Waldorf in Thailand

I know I haven't written on this blog for a looong time ~ even so much of my time in Timor is not covered here. However ~ I'm glad I did this blog because my camera was stolen about six months after I arrived in Timor, so I only have the pictures here because I posted them to this blog.

Now I am in Thailand. To be honest, I've never been interested in coming to Thailand, and I wasn't super-excited about the idea of living in Bangkok. The main reason I accepted this job is because it is at a Waldorf school, and I'm interested in Waldorf. So this blog may be about Waldorf just as much as it's about Thailand ~ we'll see. Another good thing about Thailand is that it's close enough to Timor that I will be able to go back there during the break. Also my friend Faruq is living in Dhaka now ~ I don't know if I'll go there! ~ but I should get to see him over the next two years :)

Not that Thailand is some kind of hell on earth ~ of course it isn't. I expected it to be like Denpasar in Bali ~ urban, dirty, polluted, with six-lane highways etc....but the more supermarkets, malls and department stores I'm taken to (partly because no-one will take me downtown because of the Red Shirts), the more it reminds me of Seoul or Tokyo. I was in the basement foodcourt of a mall yesterday that looked just like a foodcourt in Seoul ~ a very chi-chi one too. (Much nicer than anything you'd see in Toronto). Anyhow ~ I don't expect anyone to get too excited by discussions of foodcourts...

I don't have a camera yet ~ I hope to buy one in the next month. But, in preparation for teaching I am reading some of the works of Rudolf Steiner (the creator of the Waldorf schools) and I just found this interesting, so I will share it here;

(It's from the book "Rhythms of Learning" by Roberto Trostli) and it's about teaching math to first-graders.

"The 4 arithmetic operations - adding, subtracting, etc - are also introduced in the first grade. Steiner placed great emphasis on the introduction to these operations, for he asserted that the way children learn to think about them will help determine whether they will achieve true freedom of thought as adults [!?]

Thinking has two major aspects: synthesis and analysis. When we synthesize, we add things together, building something up from parts; when we analyze, we seperate or divide a whole into its parts. According to Steiner, the process of synthesizing does not leave a human being completely free...he explains:

"If I have to add two and five and three in order to find the total, I am not free, for the answer is fixed by an underlying law. But if I begin with the number ten, I can view it as consisting of nine and one or five and five; or I can arrange it into three, 5 and 2 & so on. When analyzing, I am able to act with complete inner freedom..."

Although children are much more disposed to analyzing than synthesizing, most modern educational practices stress synthesis over analysis, especially in the early grades. According to Steiner, such overemphasis may have profound implications for later life: if children's urge for analysis is not sufficiently satisfied, as adults they may become overly materialistic in their thinking..."

Interesting. It's quite a conclusion to make, but I have to admit, I can't ever recall being asked to divide 10 (or any number) into parts when I was little; that way of thinking about it (as having many different possibilities), and teaching it, is new to me.

OK ~ Stay tuned! Tommorrow is the beginning of Songkran, the Thai New Year festival. Apparently the whole city turns into one massive waterfight ~ we shall see :)