Three dimensions. Three archetypes of Norse Myth. A salmon’s life seen in three parts. The turning-ten year olds in Class Four are more deeply experiencing themselves as individuals through a lens of three in their curriculum.

Mr. Richards says his class is incredibly capable, quick-thinking, vibrant, and active. That’s a good thing, because some challenges are afoot this year. The violin is put in the children’s more and more competent hands, giving them the opportunity to listen for and create new harmonies and beauty, vibrating under their chins at heart level. Fountain pens are newly within their grasp, with their demand for increased precision. Games class now morphs into Physical Education, and the children quite literally wrestle with each other as well as with new individual gymnastic and other physical skills, added to the familiar repertoire of social games. According to their teacher, the group is ready to problem-solve and embrace the physical world with a strong pragmatic impulse – witness the finished timber-frame garden classroom. (He also says that often the impulse of the group is like a cloud of butterflies flapping out the door.)

At this age, Waldorf pedagogy understands the children to be coming firmly into a new individualized sense of themselves: I am an individual, I have my own messy likes and dislikes, I’m surrounded by others with likes and dislikes, and we affect each other… what am I going to do with this news? They are getting to know just who that newly-realized self is - and who it might be.

As such, the children are ready for a gentle deepening of complexity into three dimensions. In form drawings, for example, suddenly three dimensions appear. The lines of colour no longer simply cross and blend, but disappear behind each other and re-emerge in the image of a braid.

Ten year olds seek to balance aspects and impulses in themselves as they stretch their wings, and so they are offered vivid archetypes which represent those aspects and impulses. Enter the Norse Gods, especially the triad of Thor (action, strength, competence), Odin (wisdom, observation, foresight), and Loki (lying, cheating, mischief). It’s significant that although the gods and goddesses are united in an ongoing battle against their neighbours the trolls and giants, who symbolize destructive human qualities and behaviours, the gods themselves enact a spectrum of human impulses and experiences – principled and unprincipled, unwise and wise, strong and weak. This is realism about human nature - in some ways a far cry from the fairy tales of Grade One, in which the hero simply slays the dragon. The world is becoming more complex and shaded for someone who is ten. Someone who is ten is coming to know her/himself more, so now s/he is capable of and interested in braiding these ‘light’ and ‘dark’ strands of humanness together.

In their recent class play, "Thor the Bride", the children were able to breathe their own life into the archetypes. Mr. Richards witnessed their desire to act out these different possibilities of human nature. He says these characters are living them, without doubt. Students sometimes talk about the gods as if they might drop in during main lesson, and one day when the subject of Ragnarok (the end of everything according to Norse myth) came up, the question arose of whether anyone survived. One student said, "Well OF COURSE someone did, Mr. Richards; if no one survived, we wouldn’t be here!"

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