What do you see? How a student’s handwriting became a “Road to Damascus” moment for Sven Saar.
“There’s one thing I’d like to apologize to you for,” I said to a student I was seeing off to high school after eight years as his class teacher. “I really tried, but I just couldn’t teach you proper handwriting. In that regard I failed as a teacher, and I’m sorry!”
“I can tell you why you failed,” Oliver replied, dryly but kindly. “I resisted you for eight years, because I prefer typing on a keyboard—and in middle school, you finally gave up.”
This conversation took place ten years ago, and its message still shakes me to the core: Had I really failed to grant Oliver—and many other students before him—to have a vigorous, independent will of their own? Why did it never occur to me that “he simply doesn’t want to”? Henning Köhler once said that a person is an individual to the extent that they refuse to conform. Does this perhaps apply most of all to children, precisely because their resistance is often spontaneous and clumsy, thereby revealing themselves?
Does much of a teacher’s professional ethos still follow the principle: “Become like me”? Especially when, as a Waldorf teacher, I fancy myself artistic, kind, and wise? This is what a human being is like, this is how they ought to be. Am I capable of letting children be different—and allowing them to discover who they are by standing in opposition to my own expectations? What do I need in order to endure that? And what do I need to make it possible?
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Translation Paula Boslau
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