What I'm Reading

I'm on a break from school, so I'm reading for myself right now. I'm in the middle of a couple books (because only reading one book at a time is no fun).

First: Adventures in Steiner Education by Brien Masters. It's subtitled "An Introduction to the Waldorf Approach." I've had a couple parents ask me about the Waldorf schools, so I thought I'd look into it a bit. Despite the claim on the back ("Spicing the text with many personal stories and anecdotes") it's mostly theory. I find that most of the theory has a mix of good and bad; Steiner had a mystical, evolutionary view of human development (including the theory that very young children could remember where they were before they were born). At the same time, he understands that children have different stages of development and addresses them. And he didn't believe in teaching them to read too early. From the best I can figure, Waldorf is intended to be a holistic approach to learning, and in the end the children are as educated as anyone in the public school system, and they may have learned to think a bit more than their peers.

Second: The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I just finished the first book last night and I loved every moment of it.  Tolkien was a master writer. I'm sort of sad that I didn't read them years ago (as a child I viewed them as "boy books" because my brother read them; as a co-worker pointed out, they also lack many female characters so they don't naturally appeal to younger female readers). At the same time, I'm glad that there are such truly perfect stories still waiting for me to read. Granted, I had to go back almost 60 years to find good writing.

That's about it. There are a couple things for Bible studies and I have another missionary biography ready to read as well. Next week I have to start school work again and most of my reading will be deeper stuff. For now I'm going to stick to fantasy primarily.