Teaching Language arTs in The WaLdorf schooL

Grammar and Spelling
299
11. Maintaining Discipline in Grammar Classes by
Awakening Interest
A teacher: I teach English to the eighth grade, and I found the discipline
there terrible.
Dr. Steiner: What do you as the class teacher have to say?
The teacher reports.
Dr. Steiner: It would be pedagogically incorrect if we did not take
the personal relationship to the children into sufficient account. It
is certainly difficult to create, but you must create it and you can
create it in individual cases. You should, however, remember that
our language instruction is extremely uneven. In spite of the fact
that we have a Waldorf pedagogy, there is, for example, sometimes
too much grammar in the classes, and the children cannot handle
that. Sometimes I absolutely do not understand how you can keep
the children quiet at all when you are talking, as sometimes happens,
about adverbs and subjunctive cases and so forth. Those are
things for which normal children have no interest whatsoever. In
such instances, children remain disciplined only because they love
the teacher. Given how grammar is taught in language class, there
should be no cause for any complaints in that regard. We can really
discuss the question only if all the language teachers in the Waldorf
School meet in order to find some way of not always talking about
things the children do not understand. That, however, is so difficult
because there are so many things to do. What is important is that the
children can express themselves in the language, not that they know
what an adverb or a conjunction is. They learn that, of course, but
the way such things are done in many of the classes I have seen, it is
not yet Waldorf pedagogy. That is, however, something we need to
discuss here in the meetings. There are so many language teachers
here and each goes her own way and pays no attention to what the
others do, but there are many possibilities for helping one another.
I can easily imagine that the children become restless because they
do not know what you expect of them. We have handled language
class in a haphazard way for too long.