| It's the Children, of Course... by Diane David, BACWTT faculty member, mother of six children, and kindergarten teacher at the San Francisco Waldorf School. Why do I want to teach on a Friday night and again on a Saturday morning after I've spent all week with twenty children in a kindergarten classroom, not to mention additional hours preparing stories and circles, making puppets, birthday gifts and various items for the classroom, and then, of course, meetings, meetings and more meetings? Then I must interact with the parents through conferences, impromptu conversations and again more meetings. I must be crazy. And yet something draws me to work with the adult student, the next potential teacher. Perhaps it's the same thing that drives me to be a teacher to begin with. It's the children, of course, and one's potential to affect the future through working with them. I am passionate about Steiner's picture of the developing human being in its three-foldness and four-foldness, and the vibrant and timely curriculum that supports this view. Steiner's ideas are at once wide in scope and also true; I have observed and experienced them myself. That's what keeps me going. For example, looking at the first chapter of Study of Man, Steiner basically says that we need to teach the child how to breathe in the right way. When I first read that in my teacher training, I felt it to be a strange task for an educator. After all, breathing is a physiological process, basic to life. Is it really something in the realm of education? Further on in Chapter One, Steiner gives us a beautiful picture of the breathing of the physical body with the soul, but my questions were more practical. I began to think about and ask my own mentor: What does Steiner really mean, and how does this apply to the young child? How does it apply to the everyday work of the classroom? Breath is a symbol for the Holy Spirit - does it fit into this picture too? These are big questions with long answers. But simply observed, if the classroom is not breathing, in other words if there is no rhythm to the day, and if the teacher does not find an inner breathing of her thoughts, feelings and activities, indeed, the day will not breathe, therefore the children will not breathe in a healthy way either. That I know from experience. How to bring such simple principles with deep significance to the education of the young child is a task that challenges me. And heaven knows I need all the help from the spiritual world to meet this challenge. I also get a thrill from looking at a question and finding different ways of working out the answer. What about the use of black crayons, block crayons and beeswax? Where in the morning should circle time come and how do we bring the festivals? What about the six-year-old who seems to have outgrown kindergarten? These are just a few of the hot issues in the kindergarten world that need looking at from different angles, and should always be answered with the thought in mind, "What are the needs of the young child in this time and in this place?" I find that working with adults allows me to look at my own work with the children more critically. What is important in the kindergarten and how do I bring that into a lesson plan with adults? How do I reach an adult whose experience of children and childhood, as striving as it may be, is nevertheless still adult-like and a bit rigid? As one teacher training student said to me after a class of nature storytelling, "I realize that I have to change my way of seeing and thinking and being in order to work with these children. How do I do it?" Good question, with many answers. This is the work of personal transformation and it can be exciting. Despite eighteen years of experience in a Waldorf kindergarten, these challenges compel me to be a good teacher and certainly not to rest easy on any laurels.
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