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|||Â Â Each student, throughout their school year, will participate in a play along with their classmates. The benefits of this are many and include: a boost to self confidence and self esteem, teamwork, memory, attention span & concentration building, problem-solving and importantly building social and emotional interactions between individuals. In this article, Mr Loosli, our 8th grade teacher, talks about the significance of this work and especially introducing Shakespeare to the young teen!
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The Eighth Grade Play is truly a right of passage for the emerging teenager.
At the ages of 12 and 13 the beginnings of the true nature of the young person form. When a child reaches their “adult-like” iteration of self expression, authority, and understanding between the years of 12-13, a spark of recognition occurs within themself. They notice in a new way, the birth of their own ego consciousness. Not only are they separate from their parents, with their own ideas and life path, also, they may not agree with them!
Thus, they venture out, embracing a new path of self discovery.
On this path, they use everything foundational that they have learned thus far from their loving parents, but also, what they are currently learning from their peers and teachers. They go inward, rarely expressing their process to anyone who provided the fundamentals of their thinking. Instead, they begin to think for themselves, separate their understanding from others, and try out new forms of thinking that may or may not be beneficial to their development. Their friends become the trusted source, with the knowledge deep down that the adults who surround them, still care and will still help, when THEY need it.
Within this context, the 8th Grade Play is brought by the teacher, who, seeing what each individual in their class needs, strives to bring an experience that challenges each individual in their class. The teacher does this, while at the same time considering how on Earth they may bring a Play that will speak to the unity, respect, and wholeness of their Class’ emerging life experience and ego. Many teachers within the Waldorf Community choose to use Shakespeare to accomplish this. They use Shakespeare because within each line of each play the language is hard to understand, the content is as extravagant as it is beautiful, and the implied moral anchors and questions underneath are exquisite. This is the challenge for the 8th grader.
Thus, everything an 8th Grader encounters within the HARD work of creating a play together, speaks to a panoply of their individual, developing inner, emotional and social needs. They are challenged with something new, they encounter moral issues they have not considered, they learn to work with language that is unfamiliar, they need to search for meaning, they feel awkward and self-conscious, they ask for help from each other and other teachers, they rely upon help from their parents, they rely upon help from their teacher, and, thus, they GROW!
They grow into the purity of themselves.
And with that, new capacities for humility, responsibility, caring, awareness, and attention for their fellow beings also grows. The young individual, the Class Community, and thereby the Greater Community, thrives!
— Mr Loosli, 8th Grade Class Teacher
