Colloquium on English - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

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34 novels Shane, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, A Tale of Two Cities. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Black Like Me, To Kill a Mockingbird. Tenth grade: Classes focus on grammar, writing exercises, report writing, and works read in conjunction with main lesson or separately. Reading may include Ramayana and Bhagavad-Gita, Gilgamesh, Greek, Egyptian, Finnish and Norse Mythology, the Old Testament, Beowulf, The Song of Roland, Romantic and Modern Poetry, and the novels The Chosen, Siddhartha, and Zen Flesh, Zen Bones. Eleventh grade: Classes focus on essay writing and works read in conjunction with main lesson or separately. Reading may include the plays Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Hamlet, King Lear, The Tempest, Luther, Doctor Faustus, and the New Testament, Dante’s Divine Comedy, The Canterbury Tales, excerpts from The Prince and Utopia, as well as the novels The Robe, 1984, Brave New World, and the translated poem Parzival. Twelfth grade: Classes focus on essay and report writing, and works read in conjunction with main lesson or separately. Reading may include a variety of modern poems and short stories, the plays The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail, The Crucible, and Faust, the novels Ordinary People, Cry the Beloved Country, The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick (excerpts), One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Fathers and Sons or The Brothers Karamazov, Cannery Row. essays in The Selected Writings of Ralph Watdo Emerson and “Civil Disobedience” and Walden by Thoreau.
Discussion: Schooling Imagination Our group discussions following the presentations of Philip Thatcher and Mary Emery were understandably exciting. What follows is a compilation of some of the ideas exchanged. Toward the end of our hour on this topic, as you will see, we dissolved into what seemed like somewhat frenzied shouting out of titles of great books for students to read as though they might be lost forever if not recorded in this session. This is perhaps predictable behavior for English teachers. But we began in a more philosophic mode. Why do we want to school the imagination? In the largest sense, imagination is what we use in solving problems and bringing ideas to reality. Imagination is what allows us to seek new relationships between things and people that have never been seen before. In what ways do we as English teachers school imagination? Clearly, it is through our devotion to the Word. When we choose literature for our students we need to keep in mind the Greek trinity of truth, beauty, and goodness and choose writing that contains at least one of these. Literature allows us a time consciousness providing a double dimension between historical context and modern experience. We begin with the understanding that the four years of high school are steps to insight. The aim of the 9 th grade is to look at the world, that of the12 th grade is to look at the unseen, at the spirit, which would be an impossibility in the 9 th grade. Schooling the imagination leads to intuition – intuitive thought is our highest capacity. But we school the imagination step-by-step. We must have a long view of what we’re trying to achieve in the four years. Emerson relates primary imagination to reason; the question for teachers is how do we get there. Steiner speaks of the fact that if adolescents do not hear beautifully formed speech, they will only hear the driving force of their own hearts at night. Reading aloud can help, and we have rich resources in Shakespeare’s plays, Parzival, the Odyssey, and many other great works. It means a great deal to hear beautifully read literature; it rings in the listener. Many students also read aloud well and can be encouraged to do so. In much of our teaching of literature, however, we are working more abstractly, with written rather than spoken language. A Is for Ox : The Collapse of Literacy and the Rise of Violence in an Electronic Age by Barry Sanders is recommended for all English teachers. Rene Querido gives an image describing the ancient polarities of East, West, North, and South, forming a cross. He then suggests that the Christ impulse is a potentizing of that image of the cross that can be transformed into a pentagram. All humans are part of an intricate knot, endlessly connected and always equal. Our task as teachers is to soak the students in the polarities not only so they become acquainted with the different streams, but so that they also enjoy the play of colors, sounds, and tones. Then they come to recognize that we can’t live with a trival mentality any more. How do we achieve Querido’s pentagram form? It is important for students to experience the difference between times and cultures. Their imaginative life is enriched, and by 12 th grade they can have developed a sense for the future. We begin by recognizing the need to strengthen our students in their image forming capacities. Because they are awash in ready-made images, the ability to bring forth their own images is weakening. What do we have to do to strengthen these capacities? How do we teach imaginatively? Metaphor is one of the clues, as we learned in our exercise with Mary Emery. Poetry takes us into a different space, metaphor connects us to our essential humanity. All art does the same thing. Harwood, in “The Wholeness of Imagination,” says that it is about inserting ourselves into the universe. Metaphor allows us to insert ourselves into the universe. We are the leaf, the stone, the sun. Primary imagination is the given imagination; secondary imagination is conscious imagination. We can’t get to the second stage until we’ve schooled our thinking. That is the bridge between the two kinds of imagination. 35
Page 1: Research Project #9 Colloqu
Page 4 and 5: 4 Title: Proceedings of the <strong
Page 6 and 7: 6 Additional Articles: Recommended
Page 8 and 9: 8 WHSRP Mission Statement Formed in
Page 10 and 11: 10 MONDAY 13 OCTOBER 8:00 A.M. - -
Page 12 and 13: 12 From the Left: Patricia Ryan and
Page 14 and 15: 14 We left feeling that we had much
Page 16 and 17: 16 Secondly, it discloses the world
Page 18 and 19: 18 Student Response: In our lives t
Page 20 and 21: 20 Benchmarks: Transition from Midd
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Page 26 and 27: 26 “What have they been doing in
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Page 32 and 33: 32 POETRY EXERCISE Mary uses this f
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Page 40 and 41: 40 Why do we teach literature? Some
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Page 48 and 49: 48 Steiner on the High School Liter
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84 I-Search Projects The purpose of
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86 Annotated Bibliography Breindel,
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88 Steiner on Writing and Spelling
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90 Understanding Spelling Difficult
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92 Is there a Phenomenological Appr
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96 in this Colloquium</stro
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100 of your lesson; at times it can
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102 the students’ perception of a
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106 Introduction to Grammar Grammar
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116 “substantiating” verbs. In
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118 Grammar in the Ninth Grade In G
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120 quy and a sonnet, and to recite
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122 Enlivening English Teaching thr
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124 Recommended Books For Waldorf E
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126 Also Recommended: Bly, Robert.
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128 reward for the first person to
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130 1) Tenth graders may wish to re
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132 Solzhenitsyn’s A Day in the L
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134 How in the act of writing itsel
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136 The Wholeness Of Imagination by
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138 Coleridge was an exact thinker
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140 ception of the universe into wh
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142 The theories must indeed come.
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144 Disturbances in Speech Developm
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150 Acquisition of Speech and the D
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Colloquium on English - Research Institute for Waldorf Education

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