RSI – My Summer Home 

Jack Petrash

For years the Rudolf Steiner Institute has been my summer life, my summer family, and my summer work. Each year I have packed my books, my photocopied articles, and whatever notes I remembered to save and headed off to teach a course on the Essentials of Waldorf Education. And whether the Institute was in Maine, Vermont, or outside of Boston, as it was this year, it has always felt like a homecoming. 

I say that the Institute was my summer life, but it would be more accurate to say “our” summer life for surely this is just as true for our daughter, Ava, who grew up at RSI, and for my wife Carol who served as the Institute’s registrar for seven years. In fact, it was our fall, winter, and spring life too. The Institute would be conceived each year at the early board meetings in the fall when the curriculum was finalized and back then, it would slowly come alive in our home in the winter through faxes, phone calls, and eventually, emails. The faculty would be gathered and the catalogue would be designed and printed, and then sent to the mailing list. Our living room would be filled with large manila envelopes stuffed with brochures to be mailed to all of the Waldorf Schools in North America. And then after a while, the registrations would begin to arrive.

I would watch carefully when the registrations came because that meant that my class was taking shape. At first, it was just a list of names and places on the computer screen, but I knew these were teachers from as far away as Atlanta, Georgia, Calgary, Alberta, New Paltz, NY and Cuernavaca, Mexico, as well as students from the Toronto Teacher Training Program – young and eager to begin their study. These were my summer students. Many have become dear friends.

 

But it wasn’t until the first day of classes at the Institute when we all sat together and the introductions were given that I felt my work began. I always started my first class with a simple, benign and somewhat unimaginative question: “What are you hoping to gain from this course?” But the responses have never failed to inspire me. Here is a sampling of what I have heard repeatedly over the years. I am going to be the first grade teacher at a Waldorf School in the fall and I have not been formally trained. I am here to get ready for first grade.

• I am a former public school teacher and I was hired to teach second grade last year. I keep wondering if what I am doing is Waldorf? and my personal favorite
• I was a Waldorf student when I was younger and I want to learn more about the education I received.
• Of course, there were many other important questions, questions about developing the will, teaching with imagination, working with classroom management, but regardless of the question, my assignment was always the same. I was there to help the participants in my class understand how Rudolf Steiner’s spiritually-based ideas come down to earth and manifest in Waldorf teaching.
  
  
   

  To do this we needed accessible and manageable reading assignments, ones we could read carefully but not find overwhelming in summer. Early on I found that Rudolf Steiner’s, concise essay Education of the Child in the Light of Anthroposophy, was the perfect basic book for our work. It afforded us a clear look at how Steiner’s spiritual view of the human being, and the human being’s fourfold nature, gives rise to the Waldorf understanding of child development and the structure of our schools. In addition, we read excerpts from John Gardner’s, Education in Search of the Spirit, which provided an insightful and clear picture of Steiner’s theory of knowledge and how Waldorf teaching enkindles warm, lively thinking.
  
  But as a friend once said, “A book is only a vehicle. It takes you to the conversation you need to have.” And that is what has happened repeatedly at the Rudolf Steiner Institute. Invariably each morning I prepared for my class. I read what the students read, and went over what I planned to say. But the real moments of magic for me have always arisen from the surprising questions and comments that I could never anticipate. It was always at these moments that I was most grateful because they reminded me that when we work together closely, intensely, and continuously over a period of time, as we do at the Institute, we create a learning community and then the unexpected can arise.
  
  Of course, not all teaching (especially not mine) is neat and tidy. But at the Steiner Institute I have always been grateful for those opportunities to walk back to the dining hall with a student or to share a meal together and continue an unfinished conversation about the curriculum or the inner work of the teacher. And it is this life outside of class, the evening talks, the music, the artists in residence, and the classes that even the teachers take that has also enriched me over the years. I will never forget the work that I did with Peter Schiefer, the fine painting teacher from the Stuttgart Teacher Training Program, who inspired his students with his instruction, the subtle and inimitable command of the English language, and most importantly, his humanity. As a faculty member, I value the chance to work with colleagues from other schools and other countries, to learn what is new and different in their work, and to see what is the same for all Waldorf teachers around the world.
  
  There is no doubt that my life has been enriched by my summer work at the Rudolf Steiner Institute. It has given me an opportunity to deepen my understanding of Waldorf Education and to do this in a community of spiritually-minded individuals – teachers, artists, professionals - my summer friends.