Day 135-year end activities

   May 18-Sally's development economics class took their final exam today. Again, Sally did not actually proctor the exam, but instead drank lots of coffee while catching up on some research. The university assigned every student who took a class during this part of the summer term a specific seat in a specific classroom. Since this is done randomly, some of Sally’s students were in the lecture classroom, whereas others were not! The exams were delivered electronically to the students at 9am and they had three hours to complete them and turn them into the course management system. Students who failed to complete the exam by noon had to email the exam to the director of undergraduate education who forwarded the exams to the professor with a note that they were received late. Students who wanted to leave the exam early had to leave their materials behind and return after noon to pick them up. In addition, no student was allowed to enter or exit the examination room during the last thirty minutes of the exam in order to try to preserve quiet and order at the end of the examination. Overall, this is a nice examination system from Sally's perspective because she doesn't have to sit and watch her students stress out about the examination or deal with the requests for additional time.

   Joslyn finished her stained glass angel during her wood-working class today. Gróa had a large container full of glass pieces from which the students chose pieces for the body and wings. The head of the angel was a rounded glass disk. The kids wrapped copper foil around the edge of each glass piece and Gróa soldered the pieces together. Half of Joslyn's class took cooking instead of wood-working this semester. To celebrate the end of the course, her class cooked American-style pancakes from the recipe Alex brought into school in January. Joslyn and her friends were assigned seats and everyone was looking forward to the pancakes with syrup and chocolate sauce. Unfortunately, the students are still learning to cook and most of the pancakes were burned. The biggest problem, however, was that they put in three times the amount of salt compared to the recipe (one tablespoon instead of one teaspoon).  Joslyn ate two pancakes mainly because she didn't want to hurt her friends' feelings. As Joslyn tells the story, only the kids who had never eaten American pancakes before thought that they tasted good.

   After school, Sally sent Spencer and Joslyn to the small Samkaup grocery store here on campus by themselves to purchase ice cream and a large chocolate bar for dessert for the family. They really like the independence that they have here in Iceland. Meanwhile, Alexandra stayed after school today for her class's end of finals/school year party that was organized by a few of the parents. The main activities included watching a movie (in English with Icelandic subtitles), swimming, eating pizza, and playing hide and seek which evolved into tag. She got a ride home with a friend at 10pm and announced that she loves school here. She wanted to know why we could not stay longer. She has grown used to the camaraderie at Varmaland, which makes it feel more like a group of friends who are learning and playing around. Her main criticism of the Gunnison schools is that there are many cliques, while everyone gets along with everyone else here. She also received her school hoodie today that has her birth year on the back. Other students had their names placed on the sleeve but Alex requested that "Varmaland" be placed on hers because it was more significant to her.