So day two, and my first full day, of school is now complete. School in Denmark is a completely different environment to school in Australia in many different aspects. Firstly, they stay in the one classroom, and the teachers come to them, a little bit like primary school in Australia. The whole environment is also much more relaxed than my personal schooling life in Australia, with people openly texting and playing on their phones, people playing games or being on Facebook on their laptops. So far only one of the teachers has actually taught a class, all of the other teachers have just come in and been a presence in the room while the students worked, or rather not worked, on set worksheets or questions. Also if a teacher is not able to attend a class for any reason, there are no substitute teachers sent, students either have a spare lesson, or are sent work that they are supposed to work on, but many of them just sit and chat. Danish school is very interesting to observe, however, i can't actually understand anything that they are saying. Luckily for me my host sister, Natacia, will often whisper translations to me, every so often, just so i have an idea of what is going on. Today I was able to participate in two of the classes, Chemistry and Maths. Chemistry was the lesson for which there was no teacher, but the students just worked through questions from the textbook. The topic that they are currently covering is Organic Chemistry, so I got to put some of my recently ended schooling knowledge to use, and helped Natacia with some of the questions, such as working out the name of molecule. I was also able to do work in maths, because luckily for me, numbers are the same and work the same almost everywhere in the world. So I had the joy of working through simultaneous equations, however, both Natacia and I were stuck on a question, so we asked the teacher for help. The teacher came over and started explaining the question to us both, but in Danish. Not wanting to disrupt Natacia's understanding of the question, I just smiled and nodded whenever the teacher looked at me to check my understanding. Eventually Natacia told him that I didn't speak Danish, and he quickly changed to English, he finished explaining the question, then he asked me a little about where I lived, after I mentioned to him that I lived in Australia, he proudly declared that he once had an Australian room mate. School seemed to go a lot slower than Australian school however, mainly because we didn't move around a lot, and i didn't really understand what anyone was saying. Other than that though, school is interesting, and I can't wait for my first English lesson in Danish.
As promised, here are some photo's:
The Scout Leader holding a snake:
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