Week 5: 1st February – 7th February

Personal and Cultural Development

The first week of February has been a lively one! I culturally broadened my horizons further by facing my fear and experiencing traditional Finnish sauna for the first time! This is hugely different to anything I have ever experienced before and is nothing like sauna back home! Talking to one of my Finnish friends Tanja, I was getting more and more nervous but it soon became apparent that it is completely normal here to bask in the heat of a sauna at 80 to 100 degrees Celsius, with others in their ‘birthday suits’ in (what can only be described as) a social situation. Despite my initial fear, I ended up in the sauna again in the space of a few days as part of a cottage weekend organised by the ESN (Erasmus Student Network).

The cottage weekend was, personally and culturally, an experience I will never forget! I met a lot of new (crazy!) people and got to know better others that I had previously met before in my Finnish class. The cottages were set in a place called Sauvo which showed off the Finnish countryside by the sea, about one hour from Turku. It’s a beautiful place and the snow made the scene look like something from a postcard. We were given many challenges to complete during the cottage weekend that, for me as part of our group names the ‘Fantastic Four’ (group number 4 with 12 people!), involved wearing a green wig, making up a song and dance routine to perfection, eating liver with raisons, getting competitive in ‘snow rugby’, lighting a fire with just wood and matches in the snow, and generally having so much fun I could barely handle it! Our team (Fantastic Four) ended up winning the overall day of challenges and received a basket of goodies – chocolate, crisps, biscuits, the lot! The team spirit was just that, fantastic. :)

As if all of that wasn’t enough for one week, I also attended the ‘International Stereotype Party’. This was an aptly hilarious follow up to my comments last week about the stereotypes of the British/English/Irish. Everybody dressed up to represent the stereotype of their home country or favourite country. Some were very creative and you could easily guess their country, e.g. one Finnish girl came dressed only in a towel as if she was going to sauna! The French were teaching the Finnish how to be on strike. And the Spanish were Spanish dancers. There were many other nationalities there; it was fascinating to see everybody’s take on their own culture or country stereotypes.

 

Professional Development

This week we had our first School Experience lecture, giving us an outline as to what exactly this module shall entail. I’m very excited about where I shall be placed, because I think most of my experience will be in the International school in Turku. I’m very interested to find out how this works, especially with the influx and constant outgoing of pupils, and how they deal with multiculturalism in the classroom. I also hope to learn some new teaching methods, techniques and strategies that I can apply to my own teaching at home. As well as this, I wish to seek out opportunities to practice or observe TEFL lessons as I’m thinking about going into this field of work following the EAL/TEFL course I completed at Stranmillis last summer. Furthermore, I will inevitably compare the Finnish system and works of an International primary school with those in Northern Ireland’s education system, and the UK in general.