Colloquium on English - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

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128 reward for the first person to sight the white whale, Moby Dick. Around the rim of the circular coin are the letters, “El Quito, Ecuador.” Pictured on the coin is a scene: in the sky the sun shines in the constellation of Libra. Below are three mountain peaks. On top of one is a flame, on another is a rooster, on the third is a tower. Captain Ahab, beholding the coin, sees the flame as Ahab, sees the rooster as Ahab, sees the tower as Ahab; he sees Ahab, Ahab, Ahab. First mate Starbuck, with his melancholic foreboding, sees the three peaks embodying the trinity, and focuses on the valleys between them, embodying the mood of the 23rd Psalm’s “valley of the shadow of death.” Buoyant second mate Stubb takes the sign of Libra as the start of a rambling, improvised, yet cohesive meditation on the signs of the zodiac as a picture of the stages of a human life. Pragmatic third mate Flask looks at the sixteendollar-coin and sees nothing more than a means of purchasing 960 cigars. The black cabin boy Pip, who has lost himself while floating adrift one long day before being rescued, sees neither himself nor even the coin itself, but rather everyone else’s “reading” activity. “I look, you look, he looks. We look, you look, they look. Where’s Pip? Where’s Pip? Where’s Pip?…” Every member of the Pequod’s crew reads the same golden doubloon differently. So any book speaks to each of us somewhat differently, although we may be, figuratively, on the same journey. How does reading continually deepen, “vertically?” Harvard’s Professor William Alfred, featured by Life magazine in the 1970’s as one of the ten best college professors in the U.S., said that after he had read John Milton’s Paradise Lost fifteen times, he had started to “get it.” What are the implications of that statement? Not that he didn’t get anything during his first reading of it. And certainly not that he had read it fifteen times in a row to start to get something from it. But perhaps over the years the parts had been leading him toward the whole, until during his fifteenth read, like frit turning to glass, the whole started to illumine all the parts. William Alfred the reader had been maturing continuously over the years, not only through years of life experience, but also through the influence of Paradise Lost itself. Mediocre books we read once and outgrow. Masterpieces we can always grow into; they grow us, always further. Acknowledging the “horizontal “ variety of reading experience, and realizing the “vertical,” growing capacity of masterpieces, how can we, as teachers, think about the most important question of all in relation to reading: timing? Of course, one aspect of timing is as unpredictable as fate, fortune, karma, falling in love, “accidents.” Books have a way of appearing at just the right time in a person’s life. Or one is given a book, and three years later, at just the right time, one is moved to read it finally. Such examples of individual timing are impossible to write about generally. The best we can do as teachers is to listen and to trust our intuitions in relation to particular books for particular individuals at particular times. However, the accuracy of our intuitions can be greatly helped by deepening our understanding of child development. And our reasoned understanding of the stages of adolescence can lead to many timely choices.
A number of good books exist which can help one to think about the teen-ager’s development year-by year: Betty Staley’s Between Form and Freedom, Julian Sleigh’s From Thirteen to Nineteen, Bernard Lievegoed’s Phases, George and Gisela O’Neill’s The Rhythms of Life, Douglas Gerwin’s introduction in The Genesis of a Waldorf School, to name a few. Ninth Grade Since the ninth grader is stepping out of the lower school into high school and waking up anew to his or her place in the contemporary world, contemporary authors will often guide our students well into our modern world. 1) In the context of the transition from childhood into adolescence, one can look for books that explore the transition from a harmonious, “innocent” relationship with nature into a more conscious “separation” from nature. Books with a sensitive eye for nature can have a healing effect on the inevitable separation. Among these are Forrest Carter’s The Education of Little Tree, Gerald Durrell’s My Life With Other Animals, Willa Cather’s My Antonia. 2) All books with a “coming of age” theme are appropriate, such as Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations 3) For the sake of the birth of the more conscious soul life, it can be helpful for students to read books which do not fix on one point of view, but rather which reside in the healthy tension between polarities, such as black and white, tragedy and comedy, war and peace, rebel and oppressor. Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country is just such a book. 4) It can be helpful for a ninth grader to read one or two books about actual and/or potential tragic dimensions of the twentieth century, perhaps Elie Wiesel’s Night, or Nevil Shute’s On the Beach. It’s best when such a book can inspire hope or courage as do Jacques Lusseyran’s And There Was Light, The Diary of Anne Frank, or Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. 5) Since the birth of the new soul life is inevitably painful, and adolescents can become too absorbed in their sufferings, humor is a healthy antidote. America’s tall tales about Paul Bunyan, Davy Crockett, and King of the keelboaters,Mike Fink work well, as do selections from Mark Twain, James Thurber, and E.B.White. 6) Short stories, the most contemporary form of literature, are wonderful windows into modern life for ninth graders. Tenth Grade The tenth grader, having survived the ninth grader’s often initially awkward “arrival” into the high school and into modern life, usually needs to take a step back, to gather perspective on this mighty journey. The growing thinking capacities are increasingly able to serve a deepening wish to understand the origins of our world, the origins of cultures, and how things grow and develop. 129
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Research Project #9 Colloqu
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4 Title: Proceedings of the <strong
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6 Additional Articles: Recommended
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8 WHSRP Mission Statement Formed in
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10 MONDAY 13 OCTOBER 8:00 A.M. - -
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12 From the Left: Patricia Ryan and
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14 We left feeling that we had much
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16 Secondly, it discloses the world
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18 Student Response: In our lives t
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20 Benchmarks: Transition from Midd
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22 Thus the center of the red spira
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24 attention to the composition of
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26 “What have they been doing in
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28 more accurate than our senses, t
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30 and bring their free thinking to
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32 POETRY EXERCISE Mary uses this f
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34 novels Shane, The Adventures of
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36 Poetry is the path because it pr
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38 In the10 th grade, we begin to m
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40 Why do we teach literature? Some
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42 We always have to work with the
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44 The analytical process becomes a
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46 Keeping The Curriculum Timely by
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48 Steiner on the High School Liter
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50 Dr. Steiner: … it would depend
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52 Historically, Wolfram is an inte
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54 plane, need to strew pictures an
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56 of German literary history in re
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58 Children’s Receptivity to the
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60 however clumsy the children’s
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62 Discussion: Teaching Reading Our
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64 specifics from the text in discu
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66 Steiner On Reading The Effects o
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68 the school subjects demanded by
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70 Consequently, we will have to re
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72 emerge only later on. In this wa
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74 stand its truth and beauty, to b
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76 The writing experience begins wi
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Page 82 and 83: 82 I Am I am: yet what I am none ca
Page 84 and 85: 84 I-Search Projects The purpose of
Page 86 and 87: 86 Annotated Bibliography Breindel,
Page 88 and 89: 88 Steiner on Writing and Spelling
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Page 104 and 105: 104 Through eurythmy people can lea
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Page 112 and 113: 112 you do not let them do what is
Page 114 and 115: 114 period. If you have caused them
Page 116 and 117: 116 “substantiating” verbs. In
Page 118 and 119: 118 Grammar in the Ninth Grade In G
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Page 122 and 123: 122 Enlivening English Teaching thr
Page 124 and 125: 124 Recommended Books For Waldorf E
Page 126 and 127: 126 Also Recommended: Bly, Robert.
Page 130 and 131: 130 1) Tenth graders may wish to re
Page 132 and 133: 132 Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the L
Page 134 and 135: 134 How in the act of writing itsel
Page 136 and 137: 136 The Wholeness Of Imagination by
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Page 144 and 145: 144 Disturbances in Speech Developm
Page 146 and 147: 146 ment then the development of th
Page 148 and 149: 148 which the forms are continually
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