Chris doesn’t really know how best to counter this massive push from the makers of things and the creators of style, and he wrestles with his pedagogical choices. He thinks beauty might be a good antidote, or maybe a good vaccination.

One Thursday morning in late February, just after recess, Katrina, Larkin, and Brennan tumble into the art room with their peers. The multipurpose room is where Chris holds teacher education art classes for the adults in Eugene who want to become Waldorf teachers. Their work and the younger students’ work line the available area in the large, pink, well-lit room; unfinished clay busts wrapped in plastic perch atop cabinets containing jars of deeply infused paint for watercolors. The Waldorf system has its roots in Germanic ideals like cleanliness and order, and Chris, wrestling like Jacob with the angel, pushes back against the chaos of an art room by enforcing these ideals. Everything has a place—and everything should stay in that place. Mixing up aquamarine and midnight blue simply is not acceptable.

“Katrina, you’re all muddy!” he says to her.

“I’m not!” she protests, automatically. Then she checks her shoes.

“Am I muddy?!” she asks. A puzzled look slides across her face.

“Shoes outside of the door!” he answers, then forces the other seven kids in this group to check their shoes. But he isn’t finished with Katrina yet. Chris has spotted more mud—mud covering her jeans and part of her sweater from where she slid and fell playing soccer during recess. Unlike the younger Waldorf kids, the eighth graders don’t keep clean clothes on hand for emergencies. So, Chris decides, Katrina must leave the classroom in search of pants from the costume room.

She returns, wearing large gray pajama pants loosely rolled over her muddy jeans. Chris still makes her take off her sweater. Larkin bursts out angrily, “Why does everything have to be clean?”

On many days, Larkin finds himself getting his name up on the board—the first step to a “consequence” like writing an extra essay—thanks to his nonstop mouth. He craves the approval of his classmates, but they know him well and shake their heads at how he continues to get himself into trouble at school.

Larkin would never admit it, but he craves adult approval too—the one day in Main Lesson when he could spell “circuit” before anyone else, he looked surprised and pleased when his teacher Erika told him he was correct. If Larkin could perform to a higher standard in art, he probably wouldn’t want Chris’s attention quite so much.

But Chris Guilfoil doesn’t bother to answer Larkin’s complaint. He has moved on to more important topics: teaching them the measurements of a classically proportioned head. On their tables lie three-ring binders with a photocopy of a Picasso sketch on the cover.

“I have a love-hate relationship with Picasso,” he says. “I find myself both attracted and repulsed.” The students look interested, except for Larkin.

Larkin opens and closes, opens and closes, opens and closes the three rings of his three ring binder; on the last snap, he looks up guiltily and finds that Chris is writing his name on the chalkboard at the front of the room. “Noooo!” he yelps. But he soon falls quiet under Chris’s cold blue-eyed stare; more trouble awaits him if he opens his mouth again too soon, so he tries, sulkily, to sit quietly at his art table.

Chris believes that the eighth-grade students need to know more about beauty and its ideals before they enter the world beyond the Waldorf School’s bounds. That is why he teaches the students art history along with the practice of art.

But on to the art itself. Today, this group is crafting clay ears.