Monthly Archives: February 2012

The Gift of Learning

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The Steiner Waldorf Schools Fellowship of the United Kingdom commissioned this short film about Steiner schools also known as Waldorf schools. It looks at some of the key features of Waldorf education including:

  • the Waldorf approach to spiritual development
  • the role of artistic and practical work
  • the importance of quiet contemplation in the school day
  • nurturing joy in learning as a way of life
  • the qualities and prospects of the Waldorf graduate

Waldorf education is the fastest growing, secular school movement in the world today.  Meadowbrook has grown exponentially since its incorporation in 1979 and we look forward to welcoming many more new families as word of this wonderful education continues to spread.

Motherhood and Mountain Climbing

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These are the reflections of Tabitha Jorgensen who joined the Meadowbrook Waldorf School community more than 12 years ago when her eldest son began kindergarten. He has since graduated from high school but Tabitha has three younger children at the Meadowbrook. She is currently the Enrollment Coordinator and Latin teacher.

Tabitha and her sister on the mountain

So I decided to climb a mountain for my 40th birthday. Not a small mountain, but Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. A sleep outside for 9 nights, no running water, altitude sickness, sub-zero at the top kind of a mountain.

Mt Kilimanjaro

Why would I want to do this you may ask? A legitimate question – when I invited my sister to come with me, she responded that for her 40th we would be doing something sensible like drinking wine in Italy. She, of course came out obligation and duty.  But truly, as this birthday approached, I could feel my life changing in profound ways. Continue reading →

Sympathy and Antipathy– more than a feeling?

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Colleen O’Connors has been a Waldorf teacher for more than 20 years. Originally from RI, she began teaching in Switzerland when her daughter was in kindergarten. Colleeen has a son at Meadowbrook and is currently our 5th grade teacher. Here she writes her reflections from the weekly, faculty study.

In Lecture 2 of Practical Advice to Teachers, Rudolf Steiner develops various aspects of language development and sets them in direct relationship to the two fundamental gestures of sympathy and antipathy, sometimes translated as affinity and aversion. It is very easy to limit the scope of these immense concepts to the familiar sentiments of our feeling life; setting sympathy equal to “I like it” and antipathy to “I don’t like it.” In order to understand what these two ideas have to do with the development of speech (and as we will see, in a wider sense with human development), we need to widen our sense of sympathy as that which unites us with the world, the power that overcomes all that separates us from the other Continue reading →