Teaching Language arTs in The WaLdorf schooL

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Language Arts Compendium
you will be able to make your own and establish an inner connection
with the children. This is much better than merely adopting an
outer image. In this way we recognize speech as a relationship between
the human being and the cosmos. On our own as human beings,
we would merely remain astonished, but our relationship with the
cosmos invokes sounds from our astonishment.
Human beings are embedded in the cosmos in a particular way,
and we can observe this externally. I am saying this because (as you
saw in yesterday’s lecture) much depends on the nature of our feelings
toward growing children—the degree of reverence we have toward
the mysterious revelation of the cosmos in growing human beings.
A tremendous amount depends on our ability to develop this feeling
as teachers and educators.
Now let’s take a broader view and look again at the significant
fact that the human being takes about eighteen breaths per minute.
How many breaths is this in four minutes? 18 x 4 = 72 breaths. What
is the number of breaths in a day? 18 x 60 x 24 = 25,920 per day. I
could also calculate this in a different way, by beginning with the
number of breaths in four minutes—72. Then, instead of multiplying
this number by 24 x 60, I would simply multiply it by 6 x 60,
or 360; I would arrive at the same number of 25,920 breaths per
day: 360 x 72 = 25,920. We can say that our breathing for four minutes—breathing
in, breathing out, breathing in, breathing out—is,
in a sense, a microcosmic “day.” The sum of 25,920 I obtained by
multiplying it by 360 relates to this as the process of a whole year: the
day of 24 hours is like a year for our breathing. Now we will look at
our larger breathing process, which is made up of a daily alternation
between being awake and sleeping. What, basically, is being awake
and sleeping? It means that we breathe something out and breathe
something in. We breathe out our I-being and astral body when we
go to sleep, and we breathe them in when we awake. This occurs
during the course of 24 hours. To arrive at a sum for the course of a
year, we must multiply the day by 360. So with the greater breathing
process, in one year we complete something similar to what
we complete in one day with the microcosmic breathing process,
assuming that we multiply what takes place in 4 minutes by 360. If