Waldorf High School at Home

Learning Arabic

My son Gabriel is very keen on learning languages. He has been studying Latin on and off on his own (well, with a bit of help from my husband who studied Latin in school) for a number of years. He has taken French at a local high school for a year and a half. And he also experimented with German and Russian - I helped him with the latter as that was what I took in high school and also for a year at college.

 

This semester he decided he wanted to study a non European language. Since it's always better to work with someone when learning a language and since I had been thinking about studying Arabic for a number of years, I suggested we do this together. He was pleased and so we have begun. Slowly.

 

Our first consideration was approach and goals. I want to be able to speak to people - I have wanted to work in the Middle East for many years - once my sons are grown I might well do so at some point. Gabriel wants to be able to read - he also wants to be able to write because he thinks the script is really "cool looking". He would like to be able to speak as well. Gabriel is really good at grammar, at the "mechanics" of language. I am really good at "picking up" language and hearing into how people speak. I am lousy at working directly with grammar.

 

We got a few books from the library to help orientate us before settling on an approach. We learned that there is, as one might expect, the Arabic of the Koran which is the bridge between millions of people all over the globe. Then there's the Arabic which real people speak every day. Apparently if one uses "Koran Arabic" "on the streets" with a native Arabic speaker, it is analogous to ordering a sandwich in Elizabethan English in Ohio! Several sources suggested that for conversation, one learn Egyptian Arabic as it is widely understood in part because of the popularity of Egyptian movies. At that hint, we went to Netflicks and took out a couple of Egyptian films to watch. Hopefully the subtitles will help us figure out the dialogue. And if not, it's important that we get our ears used to correct pronunciation anyway.

 

I've been watching Arabic language music videos on YouTube as well. Lots of fun. I wish I could figure out who the artists are and where they come from - maybe North Africa or Lebanon? At any rate, the videos we've watched have been good fun though, being 15, my son has strong ideas about what music he should and shouldn't listen to!

 

After slogging around the internet for a hour or so, I also came upon a site where I could download worksheets for learning the alphabet and also a site devoted to teaching Arabic. Sometimes I just love the internet - here's all these people, presumably all over the globe (looking at their faces, clothes and surroundings) who have taken the time to make little demonstration videos for people they will never meet or know to use! I love that! That really is the bright side of the internet. For today I will not dwell on the shadow side!

 

Anyway, on that site I found useful clips of the alphabet, for instance, where each letter is highlighted while someone says each letter's name. I found clips of an elder reading something slowly - perhaps surahs from the Koran? - so slowly that one could really hear and appreciate the words. I found dialogues between people - I found some lovely little children in a classroom signing and dancing as they sang the alphabet (unfortunately the sound quality was poor on that one so I couldn't make out the words).

 

And I ordered some materials from Amazon to get Gabriel and I on track with our studies. I will report here from time to time on our progress!

 

ma'a as-salaama!

Good bye AP History

Last semester, as those of you  who have read my high school blog know, my son and another student and I embarked on a study geared toward taking the World History AP exam. We got the text book (Peter Stearns) and started plowing through it.

 

Shortly before Thanksgiving the two students came to me, expressing dissatisfaction about the class. My son, who has an extensive history background and is a very good writer, felt that he was starting to hate history and that the relentless pace we were obliged to take so that we could "get through" the material meant that depth was being sacrificed for breadth - and that the breadth was in danger of being superficial. The other student, who does not have much of a history background and who is quite a poor writer, felt overwhelmed. She was struggling mightily to keep up and while I admired her perseverance tremendously, I had begun to wonder if this approach was really doing her any favors. And I had noticed that my son, always excited about history, was becoming rather unenthusiastic.

 

So together we decided to look at what was positive about what we had done, and then to move on to something else. We decided that the very disciplined approach to essay writing was extremely useful and had helped both of them enormously. We also appreciated the scope of the course and the fact that the authors attempt to make connections between the whole of human history. But.... we could also see the limitations there. We also felt that the way that "all cultures" got even attention did not serve to give an accurate portrayal of history in terms of impact on human development as a whole. Whilst the Aztec and Mayan civilizations, for instance, were important and worthy of study for anyone who wants to understand something of the diversity of the human experience, for them to be presented as having the same impact as, say, Ancient Greece, is ridiculous. Far, far more of the globe, far more cultures were directly effected by the Greeks over many, many centuries than the isolated Aztecs and Mayans! It is, of course, not a question of "better" - there is no judgment here. But it is misleading to teach students that "all cultures are equal" in terms of their lasting impact on human culture!

 

Anyway, we finished off with a study of China through the Song Dynasty. My son wrote a paper looking at the influence of Confucianism on government, and the other student wrote a paper comparing and contrasting Confucianism with Taoism.

 

This semester? We decided that since last semester we mainly focused on non European cultures, that this semester we would do a Western Civilization course. I have designed a course outline and rustled up some resources. At some point I will put those up on this blog for others to consider.

Gardisil Warning

Dear Parents,

 

Please have a read of this report from Medical News Today questioning the safety of Gardisil if you are considering getting your daughter vaccinated with it.

Attention Scientists!

I thought this title might attract some attention..... I really would like to address what I am about to say to all parents.... but perhaps especially those with a strong interest in science.... and who perhaps are wondering about what "Waldorf science" might be.

 

And that can be hard to encapsulate. We had a study on my discussion forum about David Mitchell's article on the Waldorf approach to science  and an earlier discussion on an article by Craig Holdrege of the Nature Institute about developing the thinking capacities of children, but there is still a lot of room for getting to grips with what makes the Waldorf (or to be more precise, Goethean or anthroposophical) take on science so different.

 

So here is a wonderful article by Steve Talbott of NetFuture which I think can really help people start to see what I keep driging at when I refer to the differences between "Waldorf" and conventional views of science. The article is called Do Physical Laws Make Things Happen (it's actually from a book Talbot is working on). Here is an excerpt, just to peak your interest:

 

In Chapter 2 ("The Limits of Predictability" ) I tried top show the great distance between understanding a certain lawfulness inherent in events and predicting or explaining the events themselves. Contrary to all current thinking within science, the more uncompromisingly;y we formulate the precise and determining action of a physical law, the less it tells us about the events it governs. Wee gain more and more exactness about less and less of the world's concrete expression.

 

I illustrated this by describing what happens when we release a leaf in a vacuum chamber. The leaf now "drops like a rock." That is, we get a trajectory that seems to be little more than the graphic display of a methemetical expression we call the "law of gravity". To see an event in this way as a mathematical necessity made visible gives us a powerful sense of explanation.

 

But - and this was the decisive point - if we restrict ourselves to the sphere of our mathematical explanation and do not smuggle in qualitative aspects of the phenomenon lying outside the explanation, then we no longer even know whether we're dealing with a leaf or a rock! The explanation, in its own terms and despite all its precision, gives us no means to distinguish between the two. We highlight a law equally implicit in both leafy and rocky phenomena by sacrificing everything distinctive in those phenomena to the single, implicit aspect we are looking for.

 

Talbott goes on to say:

 

The decisive question is not whether there is predictable order in the world. Nor is it whether mathematically precise laws focus our attention upon elements of this order - which obviously they do. Rather, we need to ask how, in their strictly quantitative, precise, and unequivocal aspect, laws relate to the world they help us understand.

 

I have found this article to be extremely useful as my husband and I have been watching a series of Classical Physics lectures which often takes  a mechanistic and deterministic  approach from mechanics and applies it to living organisms in a way which I find baffling and sorely lacking. The scientists at the Nature Institute work to bring context and qualitative analysis to phenomena, something which is so sorely missing in much of our modern science. Anyone who has been in a hospital and has been referred to as "the kidney stone" or the "hysterectomy" knows how frustrating, alienating and out of context as a living being they can feel when they are reduced to a single phenomena. While discussing the physics lectures with our 15 year old, we have been grateful to this article by Steve Talbott to help us broaden an understanding of the usefulness and limitations of classical physics. I have written a blog article on my high school blog discussing this.

 

Have a read of Talbott's article! I would love to have your feedback!

Classical Physics

For science this semester, we are focusing mainly on physics. For a number of years I have been aware of the Teaching Company, an organization which produces lecture series on every topic imaginable, delivered by hand-picked college professors. Many homeschoolers use these courses as part of their children's high school educations, and I was eager to see what the lectures were like.

 

So.... knowing that neither my husband nor I would be up to giving a properly Goethean (ie Waldorf) physics course to our son, we bought the lecture series Great Ideas of Classical Physics. There are 24 thirty minute lectures and three mornings a week, Paul, Gabriel and I watch a lecture and then discuss it a bit after.

 

The lecturer is Professor Steven Pollock, Associate Professor of Pysics at the University of Colorado at Boulder and he is magnificent! He is clear, thorough, animated and has such great warmth and enthusiasm for his subject that one can even feel this from the screen - it must be a real treat to attend his live lectures!

 

Professor Pollock begins with some ideas that the Greeks, especially Aristotle, had about the world around them and then spends quite a lot of time discussing Isaac Newton, whose ideas are, after all, the foundations of Classical Physics. He goes through Newton's laws and in a very accessible and straightforward way, talks us through Newton's discoveries and how he condensed his findings into his laws.

 

Pollock takes a historical view to Classical Physics which definitely makes it a bit easier for the lay person and student to follow. He also takes great care to often double back on what he said, to pick up threads he left dangling, and to draw the lectures together into a coherent whole. From Newton he takes us on an exploration of magnetism, electricity, wave and particle theory and, finally, the atomic hypothesis.

 

I heartily recommend this lecture series for motivated and strong student. Other families might also want to do as we did, watching these lectures together and discussing them. Although the professor was extraordinarily clear (and there was just about no math!), not all students find physics ideas readily digestible. Also, if one is trying to keep any whiff of a Waldorf flavor to what you are discussing, parents can help raise questions and bring further issues to deepen the experience.  The ideas of classical physics are integral to a historic understanding of our world  - but they are not the end of the story. We read an excellent article by Steven Talbot called Do Physical Laws Make Things Happen?  We felt that it is crucial for our son not to feel that laws of physics are the be all, end all to explaining life. And Professor Pollock definitely, like many conventional scientists, goes in that direction. The game is not its rules - and Steve Talbot, researcher at the Nature Institute, a Goethean science center, raises many questions to help us think this through.

 

Back to the physics video, we bought the text to accompany the dvds and found they really weren't necessary as the course notes were very detailed. To accompany the course, there are recommendations for "sims" at the computer lab at the University of Colorado at Boulder which we found to be a waste of time. Sims are computer sims - simulations of various experiments. All were disappointing. Instead, we worked with a special K'nex set Gabriel had gotten last Christmas. It is a deluxe roller coaster model, complete with teaching notes for high school physics. Many of the concepts covered in the lectures could be experienced using the roller coaster set (conservation of movement, F = MA and so on) much more satisfactorily than by manipulating computer images.

 

It'd be great if anyone using these or other high school level physics materials would share here on this blog what they find! And we will be watching and listening to a Teaching Company lecture series on music appreciation in the spring - we'll let you know what we think!

A Home For Teens

Having started a conversation her on my blog about the importance of being at home with ones little children (see Early Years Rant), I am now going to throw a another gauntlet down: this one has to do with teens at home.

 

One of the most delightful things about homeschooling ones children - or at least creating a homelife which does not have children shunted off away from the home and family for most of their lives - is getting to know one's teens. They really can be charming people! Sadly, just as so many people have no idea how wonderful it can be to be with young children, having only experienced the whining, screaming, over stimulated kind, similarly, many people only think of teens as surly, monosyllabic and somewhat scary people only interested in shopping or video games. But it doesn't have to be that way. Children - from birth until they leave home - have the capacity to be the most delightful and rewarding people one can be with.

 

Much of it comes down to how we parent and educate our children. Obviously, if a child has challenges (attachment disorder, autism, ADHD) he is going to be a fair bit more difficult - and oftentimes incredibly difficult - to be with. But the baseline of what children are like and what they need is so far from what is considered normal in our society that people often do everything they can to escape being with their children.

 

What often results then is the spectre of teens and parents who are completely estranged from one another. Millions of dollars of books are purchased every year by parents seeking to understand their teens and to learn how to communicate with them. This is no easy feat if the teen's upbringing has mainly taken place outside the home and in the company of other adults and groups of children. Why is it that parents - and so-called experts - don't think that the way we bring up children is the key to  these problems? How on earth are parents and children who have spent very little time with one another over the course of that child's formative years to be expected to know how to communicate?

 

Homeschooling can be lonely, exhausting and incredibly intense. But one gets to know oneself and one's children in a way that cannot be underestimated. Children see all our bumps and warts - and thereby learn what it means to be human. They see us fall to pieces - and they see us pick ourselves up. They see how mistakes are made - and how one learns. They live in the warmth and love and turmoil of the family and learn to compromise, adapt, be patient, take turns, forgive and move on. No education system, no day care, no after school activities can compete with that.

 

And so when one has lived with a child every day all day (obviously all homeschooled children regulary spend time with friends and in group situations) one knows that person. One can communicate. One has learned over the years how to adapt to that child - and she has learned how to adapt to us. In the bosom of the family, a child learns how to be a human being. How ironic it is that people worry about socialization of homeschooled children!! Pity the poor children who are never home and who are constantly shunted from one place to another, from one group of people to another! They are the ones we should be concerned about.

 

Sharing our children's lives makes life so much easier when one has teens. The foundations have been laid and we know each other. And when we are comitted to being in the home with our children - at least most of the time -  we can be there for our teens. Whether one works part time outside of the home or is a stay-at-home mom (working for income or not) to actually be in the home and ensoul it is so precious to teens. So few people think that teens want us or need us to be around.

 

In You Are Your Child's First Teacher, Rahima Baldwin quotes a friend of hers, a midwife, who cut back on her hours when her children became teen agers. She had been at home when they were little, then started to work more in the middle years. But then she found that once her children hit their teen years, they needed her more.

 

This spoke deeply to me when I first read it - not in terms of my own children who at the time were very little, but in terms of teens I had worked with and with my own experience as a latchkey kid. How hard it is to be in a cold empty house with no one there to make it a home. How hard it is for teens to come home from school to nobody. Is it any wonder that most crimes committed by teens happen after school, when no one is home yet to be with them? The computer, video and TV just are not substitutes for the warmth of a home ensouled by a loving parent. Even if the teen doesn't want to talk and only goes up to his room, he knows you are there and on some level feels that someone who loves him is near. Can anyone really tell me that this isn't vitally important to teens, so delicate in their sense of self and their relationships to other people?

 

My own son , when he went off to high school insisted that I be waiting for him, on the porch with a snack for when he returned from school. He would throw himself in a chair and, whilst wolfing down his snack, proceed to tell me and his younger brother a blow by blow account of everything that happened that day in school. He stayed in high school for two years and then came home for a year - while home, he would also regularly emerge from his room and give me an update on what he was thinking about.

 

His younger brother has been the same - he went to high school for six months before returning to homeschool. Every morning we check in with his work - some days we work together, other days he is more independent. But every afternoon we check in about his homework and plan to sit together while he does his. Sometimes I knit or read while he is reading, sometimes I work on the computer while he sits at my desk. He really likes the companionship (and my husband's ability to help him with his French) while he does his homework. Sometimes we just sit together in silence, each reading their own book.

 

My sons do not know that in some circles it is apparently considered uncool for teens to want to be with their mother or father and to share deeply with them. My elder son actually ended a friendship with another teen boy becase he couldn't handle how rude and disrespectful that boy was to his own mother.

 

So this is a plea to parents to not overlook the needs of teens when they are planning their lives. One might no longer be able to be at home all the time and one might not homeschool ones teen. But if there is any way to be at home in the afternoon and evening when a teen returns from school, then I encourage you to do so.

No math this year

Planning each academic year for my son has developed,  since about 7th grade, into planning with my son. This is as it should be. If homeschooling is about anything, it is about people taking hold of their lives and finding what inspires them. Of course, because Waldorf is also about health and because we recognize that we are all flawed human beings, real education also often means having to do what one does not wish to do - to push against ones walls and "stuff" to get to the other side. As adults we have this challenge from time to time (more often for some of us!) and as parents we can keep our eyes open for these challenges for our children.

 

To truly develop the will forces, one needs to push against resistance - one's own, preferably. Nothing is more satisfying than trying again and again and again to master a skill - riding a bike, playing the piano, dribbling a basketball. Math can provide such experiences - the sheer agony of learning multiplication tables and the prolonged determination needed to master long division are two examples.

 

But.... it is also true that when children are not motivated and loathe a subject that there is just no way that they will be able to learn it. Thus igniting the determination to  push through resistance and get it done (whatever it might be) necessitates enthusiasm and engaged will forces in the child. Simply saying "you need to learn your 8 times table - or else" is not igniting a flame. It is coercion. But finding a way to set the bar high and keep it there in the face of a child's necessary whining and complaining is not coercion. It is helping a child identify his own resistance and get over it. There is a delicate balance that must be found - and this is by no means easy. It is one of the heardest challenges of parenting.

 

And of course, all parents have this challenge, whether they homeschool or not. How much soccer practise is necessary? When is practising the piano necessary and when might it kill any joy in music? As homeschoolers we share these dilemmas with the rest of parent-kind. But..... we often have to deal with it a good bit more as we are the teachers and face these questions every day. And if our child tends toward the sluggish or ethereal and is especially reluctant to set his or herself challenges to overcome, then we have our work cut out for us.

 

In my family math provided an overwhelming abundance of opportunities to challenge both my sons to dig deep and get over it. Tears, screaming fits, out and out refusal, hours of whining.... math, in all our years of schooling, has almost never been tackled with any semblance of willingness or grace in my sons. But we have persevered.

 

My eldest, who now lives back in the UK, is about to start an engineering course. He phoned me up to tell me about a test he had to take to get accepted onto the course. He of course aced the language arts part - and then, I could hear him grinning as he proudly told me that he had passed the math part. No great honors involved - but he passed. It had been worth it and he was satisfied.

 

Whewf - was I glad! And Daniel will use math in the work he wants to do and has the ability to learn what he needs to. This is a rather utilitarian relationship to math, but it will do. He has perseverd and he has come out the other side.

 

Gabriel on the other hand, has no intention of using math past being able to balance a check book and other similar tasks. But because the Waldorf approach to mathematics is not purely utilitarian but also appreciates mathematics as a rigorous way of training the mind and thinking, we have pushed him to go beyond just skills-based math. But he is digging his heels in.

 

It came to a head at our pre-semester planning meeting when the question of "what is Gabriel doing this year for math" came up. He basically said he would do what we "made" him do, but was sure he'd hate every minute of it. Paul and I looked at each other - was this one of those parental moments when we needed to just make him push through his stuff or was this a time to step away? We decided to do the latter. Knowing how stubborn our son is, we knew that at this point in his life, it would be futile to make him do math in the hope that he'd come round. Rather, at 15 years of age, it is time for him to have to make such decisions himself - and, because we know that he is a basically sensible person, we figure that at some point before he finishes high school, he will, undoubtedly, return to math.

 

So we said "ok. No math this year."

 

He looked surprised, to say the least. And after a few minutes started talking about that this would be his "rest year" for math.... and maybe during his junior year he'd do some math. I wasn't expecting that and his willingness to articulate that possibility made me feel even more certain that we'd reached the right decision.

 

And this is where another truism in education comes in - when a person is motivated, they can learn whatever they want, often in a very short time. We have always, of course, known this, not just because it is a main tenet of unschooiing (one of John Holt's biggest arguments for unschooling) but because anyone who has his or her eyes open and observes human behavior knows this! But.... we are not unschoolers. We are Waldorf educators and although every Waldorf educator will also agree with this position, we also again add in the fact that education, as a holistic practise, also needs to take into account developing the will forces and qualities such as perseverance and determination. And, back to what I said earlier, opportunities for this usually come in the form of things one doesn't "want" to do. Over time, hopefully, a child and then a teen learns to have insight into her resistance to things and can transform "don't want to" into "yes I will". But that takes years and a path of following whims and inclinations in childhood is not the best path, I would say, toward this goal.

 

So we shall see. We shall see where Gabriel goes next. And we will keep you all informed!

This Year's English

This year I am teaching a homeschool English class - well, actually, most of the students are enrolled at a Charter school here in our town which allows them to take classes "in the community" - but the regulations are (surprise, surprise) tightening so they won't be able to do this next year....and so most will become homeschoolers. My son Gabriel is in this class. Thought you all might be interested to see what we are doing...

 

English 9^th/10^th Grade   Fall 2008 Course Description

 

We will begin with an introduction to Greek culture and theater, with a special focus on Aristotelian elements of drama. Our theme for the year will be “elements of literature” and we will explore how this manifests in drama, short stories and novels (as well as in poetry in Semester 2).

 

The class will start with Sophocles’ Electra. They will have a number of in-class essays to write on themes arising from our reading as well as one at-home essay to write. The students will be expected to read the whole play on their own and we will also read it together, out loud, taking parts.

 

We will focus on Greek theater and Electra for 3 weeks.

 

Then we will quickly move through Roman and Medieval European theater and stop for breath during the Renaissance. Shakespeare will be our focus and we will work with  Twelfth Night for 3 weeks. The students’ in-class work will again include short, quick, on-your-toes essays and a quiz. We will read Twelfth Night as a class and “block out” the play. The students will also read it at home. We will finish this section of our class by watching a BBC production of  the play either on a weekend day or on an evening, perhaps at my house…. or perhaps at a home with a widescreen TV….hint hint….!

 

Next we will turn to short stories. The students will read several over a 4 week period and examine the differences in how, for instance, a playwright works with plot and setting and an author works with the same. The students will have a number of creative writing assignments during these weeks.

 

The last 5 weeks of the semester will be devoted to the study of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. As with our other studies, we will place the author and the novel into their historical setting and then pick up on “elements of literature”, this time within a novel. We shall see what kinds of writing assignments I set for the students…!

 

As one might expect, we will be doing plenty of things other than studying literature during each hour and a half class! We will work on grammar and spelling mainly (but not exclusively) as issues arise from the students’ work and there will be numerous exercise focused on improving writing and use of language. A major focus of the class is on writing – on developing the ability to write clearly, coherently and gracefully, whether one is writing an essay, a report or a piece of creative writing. The students will also be challenged to express themselves equally well when they speak in class, whether they are answering questions, sharing their thoughts, or giving an  oral presentation.

 

We will also spend time going over note taking and being organized – they will be expected to hand in their English Notebooks at the end of class for evaluation – one thing I will be looking at is how well they take notes. We will work with this throughout the year. And, of course, we will examine various literary terms such as use of allegory, onomatopoeia, simile and so on as we move through various kinds of literature. We might have a harmless little quiz or two on literary terms…

 

Each student will have a Greek and Latin roots workbook to work on throughout the year. We will work together as a class on vocabulary in the first few weeks of class – then I will give them the books. They will be expected to work on them at home but I will give occasional pop quizzes to see how things are progressing!

 

As 3 of the 7 students are sophomores, I will ensure that they are sufficiently challenged and that their requirements exceed those of their freshman classmates. They will be expected to go just that much deeper, be just that much clearer, extend themselves just that much further and will, from time to time, be given some additional work.

 

I would like to invite any student who wishes to opt for an Honors component to the class to do so. Students must hand in a written proposal to me by Tuesday 16 September and we will find a time to briefly discuss what they’d like to do. An example of a project could be reading 2 novels and writing a 7 – 8 page paper on a theme drawn from the two books. All Honors proposals must be approved by me and a deadline for first drafts and final work agreed upon. We’ll talk about this (and everything else!) on the first day of class.

 

I am aware that the Charter school uses a PASS/FAIL system. I will be creating a course description and written evaluation for each students to add to her portfolio. Any student who wishes to be awarded a grade in addition to a written evaluation needs to tell me by Tuesday 9 September.

 

 

 

 

No SAT or ACT?

Here's a link to an organization called "Fair Testing" which has a 2008 list of US colleges and universities which do not require or are prepared to waive standardized tests as part of their admissions policy.

 

As a transplanted Easterner, I am interested in the high number of very selective liberal arts colleges out East which appear on this list. I only wish some of their interesting nearby counterparts (Grinnell, Earlham, Carleton, St Olaf's, Macalester) did the same!

 

Here's the link.

Theater Transcript

The following is a description for Gabriel's transcripts which I wrote based on what Gabriel did this last semester in theater. The teacher, wonderful as he is at directing plays and inspiring the best in his cast, is not known for his ability to write transcripts or evaluations (although he is part of the faculty at YIHS) and so I have written it instead.

 

Class began with the students sitting together with the teacher, discussing what play to perform. Priorities, hopes and excitement were shared. By about the third or fourth class they had settled on The Plebians Rehearse the Uprising by Gunther Grass, as suggested by their teacher. Gabriel auditioned for and got the part of the Kazanka.

 

The teacher encouraged the students to deepen their knowledge of the play and its context by learning about Bertold Brecht and the context for the play. Gabriel obliged by watching a BBC video production of Coriolanus here at home as well as going to see a local production of Caucasian Chalk Circle (which was a rather neat bit of community synchronicity).

 

Unfortunately, the high school was closed for several weeks due to Draconian measures dished out by the Health Department in the face of a measles "epidemic" of one. It looked like there would be no end of year play at YIHS.

 

But, just 8 days before the end of school, the quarantine was lifted and the teacher/director and students sprang into action. They quickly decided to present an evening of Noh theatre and set to work designing a set, creating costumes and improvising Japanese-sounding music. Gabriel had two parts; one as part of a crowd and the other as a samurai in  two person play.

 

Gabriel's teacher commented that he was, of course, thrilled how Gabriel and the other students really came forward to create a memorable evening, how dedicated and hard working they were. About Gabriel personally he told me that he felt Gabriel was more relaxed and at ease on stage than he had been in a play he was in in the Fall. From being somewhat cautious about the idea of performing on stage (something he had never done in any way before last Fall) Gabriel is now very excited about theatre, giving it priority in his schedule.