Captain Canada

These days I find myself thinking about being an ambassador for Canada. I’m not considering a career change or anything but somewhere in the paperwork that got me into this exchange situation it was mentioned that when you are a teacher on exchange you are an ambassador for your country, you are representing Canada. That made sense on a surface level but now it makes a whole lot more sense and I find myself thinking about it perhaps more than I should.

Take for example the staffroom. I remember when I was a student teacher that we were encouraged as practicum teachers to use the staffroom, I didn’t. I mean I went a few times but then it just started to feel like unnecessary pressure. It didn’t help me to be surrounded by swimmers when I was flailing about in my paddling pool. At home I always go to the staffroom, it’s like eating lunch with family in there. Here I started going to the staffroom but found it so difficult to eat, and talk, and think…. it is a big room, buzzing with Danish and picking out the English from all the buzz was too much for my ‘too many loud concerts’ damaged ears. Now I find myself wondering: “Does not going to the staffroom make me a bad ambassador for my country?”

Okay, so that might be a lame example, but I think it illustrates a point. If my students think I’m a hoser, then by extension the Canadian education system is a holding tank for hosers who are no doubt turning out another generation of hosers (Wikipedia suggests that the term ‘hosers’ is primarily used by people imitating Canadians as opposed to being a term Canadians themselves use). Likewise if the Danish teachers think I’m a hoser…

It’s a lot of pressure, for some I am the only Canadian they have ever met; their impressions of Canada and Canadians will be shaped by their interactions with me. 

So now I am faced with a dilemma, do I teach the content I had planned this week or lecture on the glory of double gold in both hockey and curling?

F*ck Skolen

I wish I remembered Catcher in the Rye better. Twice this week I have sat in the same bus seat and looked up to see the phrase F*ck Skolen; you don’t have to know much Danish to figure that one out. I wasn’t upset by the sentiment as Holden was, but it lingers with me. The first morning I saw it I shared it with my first class and they wrote the story behind it; sometimes F*ck school was written by a student who was bullied, sometimes one who was having a bad day, in other versions a teacher wrote it. I liked them all, I related to them on several levels (none more than the teacher who realizes what a phony they have become), but my favourite part of the experience was hearing F*ck school repeated again and again on a Monday morning.

Going for a walk

Recently in class a group did a presentation on British Columbia. They were given the task of selling a province as a tourist destination to the rest of the class, the idea being that this allows for a focus on being persuasive and that connects to the four kinds of writing required for the written side of the assignment…. The point I am meandering toward is that the video they showed had so many images of the coastal landscapes I love that I felt an ache; a longing to walk through a B.C. forest, stroll on a Haida Gwaii beach.

This year a typical weekend walk features the local creek. One thing I have grown to appreciate in Ringsted is the reminder of childhood that comes when walking by the creek (which was a river growing up). While the walk is usually to the same place and often follows the same direction there is always something different, largely owing to the recent seasonal changes. We have finally had some cold weather and snow and this has created much of interest to look at on the route along the creek. This weekend I walked the creek 3 times, once with Leanne, once with Gus, and once with Jesse.

It was Jesse who got me writing. I told him that it had been awhile since I last wrote and that I couldn’t think of anything to write because I felt like I was just waiting for the next school break. Who wants to read about my bus trip to work again, or my progression (or complete lack of) in the Danish language? I think he was joking when he suggested that I could write about my walks with my family, but he was onto something.

One thing that we knew going into this was how much we as a family would need to rely on each other, we knew the language differences (despite the high level of English) would be somewhat isolating, but we probably didn’t understand what it would be like everyday. Walks have become really important to us, I think a big part of it is the comfort found in walking, but we can also be anywhere when we walk. When we walk we are just walking together, we aren’t walking in Denmark, well we are, but we walk together everywhere we go, walking is not place specific. When we are walking it becomes easier to go anywhere in our thoughts, and in our conversations. I know that boys are better at talking when they are doing something and never is this clearer than when I go for a walk with the two of them. They are often so eager to talk that I have to tell them whose turn it is and have a hard time getting in what I want to say while letting them have their turn too.

On our walk Jesse and I talked about his writing too, he doesn’t write a lot this year, writing in English just doesn’t happen as much in a Danish classroom as it does in a Canadian one. I have been encouraging them to write a journal, to put their I-pads to a use in a new way, but as Jesse said, “What should I write? ‘Today I went for a walk’”. Not necessarily a bad place to start, you never know where a walk might take you.