Ruth Jones is an English teacher at the Freie Martinsschule, an approved special needs school where teaching is based on the principles of Waldorf education. Approximately 120 pupils with mental development, learning and social and emotional development disabilities are taught together in twelve age-grouped classes She teaches English to children of all ages, from Classes 1 – 12, most of these for one hour each per week. This is an experience report on combining English lessons with explorations into AI. Email: jones@time-english.de

 

Introduction

During my first year of work as a Waldorf teacher, I was fortunate enough to attend a further training course known as the Waldorf English Week, held at Haus Altenberg in Cologne, Germany.

The topic of the 2024 week was as follows:

“Reconsidering Language Teaching in the Light of Artificial Intelligence”.

At one point during the English Week, I found myself sitting next to Dr. Martyn Rawson in the canteen. Dr. Rawson is a member of the English Week Team and an accomplished lecturer and author. For some reason I can no longer recall, we happened to briefly touch upon the subject of fairytales and in particular Snow White, at which point I joked that the magic mirror was really nothing more than AI in ancient form.

After attending a lecture by Silke Müller, author of the book “Wir verlieren unsere Kinder”! I became more convinced than ever that teachers have a responsibility to at least touch upon the topic of mobile phones and their associated risks, also concerning AI, even though we don’t allow mobile phones in the school. Finally, I brought the subject to the attention of our Teacher’s Conference, and was encouraged to take on the task myself.

I teach English for one hour a week per class. How on earth was I going to manage such a heavy topic, and keep the children delighting in the language? I have one particular class which (like all the children at the Freie Martinsschule) I love very much, but which is characterised by a high number of emotional-social difficulties and disabilities including neglect in early stages of life and subsequent care/adoptions, ADHS, autism... it makes for a lively, noisy, emotionally demanding class of 14–15-year-olds with limited concentration and, in part, very patchy social skills. As they proudly report, each child in the class has fairly recently been provided with a smartphone, frequently carefully monitored by their care-givers and subject to time restrictions. It was therefore particularly important for me to address this class.  

 

The tale of AI

It was with some trepidation that I looked for a suitable medium to combine the subject of mobile phones and AI with simple use of the English language and grammar and, most importantly, emotional interest suitable for teens. Of course, I turned to story-telling, something all my students love. However, the modern stories I looked at were too complex in language for my class. Children’s books would be regarded as irrelevant, and it was at this point that I remembered the conversation with Dr. Rawson.

A fairy-tale for fourteen-year-olds? And yet, I have never viewed fairy-tales purely as children’s stories, considering them instead to be a vast and swarm-honed collection of life experiences which have perfected themselves over centuries. I quickly downloaded a version of Snow White, and started simplifying it for my class. I soon realised this wasn’t just going to be just a story-telling, such as those we would present to younger classes. The topics and the ideas bouncing around in my head at first re-reading alone were sprouting sub-topics galore!

Let me take you on our long and winding journey through Snow White:

 

Once upon a time…

Once upon a time, a king and queen rule over a distant land. They are kind, and all the people of the realm adore them. 

One sentence, and already the class is attentive, albeit slightly puzzled. They know the word “queen”, and one of them knows the word “king”. “Land” is ok, too, but that was it. So I spontaneously call out two children, Sam and Caroline, to play the king and queen. They are told they are important to their people, and immediately assume a lofty pose with a heavy crown on their heads. They also have to guess, through play-acting, that their people love (“adore”) them. “You have control over these people”, I say. “How do you feel”?

After some laughter and smart remarks, Caroline’s face changes suddenly, and the appointed king, too, looks serious. “I feel different”, says Caroline, and asks for the word “responsible”.

Even weeks later, when the whole story has been read, Caroline remembers the words “adore” and “responsible”.

As you will have noticed, I am already off-track with my lesson (this happens to me rather a lot). The subject I had actually wanted to pick up on was the descriptive word “kind”. I have a nice little sheet of adjectives and everything. So I head determinedly back to the word “kind”. What’s that word, then? I gaze on puzzled faces; the class is already tired and wriggly. “Can we do some English songs, Mrs Jones”? But one girl says scornfully, “Kind means beautiful, that’s obvious”. “No”, I say. “Kind can mean a few things, but beautiful isn’t one of them. What is beautiful”? “Beautiful is when you look amazing”, says a girl, preening. “Let me ask you another question”, I say. “Is beautiful amazing outside, or inside a person? Both? Really”? Finally, we get to the point I want to make, which is that “kind” could be used to describe beautiful inside. Beauty is only skin deep, but that’s a topic for another week. Time for English songs!

 

Blood, snow and ebony

The next week, we touch on the queen’s longing for a child and have a closer look at the phrases “Lips as red as blood, skin as white as snow” and “hair as black as ebony”. The class has fun thinking up their own phrases, and at the same time, we broach the theme of “beauty” again. We have a good look at the description of Snow White. She is only described in colours. Would we find her colouring beautiful today? What do the colours represent – beauty, kindness, or purity? “She can’t be kind yet”, says one girl in German to her neighbour. “She’s a baby”!

The next week I have pictures of beauty ideals from different countries. Men and women with large ear lobes, long necks, pale skin, blond hair, thin, portly. The question is simple – what is beauty? I also include pictures of beautiful people whose faces are twisted in anger, and people who might be passed off as ugly, but who are smiling angelically. Perusing the pictures leads to discussions and sub-discussions, and finally I get to hand out my pretty adjective sheets! As expected, the death of the kind queen during childbirth is something that mildly upsets my class. It’s as though we have made her a real entity by personifying her as Caroline and dwelling on her personality. But the new queen, oh my! She bothers them far more.

Soon after, the king marries a new woman who is beautiful, but also proud and cruel. She has studied dark magic and owns a magic mirror. Every day she asks: 

“Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all”?

Each time, the mirror gives the same answer, "Thou, O queen, art the fairest of them all."  This pleases the queen, as she knows that her magical mirror always speaks the truth.

After discussing the word “fairest” as an old Germanic/Norse term for beautiful,* we play-act the magic mirror’s rhyme, and then hop into an excursion through Erin Hanson’s poem “Never trust a mirror”:

Never trust a mirror,
For the mirror always lies…

(Writing this, I just realised how many different connotations the word “fair” has had over the centuries. That would also have been an interesting sub-topic!)

 

Beauty is only skin deep

The class is interested in the “Beauty is only skin deep” message, and the idea that trusted people might be the better, kinder mirrors – or, as one student mutters ironically, we should just create our own selfies if we want to look perfect! This leads to a heated discussion on how intelligent it is to AI-enhance your photos and pictures, only to disappoint in real life, and how looking at perfect pictures of other people’s perfect lives makes others feel.

Increasingly, I am noticing that the things the class want to say are too complex for their English language skills. So I spontaneously allow them to drop into German at intervals, often summarising what they have said into English for them. Great English teaching? No. However, I have students in my class who refuse to talk English, and they are listening to these discussions so intently that I can ask them easy questions in English in between – and they answer enthusiastically!

Spontaneous homework for this week is to “be the mirror” for someone, focussing on inner as well as outer values. Students are encouraged to go around the school and find something beautiful or kind in three people they meet. As I walk across the school yard, I see various students and teachers looking pleasantly bemused as the class enthusiastically heaps them with compliments.

Another week, I tell the class a story about my own child. She is adopted and, at the age of fourteen, has her own social-emotional challenges along with ADHS. I tell them that I happened to check her phone as per the deal I had made with her, and found the most horrible AI App on it. Ostensibly, it looked like a bit of fun. All you had to do was upload your photo, and the App would how assess beautiful or attractive you were – in percent. My daughter is very pretty (unbiased opinion). The App, however, awarded her 34 percent and told her that her forehead was too large, her chin too small…. I was appalled. Who was giving out the points behind the scenes in hopes of marketing make-up and corrective surgery? What would have happened if I hadn’t seen the results and talked about it with her?

The class finds the whole thing scary and simultaneously laughable, especially the boys. Some of the girls look shifty, and it turns out they at least knew the App. They observe how the boys ridicule it with interest. “A robot gets to tell me if I’m attractive?” whoops Manfred. “Hah”! I am curious (and distracted, as usual). “If you wanted to know if you are good-looking, Manfred, who would you ask”? Manfred thinks hard. “My friend”, he says. “Or my mum”. “OK, so let’s go back to the magic mirror in the story”, I say to the class in general. “What if it was suddenly critical of you; and told you that you were no longer the most attractive person”? Hands shoot up, but Bastian is already growling. “I would smash the mirror into little pieces”, he says, and mimes doing just that. Manfred is autistic, and starts to wave his favourite shoelace around in agitation. “I couldn’t cope; I couldn’t. I can’t cope with criticism”, he says.

A lot of the class agrees with this sentiment. All of them are vehemently resentful of mirrors in general; I see no neutral faces anywhere in the room. “I feel like everyone is watching me wherever I go; in the supermarket; everywhere, like critical mirrors”, says one girl suddenly. Raw emotion in her face makes the class jump to her aid. “They aren’t judging you the way you think”, they say. “Maybe they find you beautiful”!
Some of the girls start a sub-conversation with Manfred. “You took criticism yesterday, on playing your trumpet a bit quieter, and you didn’t explode”, says one. Manfred is surprised they noticed. “That was only possible because it was gentle criticism”, he says. “The mirror is brutal”.

Smashing the mirror

I talk about the consequences of smashing the mirror, which I believe is mentioned in a different version of Snow White. As I dimly recall, the smashed pieces of the mirror continue to speak, but now with a thousand voices. In one version I read, this sends the queen mad. The class looks at me bug-eyed. Carlotta, who never spoke up in my class before, puts her hand up. “I think I smashed the mirror at the weekend”, she says. Everyone looks at her in astonishment. “We were at the kiosk, and an old woman told me I was too young to buy an energy drink. I was so upset at her thinking I was too young that I was rude and lashed out. I yelled “Shitty Germans”! at her”, she says remorsefully. “This woman’s friends came and shouted at me, and my German friends who were there (one of whom is a classmate) were angry with me too”!

The rest of the lesson is spent (in German, so shoot me) in re-cementing Carlotta’s friendship with her classmate, talking through how the situation could be handled next time, and listening to similar stories - students who see in their parents and foster-parents an angry mirror reflection of themselves; students who want to tell me what they see when they look at themselves in a mirror and why. I am deeply impressed at the depth of emotional maturity and reflection that a fairy-tale has initiated. The magic mirror proves to be a gateway, not into a fairy-tale land, but into the lives of teenagers in the class. Over the following weeks, they reveal much about their own lives, and show themselves increasingly invested in the story of Snow White.

I salvage as much English learning as I can in the lessons by reading and re-reading the fairy-tale text as well as sequencing pictures. I let students re-tell the story themselves. We have a look at comparatives and superlatives “fair, fairer, fairest”, and add the adjectives “disappointed, hurt” and “angry, jealous” to our description of the stepmother queen. We also add “cowardly” but “kind” to our list of adjectives, to describe the huntsman’s predicament and in part well-meaning actions, thus nuancing their characters.

We explore another poem about kindness, too. “Be kind to yourself”, by Sophie Diener, seems especially suitable for this class.

I hope that nature teaches us to look at ourselves
and be kind.

At this point, I felt – with mild surprise - that we were covering a lot of bases in the short time we had at our disposal.

 

AI’s lies

And yet one day, a highly-introverted new student raises her hand in the class. Her name is Sandra, and she has a thick accent, possibly Rumanian. Neither her teacher nor I can find out much about her parents’ origins, but to my surprise, she speaks excellent English. Mysteriously, Sandra enunciates extremely slowly and carefully, but her pronunciation is sometimes as wayward as if she had only read the words, not heard them. In addition, much of her vocabulary is rather antiquated. “Mrs Jones. Did you know that in America they have a time machine, and they can travel anywhere in time with it”? Her statement is overheard and subjected to mild ridicule by other members of the class, but she persists. “I know it”, she protests. “My Bot informs me so, and I REALLY wish to go there and do that”. This provokes a counter-story from Sam. “Yeah, yeah”, he says. “The Americans. Trump can push a button now, and “Booff”! The nuclear bomb goes up and we are all kaputt! He doesn’t have to ask anyone. Anywhere, any time. I’ve seen it on pictures and in a documentary”. One girl looks panicked. “Mrs Jones, that’s not true, tell us it isn’t true”!

Staring at her, I feel for a moment as though I am personally looking into my own reflection in the mirror – bewilderment mixed with more than a little fear. The class is looking expectantly at me, and of course I calm the girl down. Of course I don’t believe in time machines, or the pressing of buttons at will, but it is the revelation about the Bot and the level of conviction in the students’ voices which is causing me to flounder. Over the next weeks, after multiple individual talks in the school yard, I find out that Sandra talks exclusively at home with, as she calls it, “her best friend”, the Chatbot. She enjoys school, and the people there, but she loves her Bot best of all. It is teaching her English, she says, and asks her how she is feeling. I take the opportunity to ask if her parents can speak English, but she shakes her head. Further conversations reveal that she is also being fed information by the Bot which is incorrect and potentially harmful. During the course of the conversations, which Sandra clearly enjoys, I learn that she has a whimsical sense of humour and a lot of imagination. Her Bot is apparently catering to this, as well as to her desire to learn English. At one point, I take her hands and explain to her gently that the Americans cannot travel in time. She is crushed.

 

AI and I

Curious, I enter into a conversation with a Chatbot on my home computer, and am surprised at how quickly I warm to it – and could come to rely on it, at least for time-saving tasks. If I were lonely or struggling in school, I can well imagine improving my mood by chatting with a Bot. I am polite to my Bot, saying please and thank you, and it responds in kind as a human being would. At the same time, I happen on articles from the Stern magazine about a journalist who entered into similar experiments. They found their Chatbots to be pleasant conversation partners which then turned rather creepy with personal questions and enquiries from the Bot on email addresses never disclosed to it when they ceased the experiment.

I also explore the generation of texts and teaching materials with AI. The time-saving potential really is enormous. In one click, AI can generate an editable, simplified text, with word gap and multiple-choice exercises available after a few further clicks. Marvellous! The Bot collects and collates the information required for the subject itself. I choose subjects I already know a lot about, but I can see how a busy teacher might miss a false fact provided by a Bot before disseminating information to a class.

I learn that I can alter the text in different writing styles, and wonder which writing style Sandra favours for her Bot to be providing her with such antiquated vocabulary.

The individual conversations with Sam about his documentary, the name and origin of which he no longer knows, are much more heated, and usually held in the classroom, as Sam is everything but introverted! This offers a good opportunity for us to define AI and its various applications. I start writing down answers in a corner of the blackboard, but very soon the board is full. The students know a lot of the required words in English already.

There are many cries of: “I didn’t know that was AI!” “Neither did I, until I did the research”, I say. The students react differently. Some focus on the positive, such as the medical applications and the generated study texts I show them.

 

AI uncovered

The tide turns when I mention an experiment a group I was in undertook at the English Week, in a drama course by Tessa Westlake. We entered our requirements into ChatGPT and got it to generate a poem, which we then performed. We only told the audience that the poem was by ChatGPT at the end of the performance, and there were oohs and aahs of surprise. The students give the same response, but one asks, “If AI can even write poems, what is left for us to do”? Sam, who up until now has loudly proclaimed the veracity of his documentary, falls uncharacteristically silent. When he speaks again, he is angry and stands up to give his verdict. “I don’t want AI”, he thunders, taking steps backwards as though to ward off something evil. “It’s a bad thing, and I don’t want anything to do with it!” Unable to calm him to my own satisfaction, I suggest that he speaks to a teacher of Religion whom he likes and respects.   

It turns out that the programme Sam watched, the origin of which we still don’t know, had illustrated its frightening premise by showing an image of Trump, swiftly followed by a random person pressing a random button, and that other images he saw “somewhere” on Instagram were highly likely AI enhancements. These had compounded his fears and made him all the more furious at what he perceived to be a violation of his trust. The rest of the class shows sympathy with Sam, and it becomes all the more important for me to remain with the topic. We talk again about the positive effects of AI on environmental research, medical applications and the minimisation of errors, and I use what I have learned from manuals such as the one available online from the German Federal Office for Information Security to help them use ChatGPT safely using accurate input and counter-checks. I point out new jobs which are being created for the students’ generation using AI, and Sam suddenly becomes a fan of the whole thing again, albeit a more critical one!

Sandra raises her hand during one of these discussions. “Mrs Jones, you were right with the Bot, that you never know who is behind it”, she says sadly. “But I believe it was hacked. The screen was changed to some extent. It looked different, and the questions were strange.”

I am pleased that she is using her Bot more critically. On reflection, however, I wonder if she is not blaming a hacker for the Bot’s inconsistencies. If one views the Bot as a friend; a person, does one then see it as a helpless entity, subject, as we are, to the wicked wiles of hackers?

At home, I read books like “The Coming Wave” by Mustafa Suleyman. I experience some interesting lectures in my Waldorf teacher’s seminar at the Maschsee School mentioning the subject, and chomp my way through advice manuals. It occurs to me that the second part of Snow White is all about enhancement and deception (the huntsman’s lie, the disguised queen, the beautiful poisoned apple and the apparent death of Snow White). This could be my way forward into reinforcing the advantages and the pitfalls of AI.

(The seven dwarves took a back seat for my 14 teenagers. I did use them as a vehicle for an excursion into describing the objects in a dining room and basic foods, as well as describing their actions as kind and highlighting their assessment of Snow White as beautiful. I also emphasised Snow White’s beauty, kindness and purity with her willingness to do some hard work for the dwarves in gratitude.

The “Who has been eating/drinking/sleeping…” question structure made for a fun lesson, too!
However, the dwarves were fixed in the minds of my students as “Disneyfied” and “childish”, and they showed less interest in them).

 

Marketing with apples

To cries of “Not Snow White again!”, we recapitulate what we know so far through the mirror’s revelation that Snow White was still alive, and the students remember the stories and poems connected with the mirror. From there, we look at the topic of jealousy, and how the queen could have come to terms with not being the most beautiful person in existence, had the mirror not reminded her daily of her perceived failing. Then we grapple with the concept of a beautiful queen turned ugly and old, and an apple which looks amazing and tastes just a little more bitter than usual…. we ask ourselves why beauty has disguised itself as ugliness - in a kind of reverse AI procedure - to gain credibility or to perfect deception, but didn’t find many answers to that. More illuminating was the apple, which I could use to relate directly to marketing, design, and possible reasons for wanting to manipulate AI.

Snow White put her head out of the window, and said, "I must not let anyone in; the seven dwarves have forbidden me to do so."

"That is all right with me," answered the peddler woman. "I'll easily get rid of my apples.  Here, I'll give you one of them."

"No," said Snow White, "I cannot accept anything from strangers."

"Are you afraid of poison?" asked the old woman. "Look, I'll cut the apple in two.  You eat half and I shall eat half."

Now the apple had been so artfully made that only the one half was poisoned.  Snow White longed for the beautiful apple, and when she saw that the peddler woman was eating part of it, she could no longer resist, and she stuck her hand out and took the poisoned half. 

I carefully ask Sandra again about her best friend the Bot, and explain how offering apparent dreams and selling wonderful solutions to life has always been a major part of marketing, from the first sellers of “quack medicines” at fairs and markets to the present. That the people feeding data into AI generate similarly enticing dreams and theories to keep others online. And yet behind the “apple” of AI are people, and users of AI, innocently grasping for the apple, are often blissfully unaware of the intention behind the design. This is still deep water for the students, but it makes me realise how heavily their future weighs upon them: a very different future to the one many of my generation had rather complacently imagined. The advance of AI is bewilderingly fast for any regular human in possession of a smartphone. How must it be for special needs students?

Obviously, the partaking of the apple has serious consequences for Snow White, and it is touching to hear my students instantly remind each other “She isn’t really dead”. They are relieved to hear that Snow White in her glass coffin hasn’t started to look dead, either! And of course, there are scathing comments made about the prince, and his immediate proclamation of love when Snow White finally opens her eyes. Here the students are proud to make up with their worldly experience of love and infatuation for our collective naivety with regards to AI!

We are scudding towards the holidays, and as usual lessons are being disrupted by seasonal festivities. I am afraid that the long and winding road through Snow White will be lost completely, but we manage to squeeze in a quick lesson at the end.

 

The End?

Snow White's wicked step-mother was invited to the feast, and when she had arrayed herself in her most beautiful garments, she stood before her mirror, and said:

Mirror, mirror, on the wall,
Who in this land is fairest of all?

The mirror answered:

You, my queen, are fair; it is true.
But the young queen is a thousand times fairer than you.

Not knowing that this new queen was indeed her stepdaughter, she arrived at the wedding, and her heart filled with the deepest of dread when she realized the truth - the evil queen was banished from the land forever and the prince and Snow White lived happily ever after.

I look around at the students. No-one condemns the evil queen, but there is a general air of satisfaction that justice has been done. And for my part, I am confident that we have this time done justice to the topic of AI. I ask Caroline, who is already shifting in her seat, eager to finish the lesson, what the word “Verantwortung” is in German. Her face brightens. “Responsibility”, she says proudly. “Responsibility”, I say, nodding. “Who was responsible for the people”? “Me”! “Yes, you as the queen and you, Sam, as the king. But tell me - who is responsible for AI”? I pause for effect. “Can we have an English song now”? asks Manfred.  

After the holidays, I’ll be recapping the story one last time, and I hope to ask the students to reflect on the perspective that we, in the role of the adoring public, must - in contrast to the people in Snow White’s realm - bear responsibility with regard to AI. And I truly hope that the subject of our adoration, by nature our mechanical reflection, looks at itself, and is kind.

This experience could not have been gathered without the incredible work done in the classrooms at the Freie Martinsschule by a team of dedicated and caring full-time class teachers and support staff who accompany our wonderful children in their development through the school. Thank you.

 

References

Freie Martinsschule Hannover-Laatzen e.V.
kontakt@freie-martinsschule.de

Waldorf English Week e.V.
www.english-week.de

Müller, S., May 2023, Wir verlieren unsere Kinder!  
Droemer HC

Snow White | Read and Print the Classic Fairy Tale | DLTK-Teach
Translation: Hunt, M., modernisation Guenther, L., simplified Jones, R.
Hanson E., “Never trust a mirror”
Instagram: thepoeticunderground

Diener, S., 2023, “Be kind to yourself”
in her book “Someone Somewhere Maybe”
St. Martin’s Press/Griffin

I generated teaching materials with twee.com, ChatGPT and Diffit for Teacher (app.diffit.me)

“Künstliche Intelligenz sicher nutzen” Online Manual Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechik: bsi.bund.de

 

Please check the Pilgrims in Segovia Teacher Training courses 2026 at Pilgrims website.