Meeting the needs of your middle school aged child in the Portland area for ages 11 to 14. I have over 30 years of teaching in the Portland area at Catholic schools in public schools and mostly in the Waldorf schools that I founded or helped found. Over those years I frequently have ended up with junior high groups and I basically had three groups of middle schools aged children that I taught and one of my most favorite Parent Meeting topics was please tell us about your experience in middle school. The vast majority of parents when they wanted to talk about grade 6 to 8, related stories that were at best discouraging most of the time, and could even be recollections of events and activities and actions that might raise the hair on the back of your neck. If you’re reading this and you have a child who is going into sixth or seventh or eighth grade, and you think back to your own experiences, then that time of life can actually be quite confusing for many young humans and even disillusioning you could say. These are still children, even though their bodies might be a little bigger and they might even be as tall as an adult, but they are still children and in the Waldorf school we put a priority on the personal value and self-esteem of each child in our classrooms . We don’t like formal testing, and we avoid it at all costs, and we focus on the finer subtleties of expression, depending on the capacities and temperament of the child . We bring history and culture and science and math through ways that spark the imagination and encourage exploration of the principles, underlying all of these histories and subjects. It is not unusual in the Waldorf school to mix the artistic elements along with the historical or scientific and we like to use what we call phenomenalogical approach . That gigantic word means through observation and through seeing a phenomena occur . This is based on human history and throughout millions of years people saw things that happened and then tried to come up with explanations for things. And these observations can include social or psychological phenomena as well.. When do you think about these things? One of our basic characteristics that allows us to survive as humans is pure curiosity . We are curious about many things and when something happens and there’s time and space to think it over, this is a very exciting moment and sometimes new thoughts and ideas arise, and thus we make progress in our world. And in our culture and in our society. This is very much oppositional to how things are generally taught in other schools and honestly, it’s one of the huge differences in the middle school years between ordinary students in a regular pedagogical methodology versus students lucky enough to enroll in a Waldorf program and receive the benefits of a living artistic education . Waldorf teachers have to attend three years or more of training in order to teach this way and then they spend their whole teaching lifetimes learning from the students and from their experiences as to how to best bring this approach . I know in my own public school education when I was in science in the middle school or math we were taught concepts and abstract principles first . For example we read in a chapter book that oxygen and hydrogen are the components of water. We were introduced to the concepts of electrons and nucleus, and how they formed together in the chemical composition and what these mean all these things and then in an experiment, the teacher would do something to the hydrogen and oxygen to make it come together, to form water in front of us. So we already knew what was going to happen it was described in the lesson. We had to read it in the chapter books. We already knew the end of the story. There was no mystery. There was no beauty. There was no intrigue. There was no sense of wonder. It was simply something that we already understood somehow intellectually and every science experiment was conducted the same way through high school. Think about that and see how it compares to your own experiences . In the middle school in a Waldorf school like ours, the teacher is going to bring an experiment and the children might participate or they might observe, but nothing is explained upfront. There is nothing that they understand with regard to the action or the interaction or the reaction, but they experience it first hand. Then they go home and sleep on it and literally there’s no discussion and they think about it and the next day they come back into the classroom and we begin a laboratory format with a report meant for an experiment and first we list the name of the experiment and then we list the materials that they observed I.e. what was used in the experiment and this could be as simple as a candle and a match . Then they start to think about what they saw. What do they remember and this can be a discussion or it can be a writing exercise where they carefully describe what they observed what actions were taken and then what transpired. The next day they come back again into the classroom and people can read from their pages and share their information and then the group might be asked the question. Why do you think this happened? Or even what were the factors involved in what happened? And then believe it or not these young kids at 11 and 12 and 13 can articulate these Observations and with the discussion often come up with something that is very close to the reality of what happened. Contrast that to the read the book and take a test method of life . You may be able to spout a lot of information that you have memorized, but the capacity to apply knowledge in various situations is not emphasized in those learning experiences in Waldorf. One of my favorite exercises I saw a teacher do was to have a fish tank and take several gallons of very hot water and color it with blue watercolor paint and pour it carefully into the fish tank. This was done without any conversation. Then he took a gallon of very cold water and colored it with red watercolor paint and stirred it thoroughly and then carefully without speaking, poured it slowly into that fish tank. I’m not going to tell you what happens you should try this yourself maybe on a smaller scale with a glass bowl or something but you know it was one of the most beautiful things I think I’ve ever seen and the kids in his class who are in the seventh grade were oohing and ahh-ing over this visual experience and then of course we walk through the process like I’ve described above to discover themselves what was happening and why. What I would like to bring to you is simply this thought if you are a parent, who wants a child to have an amazing middle school experience you should consider the Waldorf school . Yes we go camping. Yes, we do a lot of field trips. Yes, we also do folk dance and Japanese and handwork and all kinds of incredible subject lessons and you know we thrive and grow and we cultivate a climate of positivity and pleasure in learning. And that pleasure in learning is intended to be a lifelong asset for every child in the Waldorf school whether they are 70 or 50 or 30 and they will have this inherent positive outlook on learning experiences in trying new things and having confidence as well as strongly developed independent critical, thinking skills to use. We have some room in next year’s sixth and seventh grade at our school if you would like to join us in what is probably the most creative and enlightening and engaging educational form available in the world that doesn’t rely heavily on technology and computer screens to teach our children . We’re still using the human model which we feel is the way we naturally and best learn in this world! (fb)

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