Course Content
The pupils receive a Main Lesson on the Human Senses for two weeks.
They learn about the senses as an interface with the outside world. We start with the physical boundary between the world and us, our skin, and look at the qualities that the skin brings us.
We then look at the skin’s five senses: touch, pressure, pain, hot and cold. The most prominent one is the sense of touch that sets us apart from our surroundings as it establishes our boundary.
The Class discuss the senses of smell and taste – the chemical senses. For each sense the pupils study the physiology as well as the qualities that these senses bring.
The pupils draw a map of their tongue plotting areas of sensitivity to the four basic flavours of sweet, sour, salt and bitter.
Next in line is the sense of vision. This one is key to our existence and the only sense to originate from the brain during embryonic development. The pupils draw an anatomical map of the eye, a two-paged cartoon and look at after-images of colours.
The block concludes with the study of the ear with which we hear the resounding of an earthy material that has been lifted from the earth to set our being vibrating. This organ carries precious secrets including the three smallest bones in the body and the beautiful small snail shell in our skull, called the cochlea, in which the actual perception of sound takes place.
Class 9 also learn about the sense of balance, which is housed in the three semicircular canals on top of the cochlea.
They look at a poem by C.S. Lewis ‘On Being Human’ as part of the Main Lesson. In this beautiful poem Lewis compares the human condition with the angel who Lewis proposes is an all-knowing entity but lacks the pleasure and involvement of sensory experience.
The emphasis of this short Main Lesson is on the sensory experience and drawing rather than writing in Main Lesson books.
Mrs Renske Brune
BSc / MSc in Biology at the University of Amsterdam. PhD in Anatomy and Embryology at the Medical School, University of Edinburgh. Advanced Painting Course, Leith School of Art, Edinburgh. Edinburgh Steiner School Teacher Training Course. Ms Brune taught Higher Biology at ESS and continues to deliver the Senses Main Lesson to Class 9.
Indicitive description. Main Lessons are delivered autonomously by the teacher, who is given the flexibility to respond to the cohort of pupils in front of them in a particular year.