Waldorf High School at Home

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.