Inside a Finnish school

Friday was an open day at the girls' school - parents were invited to come and observe classes. I took the opportunity to take a few pictures of the normal order of things to share.

Come on in! The classrooms are portable units right now as they wait for their school building renovations to be complete. It's not ideal, but the teachers have made the portable units plenty cosy.

I arrived at the school during recess. This year, they changed the school schedule to have a straightforward 15 minutes of recess per 45 minutes of lessons (it used to be much the same overall amount, but distributed in uneven chunks of time). Then they have a longer recess at lunch. So they are never sitting in class for more than 45 minutes at a time.

Finnish schools are serious about their cloakrooms. They have to be. It is normal for students to remove their outdoor shoes in the cloakroom and wear some kind of slippers in the classroom.

In the lessons I observed, the students stood to greet the teacher before beginning. This is Miriam's math lesson, which is in English (this is a CLIL bilingual school where some subjects are taught in Finnish and some are taught in English). And the teacher happened to be a fourth-year trainee from the university. I felt like the worst person in the world, slipping into a student teacher's math lesson, conducted in English, as not only a parent observer, but a native speaker. It was a rotten thing to do. I don't know for a fact that I made her more nervous; I just know that if the situation had been reversed, it would have made me more nervous.

As I believe I have mentioned before, the girls' school is a designated place for teacher-trainees from the university to practice throughout their BA and MA programs. It is also open to outside observers - the day I was there (already officially a day open to parents), in Magdalena's classroom there were also two Erasmus scholars (one from Belgium and one from Spain) and a Chinese MA student observing the class, in addition to the student teacher running the art lesson, and, of course, the regular classroom teacher. I don't think it's generally so crowded - it was just a busy day, I guess! I really like the student-teacher aspect, actually - it makes for a good student/teacher ratio, which was especially nice last year when my girls needed extra help with Finnish.

It helps that the student teachers are generally awesome people who do such a good job teaching my kids. Ah, youthful enthusiasm. Magdalena in particular is fascinated with their sense of fashion - last year she had a student teacher with all kinds of ear/facial piercings connected by chains. This year, she has one with waist-length dreadlocks (above) who teaches art class, her favorite.

I think most schools would have students eat in a cafeteria, but due to the renovations (I think), some groups eat in their classroom. In Magda's class, they put a tablecloth over their desks to keep things clean and tidy.

The students serve themselves with the assistance of the teachers. Today's menu was sausages, mashed potatoes, and salad, with some kind of veggie patties as the vegetarian option. Then you can choose water, milk, or piimä (cultured buttermilk) to drink. Once a week or so, they have dessert, usually fruit-based, like apple pie or berry kissel.

I enjoyed experiencing the girls' school environment for half a day. It made me happy to see them settled in, with friends and a routine and familiar teachers.