(Finally I can post this blog - it was ready three weeks ago but the blog had tech issues that only now are solved...)

The kids’ time in school is wrapping up now – it is the end of the first term, and a two-week break has started. Birk has been attending Year 8, which is the final year of primary school, and Linus has been in Year 11 of High School. It has been very interesting to see the differences in the school system – both with Denmark and the Netherlands. There are, of course, the school uniforms, and teachers are to be addressed by their last name. Phones are banned during the whole school time, including breaks. Linus could still have it in his bag, but Birk had to hand it in at the office in the morning, and his school even has a cell phone jammer.

Intermediate school

In New Zealand they have a ‘unique concept for educating the emerging adolescent’, namely the Intermediate School. This school only has two years, 7 and 8, and is meant as a transition from primary to secondary school. Students are still in a homeroom but they do get ‘a specialist programme’ with specialist teachers (Birk had French and Art). There are some other unique features that we don’t see in the Danish classroom, for example the Assembly. There are three versions of this – a regular Admin Assembly where they update everyone, a Cultural Assembly where they sing the school song, and a Formal Assembly, where they sing the national anthem, the first part of which is in Māori. He also learned about Māori culture, and in this term much focus has been on the Treaty of Waitangi, New Zealand’s founding document. This is part of Integrated Studies, for which he also made a tiramisu as homework, since together with three friends he was putting up a short theatre piece about Italian food!

The school also has more emphasis on sports than his school back home in Denmark. Physical health and wellbeing is a core subject apart from English and mathematics. Birk had sport twice in the six-day schedule, and he enjoyed it very much because it’s more varied and fun. One game he played a lot is ‘Capture the Flag’ and he also tried (a form of) cricket. On top of that, he also has House Sport and Team Sport, where you either play in a team of only people from your house (Birk was in Tiri) or mixed with many from other classes that you normally don’t have sports with.

It is also interesting to see how behaviour is rewarded and corrected. In class, students (usually in teams) can earn points when they do something well, for example a math quiz, and then they get a lollypop or something similar. The correction of behaviour seems to be done more collectively, at least in the examples we heard from Birk. One example was about those brain snacks, which were extra breaks during the day where the kids could get some extra activity (I had it wrong in my earlier blog post, it’s not the official break that is called ‘morning tea’). Those were cancelled again because there were some kids who did not know how to behave in these breaks. Another example was that all the boys in his year were called in for a special assembly because some boys had been peeking over the walls of the toilet stalls, so all boys got a speech about the school values (respect and integrity).

High School

For Linus, the change has been bigger than for Birk. Where in Denmark he is still at ‘folkeskolen’ or primary school (which runs from age 6-16), here he joined Year 11 of High School at a much bigger school than his small school at home (with only 20 students in total in his year). This meant that he could pick his courses, which he thought was a brilliant idea, but also that he was the one to shift from classroom to classroom. He only has 20 minutes of homeroom at the start of each day, where kids from his house (which was Mana) from different years are gathered. And that’s actually a bit of a downside, especially when you are only here for a few months, because you don’t have your group of existing friends around you. Linus did enjoy that classes only took 1 hour because it was easier to concentrate and made the day go faster. This also meant he had every one of his six courses almost every day – so he had four times of sport in one week.

The classes were a bit different than expected, for example we were surprised by the use of the computer in both Physical Education (PE) and Food Technology. In PE, apart from running, swimming, playing tennis, touch rugby and a Maori sport called Ki o Rahi, they spent quite a bit of time on writing about ‘movement strategies’, especially towards the end of term. In Food Technology Linus was sad to discover there was actually very little cooking going on (only in 1 out of 4 classes a week). Instead, they talked a lot about bacteria and ways to get hurt in the kitchen... Chemistry was quite fun until the homework started – he is not used to that since in Denmark he is still able to finish all the work within the school day itself. And let’s not talk about Technology Product Design and the cardboard model he had to make… Overall, he is looking forward to going back to his friends in Denmark, though he will be missing the facilities that the school has, not in the least the cafeteria 😊 (there are no options for him to buy anything at school at home, which is very small and in the countryside).

While the summer slowly faded into autumn, both Linus and Birk went to school in shorts the whole time. At some point we did buy some black shoes for Linus that managed to be both cool and within the school uniform guidelines. Birk opted to keep going in his Birkenstock sandals because if he were to wear shoes under his shorts, it would mean he would have to wear long school socks which literally come to his knees (‘Long socks must be worn pulled up’!). They are both happy to leave the uniforms behind!