unformed, and, when we do, we will enjoy a better life. We will decide to protect our children from the world that we have made, a world that doesn’t yet belong to them. We will allow them grow up as we could not, quietly maturing into the adults we wish we could be. In doing this, in giving our children’s childhoods back to them, we ourselves will shed our adolescence. We will finally grow up.
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