The author, a Waldorf teacher of many years' experience, provides a lucid explanation of the events happening in the life of a child between the ninth and tenth years. This is the time when the child's ego incarnates more deeply. As a result, children at that age often experience themselves for the first time as separate individuals, different from their parents and peers, and essentially alone. As Koepke points out, this inner experience is often accompanied by a first encounter with death in the child's environment, a first inkling that life is fragile and does not go on forever.

This book tells the story of how Suzanne, a young teacher at a Waldorf school, copes with the changes her class is going through at the transition from childhood to adolescence. The problems she and the parents of her students must face are familiar to all parents of teens: drug use, smoking, apathy, rebelliousness, moodiness, to name only a few. We accompany Suzanne in her sincere struggle to help her students as she talks to other faculty members and to help parents and then adapts her teaching to the students' changed needs. Suzanne learns much from an older mentor, whose advice and guidance are based on Rudolf Steiner's spiritual science, and so do we. The anthroposophical perspective gives adolescence a new, more meaningful face. Understanding it as part of our destiny and our development toward individuality will help us guide our young people as they take the first uncertain steps on the road to independence. Hermann Koepke, a Swiss Waldorf teacher of many years experience, is well known in Europe. He is also the author of Encountering the Self: Transformation and Destiny in the Ninth Year.