| Saying "Yes", Graduation Speech by Yancy Yesovitch, Class of 2003 Summarized by LISA BRADEN, Class of 2004 Before I start, I would like to thank deeply all the families who lent their loved ones to this program, who made it possible for me and my classmates to pursue this noble path. When I decided to join the teacher training, I felt like I was saying "yes" to something profound, but neither I nor my fellow first year classmates had any idea what it was. All I knew was that I felt that I had been tossed into a vast ocean, and that it took great flexibility and openness on our part to stay afloat. I'll return later to this question of "yes", but first I'd like to consider the substance of the training itself. The main theme of the teacher training can be stated as "the teacher as artist." This idea of the artistry of the educator stands in high contrast to popular notions of the artist as someone who works with a medium equipped with paint, brush, canvas, marble and chisel. In education, the artistic medium is the child himself. And yet the child is both sculpture and sculptor, because in fact the child is growing, developing and shaping himself from deep within. The teacher's task is to support this invisible artist who is in the process of becoming. In Waldorf education, the formative forces that are active in the child can be kindled in the teacher as well, and this is where the teacher as artist begins. With this as the larger theme of our studies, it seemed to me very profound that at the end of each long and tiring workweek, we came together and were revived by our striving to understand the true nature of the human being. There is in this training a deeply mysterious relationship between learning to do the "carrying" work of the teacher, and being carried oneself as a student. Rudolf Steiner has pointed out that we no longer intuitively connect with the natural rhythms of life and that now we must form conscious relationships to these rhythms. This occurs during the years of training. I was struck by how, even as our class dimished in physical size, we grew larger to each other -- not as personalities, but in allowing each other to grow beyond our manifested appearances. When one of my classmates spoke once of striving to find courage, I heard his voice as my own, as a force within me. The same was true of our teachers. In the attention I paid and was paid during the training, I felt myself grow larger and open like a flower to the sun. This picture of the student opening like a blossom is a true picture of beauty, the basis of Waldorf education in the middle years of childhood. Goethe says: "Beauty consists in an object going beyond itself, but only on the basis of what is already concealed within it." So what did we say "yes" to when we started this teacher training? We said "yes" to a path of becoming. A path of growth. A path of forming a conscious relationship with the natural laws that live in this process of development. |
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