They like their school?

I have got through marking all the 2^nd year introductions and have been very pleased to read about how much students like their school! Many students wrote to me about how they enjoy their classes, about how they feel that their school is a great place to be where everyone is accepted for who they are, and about how they enjoy being in school in general. Teachers and students alike have told me that the school has a reputation for being welcoming and having nice students. I have felt very welcomed here and people have certainly been nice.

So now I have to wonder if Koge (the o should have a diagonal line through it) Gymnasium is a magical wonderland or is there something more going on here? I think there is something more. Students who attend Gymnasiums have made a choice to do so, they know that they are going to an academic institution and that is what they want (they apply and are only accepted if they will make the grade). Others at this age can go to technical school or can join the workforce. It makes a difference when students have made the choice to attend the school.

Does this mean that students are perfect? Of course not, they still talk out of turn (how many times do we see that at a staff meeting or pro-d?) and I get the feeling that they are fully aware that I don’t know how long a writing assignment should be in a 2^nd year Danish Gymnasium English class, or how long they should be given to complete an assignment. Still there is such comfort in knowing that I can kick a student out (hasn’t happened) and they will care about missing class because they are messing with the education they chose, that and too many absences will put the counselors on to them.

We made it!

Despite the fact that I have a growing list of possible blog topics I feel compelled to write about our weekend destination before I entertain any of the topics on the list. This weekend we went to…. Legoland!

Long have the boys awaited this trip and we parents are happy to have it off the list so we can move on to other destinations. Awaiting us at the gates was a crowd the size of Haida Gwaii’s population and the lines grew no shorter as the day went on. Time to reflect on another of Haida Gwaii’s offerings, how often do we wait in line, and when we do, how long do we wait?

Gus and I went on most of the rides, Jesse and Leanne fewer, much time spent in line, rides were over quickly. Jesse is more like his mom and dad, he doesn’t care for rides, Gus on the other hand challenges me to face my fears. A few days later my heart has left my throat but the German ladies in front of us will be telling the story of the scared English speaker for quite some time (someone asked if we were from England, people can't place our accents). I’m not really sure what sound I emitted but the elder of the two women seemed to feel that she needed to reassure me that she too was scared. What sounds escaped me, did I momentarily black-out?

The miniature world of Lego was really quite impressive; I especially enjoyed the moving boats. Animals were found in several displays and were surprisingly realistic, the dragon protecting his treasure in the castle made me want to do the ride over again (the line did not), but the highlight was the Star Wars section. Jesse was clearly overwhelmed, he spent the whole day ten feet in front of us navigating with his map (something he may have picked up from watching his dad navigate Copenhagen) and when we reached the Star Wars section Leanne became his official photographer and was instructed to photograph everything, and from here, and here, and here, get that, and that, and that, did you get that?

Introducing Canada

The first text we have looked at together in my second year class is Duke Redbird's 'I am a Canadian'.
Students appreciated the balance that the poem presents, the realities that are absent in South Park episodes, and the diversity communicated by the poems east to west Canadian journey. Their assignment is to write their own poems entitled 'I am a Dane', I wrote one that is halfway between the two. They had a good laugh reading/hearing how someone from Canada is experiencing their country.

I am in Denmark for a year

  

I am in Denmark for a year

I have eaten pickled herring

I struggle to pronounce the name of the place I work

and the names of my students

I am in Denmark for a year

I have eaten a hotdog in a tubular bun

I have watched people and puppets sleep on TV,

surveillance camera footage of hallways and bathrooms

I am in Denmark for a year

I giggle when I see the word fart

a bus reads Turistfart,

Fart –the title of a book in Gus’ room

I am in Denmark for a year

I have walked the cobbled streets

Hurried my children through Pushers Street in Christiania

visited castles to exhaustion

I am in Denmark for a year

I bought my first cell-phone

Rode a 100 yr old roller coaster at Tivoli

watched a game at the national stadium

I am in Denmark for a year

I have sat through meetings not comprehending a word

Pushed grocery carts with 4 wheels that turn

got lost in conversion, kroners to dollars

I am in Denmark for a year

I will go to Legoland

 I have seen reconstructed Viking ships

learned to count to ten, been warned about going further

I am in Denmark for a year

waited impatiently to teach English and find familiarity

supported my children who are nervous and new

learned that any differences are different enough

I am in Denmark for a year

had a bowl of cookies in weird milk for desert

read about what Canadians are like

am I too polite?

I am in Denmark for a year

and wonder what will it be like

to return to my home

in

native

land

I do wonder how it will feel to return to a previous familiarity when the different of this years experience has become familiar. And then on the bus home yesterday I read:

'After you have navigated home from travels far away, there can be nothing but improvement in every aspect of your life'  (in Harper's)

Sounds good. 

Derek from Canada

Today was my second day of classes, so far they have gone very well, but it is mostly just introductory stuff. I have done a lot of thinking about place over the last few years and it continues here now that I have become Derek from Canada (teachers are called by first names here). In the only class I have seen more than once we were talking about Canadian identity and stereotypes and how our purported lack of identity has possibly led to a reinforcing/embracing of stereotypes in order for us to have some kind of identity. In class we watched beer commercials and my favourite Tim Horton’s commercial (double-double). Students knew about Tim’s, and hockey, and ‘eh’, and one student told me about a character on a TV show who is Canadian and how she thought that the way the character spoke was a stereotype but that I talked like that. I repeatedly pronounced ‘about’ followed by ‘a-boot’ to demonstrate that the two sounded different but to no avail, they were still laughing. Maybe it’s like the town name I told the bus ticket lady about, I repeated it twice, she asked me to write it down, and then I swear she repeated back to me what I had already said twice.

Another aspect of place that I have been thinking a lot about is history. A trip to Copenhagen (or any town really) has you looking at buildings 100’s of years old, history is right in front of your nose and you can’t miss it. In Canada the history is there but there isn’t always the same kind of physical evidence, the land has been tread upon lightly in comparison (tar sands? tread lightly?), no kings built excessive buildings using public coffers at the expense of the general populace. Yes we have government buildings and fancy hotels but in much of the country buildings are modest and many of the greatest buildings/structures erected in Canada’s past were designed to return to the earth they came from. History in Canada, the land of great nature as my students see it, is sometimes only found if you can set your frequency to the right tone to receive it. Know that people have been in this forest, on this water, on this beach, for thousand of years before you and that too is history. 

Class at Last

Today was my first day teaching a class, as a matter of fact we are in class as I write this, they are writing and so too am I. We started with interviews in partners and we have presented these introductions orally, now they are introducing themselves to me in writing. So far the comprehension of oral English has been no different than if I was teaching a class of students in Masset. Speaking is another matter and of course there are words that give them problems but so far their speaking skills are very good. Of course there is the natural tendency to compare to what you know and I am trying to remember when I was their age and in French class, I know we were not this good. Music, movies, television, internet, so much of what students are exposed to reinforces their learning of the English language, but who in Canada chooses to go home and watch French TV?

For their interviews in partners they made up the questions, one of which was the location for their dream vacation, so many would like to go to the United States. Classes here will study as a thematic unit ‘The American Dream’. I guess living close to the U.S. makes them just a part of our everyday living, they are there, we want to beat them in hockey, but the fascination with American culture for us is just pop culture, not ‘American’ so much but just there, a presence. Here (in Denmark) America is a distant land of intrigue and celebrity, I guess we in Canada are just over it?

They are familiar with Canada too, in my first class someone asked me if I knew Justin Bieber, I think she was joking.

Work from home?

Today I did something that felt very strange at first but now at the end of the day has me wondering why we can’t do this in Canada. As a result of increased prep time there are days when teachers have no scheduled classes, this week there are more of them because the senior students are busy doing the work with the first years so teachers schedules are light. I checked in with my schedule (all online because it changes, classes are at different times, on different days, and in different rooms week to week) and found that it was blank, so… I worked from home! As a result of my conscience I was very productive, in fact I feel better prepared for my first few classes than I ever remember feeling before. What’s more I cut out the commute time (1.5 to 2 hours) and was able to pick Gus up from school which I wanted to do because I knew he had a rough day at school the day before (he was much happier today, injury free this time from recess, and he learned some Danish words). Of course the prep time and ability to work from home is exactly what has led to this year’s mandated logging of working time, but today I learned that perhaps some of us can be trusted to use time for good rather than twisted, evil, devious, teacherly troublemaking. I suppose before long the logging of time will be replaced with an implant that measures productivity levels so all our troubles will soon be over.

Day Two

Internet at home has been down so I am posting things written since our internet woes began.

Another day at work, today I got my key, was assigned a photocopy code, and generally became more familiar with the school and my assignment in it. There were students today but mostly just the first years and the senior students who have agreed to be part of the welcoming committee. There seems to be a bit of an initiation process as the first years are made to sing a song about frogs as loud as they possibly can. Apparently all first years are called frogs and at times froglike hopping accompanies the singing. They also engage in other behaviours that were less audible so I’m not really sure what they were. This will continue for the next two days, I am involved on some level tomorrow supervising a run but it appears that most of the work is done by senior leaders. It all sounds and looks like fun because of the levels of participation and leadership, a good reminder that we should start with fun, plenty of time to get serious later.

I learned about the textbooks students will use for the classes I teach, because English is not the first language there are exercise books on grammar that contain instructions in Danish. One book contains a lot of translating exercises, Google translate to the rescue! I spent some time typing out the Danish which gave me a pretty good idea of what kind of problems Danes might encounter when dealing with English grammar, not everything comes out in the right order.

First Day

My first day of work was last Friday; I didn’t know what was going on most of the time. I was introduced to a lot of people; they have a staff of roughly 100. It is difficult to remember names with so many new faces, and new names, some of them very difficult for me to pronounce. After morning snacks and coffee we gathered in a room as a staff and everyone sang a song together, I tried to imagine the staff of GMD singing in the new school year. I didn’t join in the singing but wish I had of given it my best shot, a loud voice singing the wrong tune with an incomprehensible accent might have been just the start I needed. After singing the meeting carried on, in Danish of course, with a brief English section when I was introduced. I sat listening and wondering if staff meetings were better or worse when you can’t understand them, if I could have figured out when the meeting was nearing conclusion I would have raised my hand and said “I didn’t get any of that.” but I learned in subsequent meetings that it is harder to pick up on the cues that suggest a meeting is coming to it’s conclusion when you can’t understand a word.

At lunch I joined a table and promptly brought all conversation to a stop, they were too polite to continue conversation in Danish knowing I couldn’t understand, and so amid some awkward silence all conversation then centered on yours truly and it was challenging to find the time to eat. All the staff has been very friendly and they seem truly interested in Canada and my life there. The idea that I live on an island 8 hours away by ferry is a strange one; Europe is small enough that going anywhere is relatively close in Canadian terms.

Despite the language issue I did understand that teachers in Denmark are experiencing changes in their work situation and this topic seemed to take up much of the time. The way I understand it they are being required to log their working hours to increase accountability, I guess the idea is that this will demonstrate their productive use of prep time. Time for preparation and marking is a big part of a teachers work and here that is reflected in a teachers schedule, which (again if I understand correctly) gives a teacher half of their paid time for prep. I am pretty sure I have that right for those teachers reading this and experiencing disbelief. The current situation seems to be a reflection of what people think of teacher scheduling, I guess they want to be sure that teachers are using the time they are given and if they are logging the time that will demonstrate that they are using it? I must be missing something somewhere. 

Fart!

So language is pretty interesting. I took French for how many years at school? Do I speak French?

Most people in Denmark speak English and the few we have encountered who don’t seem to be immigrants to Denmark so they too are multilingual. Yesterday we had a meeting at the school the boys will attend, a reminder that our relationship with the Danish language is about to change. Our Danish has really gotten nowhere so far, we know how to pronounce a few words better than we did at first and subtitles on TV are bound to help (eventually) if you read them when watching in English, and of course the language also surrounds us when we are out and about.

What follows is juvenile I know but anyone who knows me won’t be surprised. The words that we learn first are those that are familiar and those that we need. Sometimes the familiarity is a similar sounding word that also means the same, such as ‘hi’ (hi), or ‘ni’ spelt 'nej' (no), ‘fra’ (from). Then there are the words that are the same in appearance but different in meaning, one of the most obvious here is ‘fart’ (speed). We have seen it in many different contexts; my personal favourite was on the side of a bus ‘Turistfart’. In many stores we noticed signs that read ‘slutspurt’, we thought that didn’t sound very nice, it turns out that it has to do with the approaching end of the sale, the ‘final sprint’ or ‘slutspurt’. 

Football

Settling in and anticipating the impact of school, everything changes next week. We went to the town I will be teaching in (spelt Koge, but with a line through the o, still working on proper pronunciation), a cute seaside town with an abundance of old crooked buildings lining the streets in the car free area of town. Crazy to walk by houses hundreds (500?) of years old.

We took a day trip to Copenhagen (Kobenhavn) yesterday and visited Christiania (I’ll write about it another time) and went to the FCK (FC Copenhagen) home opener. FCK lost their 3^rd in a row, a poor start to the season. Gus told me later that he might like watching soccer better on TV because then he isn’t distracted by fat drunk guys who are smoking all the time, I told him Mom won’t let me smoke in the house. Just kidding. There was one guy who was a bit distracting at the game, funny to watch elite athletes on the field and just off to the side is the drinking smoking guy who looks like he couldn’t run the length of the field yelling at them for making mistakes, throwing his empty beer glass in disgust; sometimes not knowing the language is a blessing.

Being there definitely beats TV though, we were at field level and no amount of TV watching can prepare you for just how fast the players are moving, I won’t question injured players anymore, any impact at the speeds they are travelling has the potential to hurt. The chants and cheering are pretty fun too, even if you can’t sing along and don’t understand what people are saying (again in some cases that might be best).

It won’t be the last time technology makes a fool of me (or maybe it wasn’t the technology) but I can accept my ignorance and I know I have learned something. A young couple in front of us at the game asked me to take their picture and I held it backwards at first taking a picture of myself looking rather confused. I guess I still think of cameras as having a small hole to look through at the back and a larger lens at the front, but this was a phone not a camera. We had a good laugh about it, they have a great picture of the half-wit who sat behind them at the game (an American I should have told them) and Gus called me a dork.

Ringsted - pronounce Rrringstill

We have had a look around our new town. Feeling very Danish with our cell phones, riding our bikes with strange Euro locks we have trouble figuring out, ordering something close to what we intended for lunch.

The town itself is relatively small; we can get anywhere we need to on our bikes. Yesterday was very hot, it has been quite warm since we arrived and some days are uncomfortable, probably only because of the climate we have gotten used to on Haida Gwaii. We realize that we are not really used to hot summer weather that continues day after day, weeks on end. I only packed one pair of shorts for the year; I had to buy some new ones at 255 kroner.

The currency takes some getting used to, everything needs to be divided by 5 to get an idea of what it costs in Canadian dollars, I suppose at some point we will just think in Kroners and know if something is expensive or not without having to do the math but we are not there yet.

There are of course many differences when you go somewhere new but it is the small day-to-day things that tend to make an impact. The carts in the grocery store for example, all four wheels swivel, awesome.