What a Difference a School Day Makes...

My favorite part of the day here in Scotland (after the morning cup of coffee, of course!) is walking to the school bus to meet the kids, and asking them about their days. They don’t bother to tell me about all the things they have learned, of course, but they do tell me a lot about their friends. John’s top friends are Everett, who is another American, Matthew, two Davids (“the one with the freckles and the one with the ears,” he says) and Norbert (yep, that’s the name.) Most of his stories, though, are about a boy named Athen, who is apparently about as naughty as they come. Athen got in trouble the other day when he decided that the long hair of the girl sitting in front of him was in his way and needed to be cut, so he took his scissors out of his desk and clipped a big section out of the back. At first, John said that his punishment was not to be able to go to lunch (can you imagine that happening in the U.S.?), but then he said that the teachers changed their minds and sent him up to P7 instead to be supervised by the older kids. I asked Emma about that, since she’s in P7, and she confirmed it, but added “They cleared the room of all the scissors first…”

Emma’s stories center mostly on an English kid named Charlie, and though she says he’s more annoying than naughty, her stories make him sound like the kind of kid that no one would want in class. They spend a lot of their class time divided into reading groups, and each group takes on a different novel. The kids get to pick which group they want to be in, but sometimes one of the books sounds much more appealing than the others, and too many kids choose that group, so they have to negotiate. One of the newest books is “Shark Island,” which six kids chose, but each group is capped at five. Emma said that Charlie was one of the six, and really, really, really wanted to be in the group. After pitching a fit, he was allowed to be in the group when a girl named Rebecca finally agreed to choose another group. But he forgot to bring his book for three days in a row, so the discussion wasn’t moving very far. Finally Miss Vaughey (the P7 teacher) lost her patience and asked him to give her two reasons why she shouldn’t kick him out of the group. “It’s good for my education,” he said, “and that should be a good enough reason for both.”

Aside from the naughty classmates, Emma’s class seems pretty interesting to me. The “reading group” concept is a great one, and she comes home every few days with a new book to discuss. Their homework is to read a good chunk of the book every night, and then they are all tasked with different jobs during the discussion the next day. Some of the jobs are Discussion Director, Word Wizard, and Literary Luminary. The last one is my favorite, and the one that Emma always seems to get. She has a chart to fill out every night after she reads in which she quotes a few of her “top passages,” then lists why they stuck out to her, and how she will encourage the other kids in the group to interpret them. The books are quite good, too, though neither of us have heard of many of them because they are put out by British publishing companies. Her current book is the Thirteenth Orphan, which is about Scottish myths and legends, and a part of the series they are doing on Scottish history. John’s class works on reading as a group rather than breaking up into smaller groups. They do a new book every few days or so, and read about a quarter of it at school (with each kid reading aloud in turn for a page or so), then read about 25 pages more at home as homework. He also comes home with big spelling lists, and has a test on them every Friday. The words are pretty hard for a second grader, I think, and in addition, some of them have different spellings (favourite and gipsy were on the list this week), so I hope that doesn’t prove to be confusing to him later in life!

Yesterday, I had the opportunity to see a lot of this first-hand, as I agreed to volunteer at the school for “Friday Activities.” These are hour-long co-curricular series that last six weeks, and are mostly taught by parents. The kids can choose between several sports (John does football, of course…), art, Chinese language, drama, baking, etc…whatever parents choose to lead. I agreed to fill in for an absent parent in the baking class, figuring that would be relatively easy. Wrong! The other parent divided the kids into two groups and took one, then sent about 10 kids with me (including, of course, the aforementioned Naughty Charlie!) to the kitchen to get ingredients to make “Rocky Road.” The recipe was essentially this: take 250g Stork and cut into 10 pieces, then melt with 50g chocolate. Add 75g crushed Malteasers, 75g digestives, and 50g marshmallows, then stir in 50g golden syrup. Of course, I had to begin the class by asking all the kids to define and find each of the ingredients, since I had no idea what most of them were. I did manage to hide my metric-system ignorance by deflecting all questions right back at the kids in a math-teacher-type voice: Well, how much do YOU think 250g would be? And after the recipe was all mixed together and divided into 10 little tins for the kids to take home, one of the little girls asked if she was supposed to bake it when she got home, to which I said, “Uh, I think your mother will know. Ask her…” She replied, “Oh, darn, I’m not going home after school. We’re going to the airport.” So I naively asked, “Oh, where are you going from the airport?.” To this, she said, “Skiing. In France.” So, I’m assuming that her mother won’t be too jazzed to see raw cookie dough in her carry-on bag at the Edinburgh airport!

By the way, David’s friend passed on this hilarious video, which gives some idea of what we’re up against with the Scottish accent: