Teaching Language arTs in The WaLdorf schooL

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Language Arts Compendium
These external processes are always the outer expression of something
inner, regardless of how strange this may seem to a conventional
world-view. The fact that you are present to teach these children from
the Waldorf factory, and the fact that you will do what is necessary
in this regard, indicates that this group of teachers and this group
of children belong together in terms of karma. You become the appropriate
teacher for these children because in previous times you
developed aversions toward them. Now you free yourself from these
aversions by educating their thinking. And we develop affinities in
the right way by aiding the appropriate development of the will.
Be very clear about this; you can best penetrate the twofold
human being as discussed in our seminar. But you must try to
understand every aspect of the human being. Through what we attempted
in the seminars, you will become a good educator of only
the children’s thinking. For the will life, you will be a good educator
by trying to surround each individual with real affinity. These things
belong to education: aversion enables us to comprehend, and affinity
enables us to love. Since our bodies have centers where affinity and
aversion meet, this affects our social interaction as expressed in the
process of teaching. I ask you to think this through and take it into
your feelings so that we can continue tomorrow.
[Practical Advice to Teachers, pp. 19-30.]
10. The Concrete and Abstract Elements of Language
When we think in ordinary life it is as if thinking, or forming mental
images, continually escaped us. When we bump into something or
feel something with our fingers—a piece of silk or velvet, for example—we
immediately perceive that we have encountered that object,
and we can feel its shape by touching its surface. Then we know
that as human beings, we have connected with our environment.
When we think, however, we do not seem to touch objects around
us in this way. Once we have thought about something and made
it our own, we can say that we have “apprehended,” or “grasped” it
(begreifen). What do we mean by this? If external objects are alien to
us—which is generally true for our thinking—then we do not say
we have grasped them. If, for example, a piece of chalk is lying there,