2024/2025 Class 11 Full Experience Details

Live Zooms in Pacific Time

Main Lesson: Monday & Wednesday 8 am

Science Block: Monday at 9 am

Math: Tuesday at 11:30 am

Guardianship: Thursday 7 am 

Enrichment: Tuesday 8 am

Humanities  Main Lesson Blocks with Ms. Daniela

Tragedy and Comedy: This main lesson explores the opposing genres of tragedy and comedy. We will begin with the origins of drama in ancient Greek religious festivals, and follow the themes of self-awareness, transformation, wisdom, foolishness, and human responses to the world around them. Our work will center on two plays: the ancient Greek tragedy of Antigone by Sophocles, and the French comedy The Imaginary Invalid by Molière.

This course also helps scaffold strong work habits. We will build skills for reading plays as distinct from reading prose, and discuss how this changes our role as a reader. Additionally, students will learn and utilize specific note taking systems and practice transforming those notes into longer essays in their own words.

There are two significant artistic assignments in this course. Students will choose short sections from the varying plays, work with the imagery and sound of the language, and present their selections to the class. Additionally, over the course of the block, students will create an artistic rendering of one character from each play.

Parzival I and II: “The eleventh grade is a turning point in the adolescent’s Waldorf experience. Out of the richness of the courses, teenagers are placed in touch with their inner resources and higher selves.” – Betty Staley

This eleventh year of the school journey brings students face-to-face with inner questions that arise within them and push them to contemplate existential realities. They encounter within themselves questions that may not have answers they expect or may not have definitive answers at all. The experiences prompt them to learn to be with open-ended questions while striving to accomplish their tasks and to take responsibility for all their work.

During this main lesson block, students will explore the medieval story of Parzival and his quest while in the process encountering their own relationships between themselves and others as well as their relationship to their own inner experiences and questions like ‘Who am I?’, ‘How can I relate to you?’, or ‘Where can the truth be seen?’.

Parzival by Wolfram von Eschenbach was written in the early thirteenth century and is a very complex tale of love, adventure, courage, and a quest that becomes the weaving of the life story. The story tells of Parzival’s journey from ignorance, through doubt, to looking for the grail which in this story is a mysterious source of the power to nourish and heal.

While the story dates to the Middle Ages the adventures and encounters in the story are still very alive for our modern age in their myth and symbolism, but also in the universally human life paths illuminated within the story. Class 11 students will set out on a quest of their own during this main lesson block – a quest to find ways to articulate deep inner truths and/or struggles, to discover the importance of asking questions, the meaning held within sacrifice, courage, and love,

Students will work on rather challenging reading and will be invited to practice their capacities for independent and analytical thinking through several written assignments. Some of their assignments will prompt them to explore questions like, ‘What is destiny?’, ‘What is compassion?’, ‘Why can one feel alone even in a crowd?’; and for some they will be guided to choose their own topics and areas of focus. In the process, we will dive deeply into the scenes from the book, the symbolism woven into the story, and the characters and their unique aspects. We will enliven the work of writing and reading through class conversations, artistic work in watercolor and pencil illustrations, and the readings of dramatized retellings.

"Societies have come to define themselves by their historical myths and national narratives. … what is the story we are living within? Where is our story taking us?” – D. Blight.

Internship: One of the main themes of 11th grade is the theme of journey. Students develop a sense of objectivity and are able to see things and write and tell about them from various perspectives. During this block they will journey out into the world to feel their place in the world, to widen and strengthen their capacities for social grace and tact, to experience working under a community mentor, and to have a taste of the life and social dynamics in professional areas of life.

Students will be encouraged to seek for these experiences to happen in areas of their particular interests or even potential future careers, and they will need parent and family support to find and confirm these arrangements well ahead of time so that they are ready to make the most of this block.

This will be a deep experience for the students and will take them into meaningful journeys at workplaces, ideally lasting 8 days (4 days in week 2 and 4 days in week 3). At the end of the block they will prepare presentations to share what they learned and what their experiences involved. These will be presented to our class community (including class parents) during live zoom lessons of Week 4 of the block, and submitted as recordings and presentation files in the assignment portal, too.

“By the end of Grade 11 the students begin to attain objectivity in their feelings and thus increasing capacity to form judgments of taste, style and social tact. They bring mobility into their thinking, which goes beyond the logical causality of their thinking in Grade 10 and can now synthesize and correlate different factors within a holistic view. They are also able to think about infinite and nonsense-perceptible phenomena. The students have a self-directed sense of social responsibility and are able to correlate and integrate related phenomena in a more holistic understanding.”
~ (From: The Educational Tasks and Content of the Steiner Waldorf Curriculum 2000)

Guardianship Class with Ms. Daniela and Mr. Siepker

Guardianship Class: Our Guardian teachers will support the full experience students through monthly and seasonal themes of focus and various projects. Students will have support and guidance in developing capacities for managing their time, leading and collaborating as a team, finding opportunities to go out and serve their local communities, asking for help when needed, and so on.

Guardian teachers are inspired by the striving to build a sense of connection and belonging for the group that will help students create ways of both, deepening their High School community and staying accountable to themselves and their teachers in their learning and creative work.

Math with Mr. Starzynski

Math Track: This course will cover topics from Algebra II and Precalculus. We will begin with a thorough introduction (possibly review depending on grade level) of 2D Cartesian coordinates. After that we will move on to reviewing Trigonometry and then go into Complex Numbers. This will be followed by combining all three subjects together along with an extensive review of algebra and an introduction of function terminology. Along the way, the class will look at graphs and roots of polynomials, exponential and logarithmic functions, ambiguous cases in trigonometry and much more.

Projective Geometry Block:

“An approach to the secrets of space from the standpoint of artistic and imaginative insights.”- Lawrence Edwards

The 11th Grade Projective Geometry Block is a challenging, highly imaginative exercise, stretching the limits of our traditional “Euclidean” worldview. Through various geometric constructions first discovered by Pappus, Desargues, Pascal and Brianchon, students explore the ways in which mathematicians for 2000 years flirted with the ideas which we now recognize as projective constructions. The effort moved forward when artists in the 15th century began to wonder how to depict scenes on flat paper which appeared to be three dimensional. PG was only recognized and developed in the 19th century. Through these explorations, we will come to appreciate a completely unfamiliar space reality which is just as valid, and in fact more generally true, than the one with which we are more used to dealing.

Science Main Lesson Blocks