Hisøy Skole

Hisøy Skule is a grade 1-10 school that I visited on January 13th and 14th, 2009. Hisøy Skule is in Arendal, which is one of the towns that I always rank in the top 5 favorite towns in Norway.

I did lectures of two classes of 10th, 9th, and 8th grade students. It was a bit strange as the school was built recently and the design was the open school design. In other words there are no classrooms and the whole area is open with a reading center as the core and the classroom space all around. The school had big open windows and skylights which gave the school a very open and airy feel. For the 10th grade students I did short stories, for the 9th grade I did a new presentation entitled “Who is Barak Obama?”, and for the 8th grade students I did another new presentation about US middle and high schools.

All three lessons went well, though I was not really excited about the Obama lesson in that I felt like it was a bit boring. I had the students watch a clip from South Park, then go visit stations that have artifacts about Obama (i.e. pictures, comics, magazine articles, websites, and video clips). Some of the comments the students wrote down from browsing the centers are:

• He loves his family.
• He believes in the American dream.
• He has attended Harvard Law School.
• His heroes are Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. [sic]
• That every whant to have him ass president. [sic]
• That he loves everyone no matter who, or how they look like. [sic]
• He just wan't to be president becaus, he wanted to help. [sic]
• He likes basketball.
• His favorite TV-program is sportscenter. [sic]
• He is in good shape for his age.
• He has a white mother and a black father.
• He got roots from Kenya. [sic]
• People seem to like Obama better than Bush.

None of the facts the students wrote down were wrong. But none were really insightful either. So I may just need to work on this lesson until I get something I like more in terms of sharing information about Obama.

After the stations, I showed the New Yorker controversial cover page and had the students create their own portrait of how they think Norwegians view Obama (see photos below):



The second group for the Obama lecture, I had the students create a portrait of Obama that reflects what they learned in the stations they visited (see photos below):

The short story lessons went really well in that the students did a nice job reading and thinking about the stories. However, I found it interesting that almost all of them made their thesis sentence more like a newspaper title or a magazine title. (see photos below):

The other new lesson I did was the lecture on what US middle and high schools are like. I made the mistake of sharing with the students that some middle and high schools offer fast food in their cafeterias like Pizza Hut pizza or McDonalds. They latched onto this idea and you can see in their student work that many of them would like to have hot food offered at lunch. In many Norwegian schools, students bring their lunch and there is no food served at school. Those schools who do serve food usually offer cold sandwiches and only rarely have I seen hot food offered in the cafeteria. After the introduction where I asked the students to tell me what they knew about the US schools (which mainly was that they often wear uniforms and they get hot food for lunch). I had the students do a text pass. In the text pass, I had photos (which worked the best), comics, and picture books. Here are some of the notes students made about US middle and high schools:

• They have school uniform. They have lackers. [sic]
• They have yellow school busses. [sic]
• long hallways and many peoples that's in their way to their classrooms. [sic]
• The teachers is a littel bitt like the norwegian teachers [sic]
• some classes a seportie boys/girls [sic]
• They have tests in first grade.
• more prosjekts with candy [sic]
• In the US they have letters insted of numbers in ther grades. [sic]
• They have warm good for lunch, cheerleading, and a flag.
• Candy in class, small classes, and TV's in the classroom.
• There are a lot of black kids in here [the classroom].
• They have their own desk.
• They can be expelled.
• Much work in groups.
• Detention is part of the system.
• The schools is often big old buildings.
• Different classrooms for each subject.
• They have a normal day at school.

After doing a text pass regarding what schools are like, I invited the students to create a poster that either encouraged US schools to adopt some Norwegian ideas or vice versa. Here are some of the posters the students created: