Home School Life

How different my life is this week!

For the next three weeks I’m doing a guest-teaching spot at a Waldorf school about an hour and a half away from home — half the week staying with my sister who lives nearby, driving back and forth the other half of the week. Daddy has taken on the full-time parenting and it’s going to be a long three weeks with not very much mommy-time. Fortunately the kids have been feeling pretty daddy-ish of late (though Alice has definitely been my girl these days) and they’re old enough to loan their mommy out for a little while. It feels like a good thing for everyone.

I’m so enjoying my visit to this school. It’s nice to see a different school in action! Some things feel similar, other things feel quite different. The whole experience is helping me to see my work with greater relevance, as part of a larger community. When I speak the morning verse with these students, as present as I am in the moment, it is not so difficult to think of the other students, some an hour and a half away, others across the globe, who also speak that verse every morning. Our three small voices seem to carry greater resonance when I think of all of those other voices.

Yes, when we speak the morning verse, there are just three small voices in the room — two students and their teacher. It is interesting working with adolescents in such an intimate environment. The morning verse is the time when I can tell they feel the spotlight of attention in a most uncomfortable way. Though I’ve always used the morning verse as an opportunity to make eye contact and connect with each student, I am hesitant to connect too strongly with these two young women during the verse. Our lessons are comfortable enough. Engaged with the material, our attention is turned toward the content of the lesson, rather than directed toward each other. The verse, though, is a standard — something they’ve spoken for so long the content of it is no longer interesting and engaging to them. Because of this I’ve noticed them want to fade away during the verse — looking around the room, out the window, down at their feet — anywhere but directly into the gaze of another human being. They have nothing to focus on but their awareness of themselves and the teacher who is standing before them. My adolescence was not so long ago that I’ve forgotten that feeling of being certain that everyone is looking at you. I worry that these young women feel this most during the most reverential part of our morning and I want to try to revision that experience for them a bit. It has me wondering what I could do to breathe some life into that morning verse, so it is fresh, new and able to occupy their attention in a satisfyingly comfortable way.

I’ll try to post more about our lessons — they are quite wonderful, if I do say so myself. And photos of their artwork, which is positively stunning! I’m loving the ability I have to put so much of myself into these lessons. Without stacks of papers, parent evenings, or extra lessons to teach I’ve had enough time to approach the subject from a variety of angles, making the experience a nicely rounded one. With just two students we are able to move through experiences quickly, yet thoroughly, and I can ensure without a doubt that they are both understanding and following the work that we’re doing. It’s a teacher’s dream!