Proceedings Colloquium on World History - Waldorf Research Institute

ize that Goliath of Gath was from the Gaza strip, and there is still fighting
over this area today.”
“Geography is so important. Steiner indicated that geography should
permeate the entire curriculum. The rivers are very important in studying
ancient history. Map drawing is also an important part of Waldorf education.
When drawing a map, indicating the meeting of water and land is a
different experience than just making a line. Compare the Nile delta and
the Tigress and Euphrates and their influence on the culture. Because of the
Gulf War, the two rivers they had associated with ancient history became
something real.”
“No longer do I give the students an outlined map to fill out. Now
I’m requiring at the end of a main lesson that they must draw the map from
memory. I started doing that after one of my colleagues asked us to draw a
map of the world about seven years ago in a high school workshop. I decided
that my goal for the seniors was going to be that they should be able
to draw a map of the entire world and the water systems and mountain
ranges. They would really know the earth. So they know now that whenever
they have to do map work, I say ‘Pay attention to the map. Don’t just
draw it. Think about what it means that the Pyrenees were there when
Charles Martel was fighting.’”
“You can do a five minute exercise every morning where students
have to draw a map out of memory, then correct it, and draw it again. After
a couple of weeks they’ve got a real picture of it. It’s part of them.”
A discussion followed on surveying outside, being exact, “crawling
on their hands and knees measuring the physical earth”, and orienteering in
relation to tenth graders.
“There’s another quality I think of the tenth graders. They want us
to help them to learn to be exact. There’s very little exactness demanded of
anybody anymore. Working on the loom in tenth grade is another example
of the same thing. One thread at a time. Before you can do your creative
work, you’ve got to thread the loom. If you are off in the sequence, you have
to go back to it and redo it. It’s just like being in that bush up to your
armpit in mud and realizing you’ve made a mistake reading the map and
you have to go back and start over. Several students work together threading
a loom. It’s very hard to do by yourself. It takes forever. So they work
together, measuring, figuring out the arithmetic of how many times the
skein has to go around, is there enough length to do the warps for three
people, etc. This is really algebra and geometry in a practical application of
exactness. They squirm under it, but they love it too. It’s the same with card
weaving.”
“The discipline is in the act, rather than in the person.”
“That’s why they like writing poetry. It’s the same thing.”
“The scanning is making a map in the way of a poem.”
“That’s right, the surveying of the poem.”
“Also Grimm’s law. They love Grimm’s law. It’s so interesting. I won
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