Berg Ungdomsskole

On March 19, 2009, I visted Berg Ungdomsskole in Lyngdal. The town has a population of around 7,000 and is in the southernmostpart of Norway. The school has around 150-200 students from grades 8-10th with around 25 teachers.

I visited 3 classes of 10th graders and 2 classes of 9th graders. And as you can tell from the picture above, it was a beautiful spring day. So the students were not overly excited about sitting in a dark auditorium for a lecture when they had just come in from running around outside in the spring-like weather (mind you it is still very cold... but with the sun, it feels like spring).

All the lessons were around 45 minutes and for the 10th graders I did the election lesson which consisted mainly of the agree/disagree activity and then sharing some examples of media due to time. The three classes got progressivelybetter. The first two classes were a little unruly, but I attribute much of that to the fact that the teacher who was in the room with me was not their normal teacher. This happens a lot (though it is not suggested by Fulbright for several reasons) and I always wonder why, but I have never asked. The last 10th grade class had their English teacher with them and they were well behaved and engaged well. I think it has something to do with the idea of a sub and then mix in the fact that I have them moving around. It might just be too much for them on a beautiful spring day.

The last two lessons I did were with the 9th grade. The first one had their teacher with them and the second one did not. Both did okay on the book-in-a-day engagement (with Seedfolks this time), though we ran out of time on the first class and didn't even get time to have them finish telling about their section of the book. The second class we got through it and even made it to the point where they drew some conclusions about immigration in the US. Here are some of their comments:

• it is hard [for immigrants] to find a job. [sic]
• It seems to be really hard to be an immigrant in Amerika. [sic]
• It is hard for immigrants in america because they couldn't the language [sic]
• Many different culture with different hopes
• It's very many different types of imegrants [sic]
• There is many difrent contreys repersented in Ameraican [sic]

You can tell from these comments that it was obvious they were able to pull some conclusions from the text, but they were not as sophisticated as some of the other classes have been. This could be due to the lack of time, the structure of the lesson (I had to shorten some things to fit it into the 45 minute slot), the setting (the auditorium which made sitting on top of each other and poking each other much more viable), or the lack of their normal English teacher (so they had sub-mentality).