First week in practice school

Hej everyone,



I had practice this week. I enjoyed it. I have got 2 teachers, Tim and Marianne, they are my mentors. Both of them teach English and Special Needs Education. Both of them are very nice. The school name is: Favrdalskole. It's a public school.

I visited 4 classes.
First one is the 9th class where there are approx. 20 students. They are 15 years old students. Here is the first difference. We have got primary school until 8th class, so until 14 years old kids and then we have high school between the age of 14-18. In this 9th class students look the same as in Hungary. Girls with make up on their face, boys are in baggy trousers or in "emo" style. That's just the fashion everywhere. They studied death penalty this week, they discussed the advantages and disadvantages of this topic. Some of the kids have strong feelings to choose death penalty for example if their family could have kidnapped. For homework they have to think about it more. I was surprised because they don't learn phonetics. At home I had to write the phonetic meaning of every new word for 12 years old pupils.They don't do it here. One of the reasons could be that in Denmark, films are subtitled, so when kids watch Tv they automatically get vocabulary and pronunciation. I think it's cool and very useful.

Second class: 9 E class. "E" means Special Needs Class, there are only 4 pupils and they're 15 years old, as well. They attend at public school but they learn everything separatly from the others. On one hand, I think it's great that they have the opportunity to learn everything in their own way in public school, however, on the other hand, they are separated from other pupils. I asked Tim if these 4 kids make friends from other "normal" classes and he said not really, it's not common to have friends from "normal classes". So these 4 kids, plus there is another speacial classes (they are at the same age) get on well. They hang out a lot, but they don't make friends from other classes in school. They do a lot together. You can find here pupils with social problems, or some kind of disabilities in reading or writing. (dyslexia, dysgraphia) They are normal and very-very nice kids. In Hungary, when you have kids with these kind of problems, they still do the same as the average do, however, they have extra lessons in the afternoon. Or they go to special school. I wonder how hard could it be for those pupils with special needs to do the same as the average kids do in public school in Hungary. And don't forget, we have grades. And if they don't do properly what they should do they get bad grades which is not fair, and they suffer from lack of confidence. All right, I think I stop complaining. I'm glad that my country is changing. Good point is that we have to know text and pieces of information when we have exams, we got used to do this since kindergarten, starting with short songs. Here, pupils don't need to know the text by heart. I think this has also advantages and disadvantages.
Relationship between 4 kids and the teacher: you can see that they're close to each other. Teacher asks students how their weekend was. What did they do? In Hungary, it's not common, only your head master ask you sometimes. So, I think here kids put more trust in their teacher than in Hungary. However, the question of authority comes up again.

Third class: Last week I got to visit the 4th class, as well. They're 10 years old students. Here, I found about 3- 4 muslims, but they speak Danish. I don't know that much about muslims and my aim in this blog is not to write about them. But I have to tell that 2muslim girls had to wear scarf on their head. I don't understand why, they're kids. But other students can accept other cultures if they see they have got something different.
Anyway, this class is a bit loud, very talkative, for example, when I had to introduce myself, kids were very curious and they interupted each other and asked me questions about Hungary. It was funny and very cute. The following questions they asked: Do you have huge mountains? Do you use chewing gum in Hungary? Do you like football? favourite football star? Do you know Sevcsenko? Do you like LIverpool? I have to say, all of the boys were in Liverpool T-shirt, there was no other choice to say, yes, I like Liverpool. :))
I talked a bit about my country and showed them postcards, they liked it.
They learnt some English songs during the lesson.

Fourth class: Special Needs class, 1st grade. They are 4 students as in the 9E class. They're cute. They asked me to teach them some Hungarian folk dance on Friday and I did. It was so much fun, and actually they liked it. We did it all together with the other special need class in that building, they're 3 grade. There were 10 cute pupils who danced together. :) Nice...

Later....
If you have questions, please feel free to ask. :)