Our first class was history I think. I made the "grand entrance" that every new student makes into a class full of people who already know each other and was introduced (along with Sierra, Olaf and Eric) to the class. I think the class had about 25 people but I am not exactly sure. There were two male teachers who were teaching the class; one of them I found out after is actually my math teacher. They talked about some dates in the future that I think are the days we get textbooks and stuff and then dismissed us...An hour before the class really was supposed to end! So Olaf, Sierra, Eric and I walked around the school meeting all of Olaf and Eric's friends. I probably shook hands and heard names of 100 students and I only remember about 5. Oh well, they will come slowly.
Then Helen, Tilda, Maya, Caroline and some more of their friends who I have no idea what their names are took us up to biology class. I understood some of what they were talking about in this class; they talked about abiotic and biotic factors and example of both and the environments they live in. Then the class took a vote as to how we wanted to be graded. The options were something along the lines of: regular tests, take home tests, papers/essays, and discussions. I think I chose regular tests, but I am not exactly sure if the mumble jumble of what apparently is Swedish that came from my mouth reflected that option. We talked about what we would be studying during the year which I understood to be a lot about water and then later in the year genetics.
And last class we went to was a gym class. The gym is a whole separate building that Sarah and Eric took me to about a quarter of mile down hill from the main building. We walked past the locker rooms and into what one might call a ballet room (small with mirrors on two of the sides and windows on the other two). The teacher talked a bit about how we are supposed to rank our effort on a scale everyday based how tired we feel (or something like that). Then we were given the option to go canoeing, go for a walk, play basketball, or play volleyball. I chose to play volleyball with the majority of the class. After that we walked to the cafeteria, which is like 10 minute walk and ate lunch. The lunches are free, there are no options to choose from, but the food is better quality than MIHS food.
You also might be surprised to hear that I have the exact same people in my class for every subject. You stay with the same group of people for every class except for your two elective classes. Also the schedule is really different than an American high school's schedule. We have a different agenda everyday and they even vary from week to week. So yesterday I only had three of my 8 classes and I got out at 12:30. Some days I will only have two classes the entire day, and other days I will have 5 classes and stay at the school until 4:30 (see the picture of my next weeks schedule and try to guess what the classes are). The school has three stories and three wings. There are three different "specialties" or programs you can go into: Social Sciences, Natural Sciences, and Nursing I think. Each program has a different hall and the floors are split by subject.
Today I had 3...well only 2 classes: math and a biology lab. I was supposed to have a social studies before math but the teacher did not show up. Apparently substitute teachers is a foreign concept to schools in Sweden and if a teacher is sick or out of town you just don't have that class. So I just didn't have social studies today. Math was nice because we just took a teat and I could understand all of it. Even the story problems I could figure out by finding the word percent for percent of just finding two numbers and guessing what they wanted haha. The biology lab is taught by the same teacher as the other biology class I had yesterday. It was essentially a free period to do bookwork and answer questions so I pulled out my handy dandy Swedish-English dictionary and translated the questions into English. The teacher was pretty proud :) Also today we got our laptops. Every student receives a laptop and a locker to keep it in. And I noticed today that there are no digital clocks in the entire schools. They are all the circular ones.
First day of school!
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