Thursday, 28 April 2016

Day 5

School visit 2

The group I have been assigned to is today visiting our school, Vaettaskoli Engi.
We have asked to sit and observe lessons, and we have been distributed in different rooms.
Our programme needs dometimes to be amnded as some classes are busy with exams, so we improvise a little.
What surprises me is that we are left totally free to roam around, enter rooms, interrupt lessons, speak with students.

The first lesson I observe is Icelandic in a year 8 class (14-year-olds).
They are studying an Icelandic saga, Hrafnkels saga Freysgoða. They read it in a partially modernised version, which however is apparently still quite challenging to read.
The lesson is teacher-centred: she reads, ask questions, explains meanings and writes main words on blackboard.
She often uses a map of Iceland to show where actions take place.

Students answer without putting up their hands, but are quite orderly and respectful of others.
They are 14 altogether, and this probably helps.
Students are eager to know how the story goes on, and ask to continue also in the following lesson. They sound honestly interested, but then we found out that the alternative would be a grammar lesson.

The lesson is quite traditional, not very imaginative.
I ask if they study texts from other literatures, and I find out that they don't.
This sounds quite shocking to me. Is it possible to focus on such a small tradition as the local one?
Again this feeling of Independent People I felt yesterday.
Parochial and proud.
Narrow-minded?
But then: how important is the content of what we study? Or is it only the procedure that counts?
Can a student live without knowing about Cervantes, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Dante?

However, what strikes me more is again the fact that students look totally relaxed when we observe them, sit next to them, talk to them.

There seems to be no problem in mixing generations or in taking photos. We are told that many visitors come, and students are used to them.

The same happens in a class of younger pupils who are working on an art project.

They are happy to talk with us and to show their works.

We visit for a short while a science room.
Big balls hanging from the ceiling represent the solar system.
The room is dark: the teacher is showing something with a projector.
Some students are quite disctracted. They talk to each other openly.

The last lesson we observe is an English lesson.
The teacher gives activities on photocopies. Students work in pair asking each other questions to complete a chart on the solar system.

Students are quite fluent in English. Some of them are professional sportspeople and they probably have understood how important English can be in their lives.

The equipment in the room is a mixture of old and modern. There is a cathode-ray-tube television set with a VHS player.

It's finally lunch time.
Students go to the cafeteria or eat their packed lunch.
They have places where they can relax:

and a nice table football:

They use all places in the school without any hesitation, except for the area reserved to offices and teachers' room.

The library is again the heart of the school. I ask whether they have books in other languages. The answer is no.
Students are led to focus only on Icelandic heritage, because it is already quite wide.
I automatically compare it to the English, French, German heritage.

In the afternoon we go together on an excursion with some free time.
We visit the place where the two tectonic plates - American and Eurasian - are clearly visible.
The two continents meets here, or better they split here at a speed of 2 cm a year. The same speed of the growth of our fingernails.

And here is our group, filling the gap between the two continents.

The day finishes with lobster soup at the Sea Baron restaurant on the old harbour of Reykjavik which really looks like the Iceland I imagined as a child.

And the company couldn't be better!

REFLECTIVE JOURNAL

Icelanders focus a lot on their heritage. They study Icelandic sagas and they seem to enjoy them, but they don’t study other cultures a lot. Are contents necessary, or is it just the procedure that counts?