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What I Learned at the Gym
For the past couple of years, I’ve been a regular at a “Cross Fit”gym in my town. My experience there has me thinking about teaching and learning. (To a hammer, the world looks like a nail; to a...
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Today
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U.S. History in a Nutshell
When 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...
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Organic Free-range Schooling, or, How to Start a Waldorf High School the Hard...
Our German teacher, a Jew whose family escaped from Germany prior to World War II, attended the Munich-Schwabing Rudolf Steiner School after the war, and remembers carrying bricks to school in the...
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How I Almost Got Fired Before I Had a Chance to Teach
You know you’re in trouble when the President of the Board of Trustees faxes the school to say that his son will not return to school until you’re fired. What had I done to provoke this terse fax?...
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Shoplifting, or, the Little Joys of Teaching Teens are Almost Without Number
“I heard the manager say he’s going to catch him tomorrow and have him arrested.”One of our more Norman-Rockwell-looking students, I’ll call him Joe, had been shoplifting on his lunch hour from one of...
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The Clam and the Butterfly: The Effect of a Little Interest
William, I’ll call him, wasn’t interested in anything. –What do you want to be when you grow up? –I don’t know… –Any ideas?–No. –What about college. Any idea what you want to study?–No. –Where you want...
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Should I Stay or Should I Go? Education as Liberation and Constraint
Education constrains us. Education guards us. In the transmission of culture and the production of citizens, education works to fence things as they are.Education liberates us. Education frees us. In...
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Waldorf Education and Theory-Induced Blindness
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...
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Waldorf Schools and Perfection
The following comment was submitted anonymously to the last post (“Theory-Induced Blindness”), but, since it doesn’t address the content of the post, I’ve decided to place it here and reply...
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The Winch, The Toilet, and the Bus: Concrete Answers to Fuzzy Questions
Sometimes, fuzzy questions have practical and specific answers. You just have to see them. Here are three examples.1.) A friend of a friend wanted to start an ocean sailing school, and wasn’t sure how...
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If 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?One thing. Be as specific and as detailed as you like.
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Part of a Waldorf Teacher Education Reading List
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.Here's a reading list for a course on the...
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Waldorf Critics—The FAQ You’ve Been Waiting For
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...
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Crisis in the History of Education in the United States
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...
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A Glance at Discipline Methods in Waldorf Schools
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.A commenter on a...
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How Many Waldorf Teachers Actually Take an Elementary School Class for Eight...
About six years ago, one of my MSEd students, Ashwini Pawar, wrote her thesis on this question. You cannot find Rudolf Steiner saying that teachers should take a class for so many years—“several,” yes....
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Waldorf Education is Deeply Strange
Because Waldorf education is deeply strange, we need not make it superficially strange.Strangeness can be good because it can shock us into awareness. Without strangeness, perhaps, we drowsily stay our...
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Playing “Steiner Says” Again: Nine More Myths about Waldorf Education
(Click here to read the first installment of “Playing ‘Steiner Says.’”)I started writing this essay following a re-reading this summer of Rudolf Steiner’s Education for Adolescence during which I was...
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One World, Two Worlds, False Worlds, True World: Why the Education of...
We live in one world, but we act like we live in two.We characterize these two worlds in many different ways: Mind and body, “inner life” and “outer life,” subjective and objective, quantity and...
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An Unintended Consequence of Reading Aquinas with High School Students
I assigned my Medieval History students Thomas Aquinas’ proofs for the existence of God from his Summa Theologiae. It was not my intention to convert students to Catholicism or even really to raise the...
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Elevator Speech--Part 3
My own attempt at an elevator speech to describe Waldorf education. Waddaya think?Education inheres in the relationship of student and teacher. A teacher’s job is to connect the student in a...
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Free the Math Gnomes
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:...
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How to Lose Your Teaching Job: The Big Three
Why do teachers get fired?An old joke in Waldorf schools goes like this:A new teacher meets the teacher she’s replacing as he packs up his belongings. He gives her three envelopes. “When you’re in...
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