The Underdogs

First week down.  I've now been in the Northern Jutland of Denmark for a little more than a week.  I've had all of my classes at least once, I know everyones name, and I'm settling into the routine.  The names were significantly easier this round because there were only 17...not 140.  I suppose you want to know how things went.  It is certainly different.  As you may know the school has had a tough time staying open due to finances and enrollment for the past few years.  With this issue I've discovered that the students don't have access to an abundance of modern textbooks.  Some of the teachers have told me that instead of handing out these outdated books to kids to suffer through, they look through them and find a suitable topic to cover and use the internet to find modern info and just use the textbook as a teachers book for resources and guidance.  I've learned that many of the classes follow this "discussion" style rather simply reading.  I love that idea, as important as it is to learn how to read a textbook and understand the vocabulary from various subjects, a daily discussion would certainly give students the opportunity to think for themselves.  Problem is, I don't speak enough danish (in the danish language you don't capitalize the name of language) to hold a meaningful, educational discussion with them.  So that idea is out the window.  I've looked at the textbooks now to give me ideas, but that is the newest challenge.

On Friday we headed to Viborg to see an book-making museum.  It was actually very informational even for those of us that had to infer a lot from the surrounding machinery and the pointing of the guide.  They had all of us write our name on a card and a little old man behind a Linotype typesetting machine from the mid 1900s cast all of our names out of molten lead and handed us a die with our name on it.  Then we took our name dies over to an old printing machine that rolled ink onto our die and printed it on some napkins. Pretty cool actually. Click here to see some pictures of the machinery, no those aren't my kids.

Then we headed over to Viborg Domkirke, a danish cathedral that has seen a lot of trials in its life time, it was even used as a grain silo in the 1800s.  But in the early 1900s it was restored and repainted inside and today it is one of the most well preserved churches I've seen.  The guide did a wonderful job talking the students through pretty much the entire Bible worth of murals on the walls and ceiling.  I thought the church was a great meeting of old and new, what do you think?

Then we finally headed down to Vejlefjord to play some football.  The weekend was a tournament for 6-9th graders and our school for being so tiny, didn't do too bad (hence the title). It was great to see friends again, even saw some people that I didn't see last time.  While I was catching up with the American's about how awesome the most recent Seahawks game was, they started mentioning how spectacular the Super Bowl party was going to be, and how there was even going to be yet another friend from Walla Walla who's been traveling around Europe.  I started wishing and hoping that I could figure out a way to make it back down next weekend for the game.  Normally it wouldn't be a problem, what I do on weekends is my business, but the unfortunate thing is this: the games are streamed live so they start in the middle of the night over here. And I'm supposed to be in a classroom Monday morning three hours away...not too promising.  So when we got back home yesterday I talked to my host and principal and told her the significance of the game for me and she said, "Well what is your schedule like on Monday?" So I'll be blessed to get to go back to VFS for the third weekend in a row since arriving in Denmark for the Super Bowl.  Awesome :)

Today we had a snow day so I was able to enjoy a day of sleeping in after a long weekend.  Hope all is well on the home front.  Toodles.