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.

Revisiting Lessons

I wrote once before about how I am now having the opportunity to repeat some lessons (they are better the second time around), most of what I am doing this year is new, although certainly at times based on things I have done at home, variations. I have been doing my introduction to Canada lessons over again recently and found myself in a position where I had to write another poem, this time it was suggested that I write an ‘I’m a Canadian’ poem. I guess I have written often enough that it is now expected that I too write when they are writing, as a student said ‘that’s how it works.” Here is my poem.

I’m a Canadian

Justin Bieber and Celine Dion,

that girl on “How I Met Your Mother”

when you talk about Canadians

I wish you thought of others

I’ve never built an igloo

though Whitehorse got pretty cold

I think I say ‘about’ pretty normal,

but that’s not what I’m told

I had a pet bear named Barney

I’ve put a saddle on a moose

A beaver dammed the crick again

I’ll have to shoot it loose

I hear that I am friendly,

I might be too polite

are these really qualities

that describe what I am like?

When I think about what’s Canadian

It’s really hard to know

But what I can tell you is this:

Denmark could fit into Canada 231.7 times

Dystopias and my first zombie novel

I just finished reading my first zombie novel, ‘Rise Again’ by Ben Tripp. I have no idea if it is a good zombie novel because I am ignorant when it comes to this genre, but I liked it. I think it appealed on the same level as a lot of novels for adolescents, I was entertained but it also made me think about humanity.

One of my classes has started novel studies with a focus on dystopias. A student suggested that zombie books are dystopian, and though I hadn’t really looked at it that way before I supposed they must be and it fits so nicely with the trend of zombie books and dystopias if they are all lumped together. In class we aren’t reading a zombie book, students are in groups reading ‘Fahrenheit 451” by Ray Bradbury, or Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’. This has led me to search for supplementary materials on dystopias, and Bradbury, and Atwood, and I was delighted to find a zombie novel co-authored by Margaret Atwood: http://www.wattpad.com/8283993-the-happy-zombie-sunrise-home-chapter-1-clio#!p=1. Now I have more zombies, and more Atwood, life is good.

One of the things I am growing to appreciate this year is my increased use of web- based resources, almost everything I do in class is on-line content, the novels are the first real exception. No one is burning or banning books so I don’t think I’m in a dystopia but without the print sources I am accustomed to having at GMD, resources are almost all computer based. This has made me think about the paper vs. screen arguments, is paper still the best way to go for learning? While I think that maybe it is for now, I’m not convinced that it will stay that way, we are still learning how to use the screens after all and for many of us paper is still more familiar, not so for our juniors.

In another class we are watching ted talks from a playlist titled: Our Digital Lives, in the last one we watched Clay Shirky makes reference to how the printing press gave us erotic novels 150 years before it gave us scientific journals, his point (I think) being that we have yet to see what the internet can really do for us. I think the screen reading issue might be the same, given time I think we will learn to get more out of it than we currently do and the longer we cling to paper the longer it will take us to make the transition. But what do I know?

For the record, I prefer books, lying in bed and reading on my computer just isn’t the same as reading a book, it’s just not hygge.

Home for the Holidays?

 I have had that song about there being ‘No place like home for the holidays’ stuck in my head recently, I don’t really seem to know the song so I’m really just singing that line over and over again and then it turns into some sort of mumble humming like it does when you don’t know the words. I’m not sure that I even think that home is an essential part of the holidays, family is, I offer as proof the ‘home is where the heart is’ stuff, but when the holidays are over we go back to life as usual and that usual involves home. This year the return to life as ‘usual’ after the holidays is a return to life that is not as usual as it has been for a number of years and this does not come without struggle.

January is never an easy time, it is dark, the days are short, and we are beginning our long wait for spring. Few are really excited to end the holidays and go back to work/school, but this year… this year every weekday is a struggle and each morning is a debate about the merits of school in Masset versus the experiences we are having this year. Each morning I feel as though we are being put on trial, how could we have done this to our children, tore them from the utopia that Masset has become in absentia and placed them into the purgatory that is school in Denmark.

To be sure it is a big ask of kids to pick up and move to another country where they don’t speak the language but I stand by my belief that it is good for them, that they will learn things this year that will make all the hardships worthwhile. Still it gets difficult when each day starts with sad/mad children who want to be at home. Lucky for us moods seem to be better after school and only decline again when it is time to get ready for bed because ‘you have school tomorrow’. But then maybe this is not so unusual at all and only a symptom of the long wait for spring.

Frankfurt

 The final stop in our German odyssey was Frankfurt, where once again we were reminded of Haida Gwaii, this time because we saw people from the island! We went to Frankfurt because we knew that the Koenigs would be there and we wanted to see them and to take the boys to the opera where we could see Michael perform. The boys declared our final night in Frankfurt the best part of the trip.

Our time in Frankfurt was brief but we stayed in a lovely apartment overlooking the river Main. The apartment had a small kitchen and our first night we had a great meal whose ingredients we found at a nearby market, few things taste as good as market fresh food. The next day we were anxious to see our friends and the morning was a countdown until their arrival, however we did manage to get ourselves into a church tower with a winding staircase that made us feel claustrophobic and height wary in turn. Our reward for having conquered our fears was a great view of the city when we finally reached the top.

In the afternoon we began our long awaited visit and were happy to feel a familiarity we hadn’t felt for some time (apart from the family visit, but that wasn’t the same either, these people live where we live). The opera was a great experience; so fun to see people you know in a different context than the one you usually see them in. After the opera I was introduced to someone else who lives on Haida Gwaii who also happened to be in attendance and after some autograph signing the star and we the entourage headed to a Turkish restaurant for dinner.

The food at the restaurant was great, but other than the food in front of us I found myself talking about the food on Haida Gwaii for the second time that day. We have been eating well and I’m sure the same can be said for the other Haida Gwaiians away but we all seem to miss what we have on the island, nothing beats Haida Gwaii fish… and deer, and chantrelles, and berries…. we have it good.

By the end of the evening the adults struggled to stay awake and conversation took a backseat to watching the kids enjoy the best part of their vacation, playing ‘Big Booty’ late into the evening.