Interview Questions by David Barham

John Reinhart is the current high school faculty chair at Maine Coast Waldorf School and teaches humanities in the high school. He was a former colleague at MCWS, and full disclosure, remains a dear friend and poetic inspiration. 

You were a Waldorf student at the Denver Waldorf School. Please share how long you were at the school and the role your parents had at the school.

I was a student there for 14 years, eventually a member of the second 9th grade class in the high school. After my initial year in kindergarten, my parents didn’t think they could afford the school and I visited a local Catholic school where I remember the students playing Frogger on the computer. While that sounded great to me, my mother began working at the Denver Waldorf School to help offset the tuition costs. My mother eventually became a lead kindergarten teacher and taught for 18 years, retiring the year I returned to Denver to teach in the high school. I’ve never played Frogger.

Tell us about the role of yo-yos, chess, baseball, and the fiddle in your life. 

I started playing violin in third grade. Our strings teacher was Chris Daring, who was also a fiddle player (who became the first woman to win the National Adult Old-Time Fiddle Championship.). Private lessons led to fiddle contests, and by high school I stopped playing in the (very small) orchestra at school and put all my energy into playing with other fiddlers and learning guitar outside of school. I competed regularly at the National Old-Time Fiddlers’ Contest in Weiser, Idaho.

On a similar trajectory to my music, I grew up in love with baseball and only ever thought about going to a public high school because I so wanted to play baseball. As a Denver Waldorf student, I was eligible to play at the local public high school. I played one season then went out for a second before ditching baseball for chess. I realized that I wanted to play because I loved the game, but I did not love the competition and the culture around sports. Chess, however, excited me because of the game’s beauty. I was intensely competitive, but could appreciate losing a well-played game. By the end of high school, I had placed 7th in the state scholastic tournament twice, I was invited to the Colorado State Scholastic Invitational Tournament,  and competed at the national scholastic tournament in Charlotte, NC.

Yo-yos. This is a longer story, but the short of it is that I taught knitting classes to employees at a toy store, and one of those employees was a nationally ranked yo-yoer. He convinced me to sign up for the 2004 Northeast Regional Yo-Yo Championship. I practiced for a few weeks and now have a beginner division yo-yo trophy that I show off gleefully. I thoroughly enjoy telling people that I am the 2004 Northeast Regional Sixteen-and-over Beginner Division Yo-yo Champion.

What made you decide to become a Waldorf teacher? Why the Antioch Grades program and not high school training? What years did you do your training? Did you ever work as a Waldorf class teacher? How did that go?

The credit goes to my high school teachers. As a high school student, I was passionate about doing something to improve our world. Teaching seemed like a very practical and meaningful way to connect with young people, to build the foundations for a socially, environmentally, politically responsible society. But so many of the teachers who inspired me seemed to have life experience they could draw from to make their classes meaningful. So I didn’t want to jump right into teaching at 22. After college, I took a job in an office where the windows didn’t open, staring at a computer all week. I landscaped on the side. And read college applications. And built furniture out of cardboard and fished food out of dumpsters. Then I spent a year volunteering at the Albany Free School while I applied to graduate school.

But I really didn’t want to go back to school. The Antioch grades program had two draws: 1) an emphasis on practical learning, and 2) I figured if I was going to spend the time and money to go back to school, I ought to come out with a degree and not just a certificate. Even though I’d always planned to become a high school teacher, I became excited about working with younger students.

I applied for grades positions before the high school position appeared. Though I took the high school position, I did student teaching in 2nd grade and have since taught blocks in 7th and 8th grade. It’s really hard to shift between the grades and high school teaching. I sometimes still dream of taking a class from 1-8, but it would take significant self-work to prepare myself for that. And sometimes I think that teaching kindergarten might have the most significance in terms of social change…

What do you now recognize from your Antioch training has been a significant support in your work in the classroom with real live students?

I was in the year-round program and the camaraderie and mutual support between the students was important to fostering a deeper understanding not only of teaching, but wrestling with our own lives and our relationships to teaching from so many different life paths and perspectives. The student teaching was crucial, not only for the direct experience, but because of the mentoring I received from experienced teachers.

What do you appreciate about working with adolescents in such a setting?

I love pushing students’ thinking in areas they have not considered. I also revel in offering them opportunities, some of which require some nudging, so they can accomplish feats they wouldn’t otherwise have attempted. After years of classroom teaching, I jumped into drama and have found working with students theatrically to be the most invigorating work we can do with adolescents: providing opportunities for students to understand characters they would not otherwise choose to embody and work collectively to tell a story to the community.

Tell us about being an arsonist.

One of the early flyers for the Denver Waldorf High School quoted Yeats about how education is not about filling buckets, but lighting fires. File that. Years later, while applying for a teaching position, a grades teacher said that they told people they were a children’s entertainer specializing in education. While the specific title didn’t fit me, I liked the idea of elevating “teacher” into something more exciting, more suitable to the work I intended to do.

I’ve told my students that I try to teach — in that traditional sense of imparting knowledge — as little as possible.

Of course, if we’re reading a book written during Stalinist Russia, then I generally know more about that context than my students do. I can contribute to their knowledge or help point them in the direction of more information so they can begin to form their own ideas about the subject. 

What I don’t do is stuff facts into them.

I can coax, cajole, converse. I can ask questions that raise more questions or light new connections for students. I’m no more a teacher than a conduit, a supportive conductor orchestrating a human symphony — while simultaneously playing triangle too.

So I tell people that I’m an arsonist. I light children on fire. Professionally.

Tell us about “speculative poetry,” the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry Association, Longfellow Days, and creating poems on the fly.

About a decade ago I became aware of science fiction poetry, which, turns out, I’d been writing. What a joyful discovery! So I started writing more, submitting poems to various online and print publications specializing in speculative poetry. In January 2025 I became the editor of the SFPA’s quarterly print journal, Star*Line. Contributors are from all over the world and every issue includes such a wealth of weird and talented voices and I’m humbled to have to choose from among them all.

Last year, while on sabbatical, I helped organize the Longfellow Days Celebration that has been going on for 20 years in Brunswick, Maine. Longfellow (and Hawthorne) graduated from Bowdoin College (in Brunswick) in 1825, so it was particularly exciting to pull together a month-long celebration of poetry to honor that anniversary.

Between all these exciting activities, I jump at any chance to type poems for passersby at festivals. Most recently, I typed 29 poems for folks at the Swine and Stein Brewfest in Gardiner, Maine, over the course of five hours. I had so many requests that I handed out envelopes to mail poems later. I ended up typing 55 poems over the course of a week, typing each poem in roughly 10 minutes. I was honored to type poems for a couple celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary, another celebrating 26 years, a high school teacher recently retired after 51 years, a couple announcing their pregnancy, a woman about to visit a niece dying young of cancer, a girl who wanted a poem about bunnies, someone who wanted a poem about Boston sports, another for a dog. Typing poems is at once about connection: about the importance of art, of slowing down, talking with strangers.

Can you speak a bit about how your wife’s work in the Priest-Training Program in the Seminary of the Christian Community and your work in Waldorf education play out in your professional and personal life.

Those paths mean that neither of us will be arrested for sloth or accused of material greed. 

From your front-line view in the trenches of a Waldorf high school (in the classroom and in pedagogical administration), what do you see as the most pressing changes/updates/additions/subtractions necessary to keep this education vital for this modern moment? What is the value of anthroposophy in Waldorf education?

I think it’s important that we find space to slow down. The world is so busy, so overloaded with information, so utterly undigestible that we all go around with stomach aches, head aches, existential aches. I think there’s great risk that such pressures lead teachers to feel more need for more information, just as students might be begging for more entertainment. We need to do real things, get our hands dirty, work hard. Connect with one another. Remember what it’s like to be human without having to prove it by clicking all the images with stairs in them.

All of my work in the classroom, with students, with parents, and with my coworkers is founded on my work with anthroposophy, parts deeply embedded in my subconscious through my own schooling, and parts carried deeply in my heart. An openness, a curiosity, an understanding of anthroposophy is what gives the often intangible “this feels different – in a good way” feeling to people encountering a Waldorf school for the first time.

Open space: anything else to share? 

Your readers might be interested in this speech I presented at the Maine Coast Waldorf School’s Grandparents Day this year https://www.mainecoastwaldorf.org/campus-life/news/news-feature/~board/community-news/post/grandparents-day-2025

Although not available as of yet, an essay I wrote called “I Light Children on Fire” won honorable mention at the Topsham Public Library’s Joy of the Pen contest and will be online here (eventually) https://joyofthepen.topshamlibrary.org/