When I was in teacher training, my teacher asked why I had chosen Waldorf education and I said, ”If I can help one person to have a different experience in school than I had it will be worth it.”
Sean came in fifth grade; in sixth grade he developed the habit of randomly leaning back in his chair and steadying himself by putting his hand on the keyboard of the piano. It always made a sound, it was always disturbing to whatever was happening in class, and it was making me nutty. I always reacted with irritation and Sean would say something like, “Sorry,” and that would be it. During a parent meeting at one point I told the mom and dad that I thought Sean was not respectful.
One day it happened again and I stopped and looked over at Sean, but something stopped me from saying anything that day; instead, something else happened. I saw Sean for the first time, as if I had never seen him before. I just looked at him and he looked at me and I realized that all he wanted me to do was see him, and that every time he had hit that keyboard he was asking me to see him and know him. I knew that right then, and the whole universe that Sean and I lived in changed.
He never did it again.
His dad wrote me a letter a year or so later and told me that he thought Sean would have committed suicide by now if he had not come to our class, that he had been terribly unhappy and depressed and defeated by the experiences he had in his former schools.
It may be that the only reason I made it through my own failings as a teenager was that I knew Sean was waiting for me down the road a bit.
