Discussions with Teachers

Rudolf Steiner

The four temperaments and the elements of the child's nature. The preponderance of ego, astral etheric and physical principles. Some characteristics of each and how to treat them. Polarity in the temperaments. Seating of children. One and one half hours of main lesson followed by one half hour of stories. Plan of stories for the first through eight grades - fairy tales, fables and Bible stories. A question about melancholics. Textbooks, examinations and subject teachers.

The sanguine child. Attention. Temperaments in the Bible and in music. Phlegmatic children and diet. Melancholics and their illusions. Treatment of cholerics. Creative powers depend upon preserving youth. Temperaments and occupations.

Story telling and drawing for different temperaments. Describing animals. The question of 'Cinderellas' in the class.

Human posture and spatial picturing. The basic four arithmetic operations and temperaments. Plane and solid geometry. Designs for different temperaments. Fairy tales and animal stories. Abnormalities of temperament. How to handle the class 'Cinderellas'. The question of bad behavior in the class.

Speech exercises. Temperaments and Karma. Individual and group temperaments in the class. Influence of mother and father. Heredity. The temperament of folk groups and language. Children's temperaments and learning languages. Dealing with bad behavior. Ringleaders. The problem of 'goody-goodies' in the class.

Speech exercises. Preparing children for poems and stories. Examples: a talk about dogs and another about violets. How to deal with 'goody-goodies' in the class. Dealing with children who have a 'crush' on a teacher.

Speech exercises. Instruction examples for children between twelve and fifteen years of age. The fable of the Boy, the Horse and the Bull. History of Europe from the eleventh to seventeenth centuries. The Crusades: their causes, goals and problems and their unexpected results. Quarrels of Greeks and Franks. The impact of superior civilizations of the East and Greek Christianity on Europe. Some historians considered. Dealing with children who have a 'crush on a teacher.

Speech exercises. The fable of the Oak and the Fox. Helping children with no apparent talent for specific subjects. Diet for bad readers and writers. Cocoa. Eurythmy for children having difficulties with arithmetic. Geography. Ambition should not be encouraged. Children with poor observation capacities and those who resent eurythmy. Effects of tea and coffee. Dull and bright children. Remembering forms through exaggerated caricatures.

Speech exercises. Botany. The nature of growth. Fertilization process not to be stressed for younger children. The plant's relationship to water (root), air (leaves) and heat (blossom). The plant as the 'negative' of the human being. Plants should be compared to the soul, not to the physical body.

Speech exercises. Human soul qualities revealed in plants. Sleeping, dreaming and waking in relationship of the Earth to plants. Polarity of tree and fungus. The Pythagorean theorem.

Speech exercises. Phrenology discounted. Human senses. Plants are not the senses of the Earth. Forms of plants. Plants classified by the development of root, stalk, leaf. The medical plant lore of medieval mystics. Plants in relationship to the child's soul at the age of fourteen.

Speech exercises. Sex education and plant growth. Maps and geography. Angles and areas.

Speech exercises. Algebra should precede teaching areas. Introducing algebra through sums of interest. Phantasy in creating arithmetic problems. A shop for the second grade. How young Gauss solved a problem. Rates of movement. Copernicus and Bessel.

Teaching music; instruments. The transition from arithmetic to algebra. Negative and imaginary numbers. Addition, multiplication, exponents, subtraction, division, roots. Formulas. Town building in Europe. Concrete chronology through enacting the generations. Towns originated as markets, later fortified. Change of consciousness in the fifteenth century. Historical observations. Socialist historians are good for facts. Observing the movements of the sun and planets. Egyptian culture.

Speech exercises. The lemniscate and the human organs. Invasion of the Roman Empire by the Celts because of their desire for gold. Invasions in cultivated and virgin land (Goths and Franks). Christianity and pagan cults. Overcoming differences in ability. Modern and classical foreign languages: English and French, Latin and Greek. Reports and grades.

General objectives for grades 1 through 8. German language in grades 1 through 8. Drawing. Latin in grades 4 through 8. Greek in grades 6 through 8. Factual knowledge in grade 3. History and geography in grades 4 through 8.

Nature and natural history in grades 3 through8. Industry and business, physics and chemistry in grades 6 through 8. Arithmetic, mathematics and geometry in grades 1 through 8. Drawing in grades 1 through 8. Music.

Music, eurythmy and gymnastics.