Day 75-school days

   March 19-Today was Sally's last day of lecture for her natural resource economics course. Teaching this course in Iceland has been very nice but also a fair bit of work. There were three issues that mandated changes from the course Sally teaches at Western State. First, Bifröst University wants every lecturer to use powerpoint slides so the students can focus on the discussion and not note-taking. Sally has never utilized powerpoint slides to this extent and therefore had to create the slides from scratch each week. Second, teaching this course one morning a week did not allow for discussion of some of the articles before additional articles were read. This hampered some of the spontaneity of discussions, because all of the articles on the topic were decided weeks ahead of time, irrelevant of current events. Additionally, new articles could not be assigned based on in-class discussions because a new week brought a new topic. Third, Sally tailored numerous topics to the Icelandic environment (ocean fishing policy instead of fresh water fish management, or Arctic Ocean instead of general ocean economics).
   The majority of this class was international exchange students (four Germans, one Hungarian and one Pole, vs. four Icelanders), which gave the class a very different feel than that which Sally was expecting. One surprising feature was that the international students' quality of work was substantially higher than the Icelandic students. An Icelandic colleague who shares the same students said that she has seen this disparity as well. Because there were so many European students in the class, Sally incorporated a large amount of
empirical data from the EU. This focus on the EU policy perspective was a great change from always focusing on US policy and specific US government mandates. This international perspective on natural resource economics will show up in the next edition of this course taught at Western State. One other sidenote-this class has eight women and only two men. This gender distribution is exactly opposite of what Sally would expect at Western State.

   Over the past few weeks, the girls have each produced numerous pieces of wonderful handiwork
in the vocational courses taught at Varmaland. Joslyn loves her woodworking class even though she cut her finger this last week. She does not want to miss school on Fridays because she would miss this class. In addition to woodworking, she has more traditional art classes and drama classes. Joslyn is already bemoaning the lack of these kinds of courses in the Gunnison school's curriculum. Unfortunately, the school district back home does not have the resources (both in time and money) to support these types of courses.

  

  

  

   Alex has fallen in love with knitting and has recently been having to show Sally the proper Icelandic method of knitting.  She can knit a pair of woolen socks in a week in her spare time. In addition to knitting, Alex is in a cooking class and brings home wonderful creations every other Monday. We all love to eat her tasty treats.

   Spencer seems to be enjoying his time at kindergarten now that he has made a few good friends. Academically, the kindergarten here does not stress learning to read and write at the same level as Gunnison. It is unusual for Icelandic children to know how to write their names and most kids at this age are just beginning to write single letters. When Spencer's class goes for a visit to Varmaland, the 4th and 5th grade students instruct the kids on how to write the first letter of their names. In addition, the Iceland kids are learning to hear the first letter sound in words. This has created some difficulties for Spencer.  For instance, when he sees a picture of a car he thinks "c," not "b," which is the correct answer over here since "bill," pronounced bit(l), is the Icelandic word for car, Luckily, Joslyn is with him and they end up working it out together.