How I came to be a Waldorf teacher, continued...

I spoke on the phone with one of the teachers during the next week and arranged a time to come by the school for an interview. At that time, the school was housed in the undercroft of a suburban church, with large windows looking over a half-acre wonderland of lawn giving way to reeds and goldenrod. The children had departed for the day when I arrived, and I was immediately intrigued by the space and by what I heard from the teachers. The classrooms were soft, lit by natural light and full of texture and color from the wooden playsets, the silk and cotton clothes peeking from baskets, and the tables set with scenes of nature's early-spring awakening.

When I was hired at the school, it was as a kindergarten assistant. I worked in the kindergarten for two years, where I made snacks, helped to direct play and redirect misplaced energy ("Look, dear friend, the shovel is for digging in the dirt! We treat our friends kindly here..."), and was drawn into the wonder of early childhood.

I hear other educators talk about a "language rich" environment for the early years. While in the Waldorf kindergarten, the children aren't taught to decode letters or to work out math problems, they are nevertheless participating in a rich variety of activities that build the necessary underlying skills for healthy literacy and numeracy later on. The kindergarten teachers are trained to speak clearly and beautifully, to use clear language with a varied vocabulary. Every day, the children hear nursery rhymes and poems, songs, and fairy tales, all of which are presented without explanation or translation. The children learn the songs and rhymes as they learn all speech at that age: through listening and imitating, almost unconsciously, and joining in with the teacher.

In my second year at the school, I also began teaching the children of the newly-started grades program. In high school and college, I had studied Russian, and when I learned that the school wished to add a second language to its offerings (the children were already learning German from one of the class teachers) asked if I might teach Russian. Let me be completely open here: I had no idea what I was doing.

More to come...

~~tigress