Getting to Observe a Danish High School English Class!

I recently had the opportunity to experience what high school is like in Denmark. I am staying with a friend here in Denmark and and she asked if I wanted to come to school with her. We decided I should go to her English class because the rest of her classes are in Danish and I don’t speak Danish. She is in her last year so what we would call a Senior in High School. First off the school system is completely different! Pretty much every student in Denmark takes either a year as an exchange student or does a year at boarding school. When we arrived at her school i didn’t believe it was a school. It looked more like an art gallery or museum. Her English class only had about 15 students. One thing that struck me as weird is that all of the student had fancy laptops and not one a piece of paper and pencil. All notes were taken on their computers and all activities and tests are done on computers as well. I gave a presentation about high school in America and it was funny to see the shocked faces of the Danish students. They seem horrified by the way I said our schools worked. Now getting to the curriculum, it’s very advanced. In the English class I attended I was shocked to see that they were learning the same subjects we had been learning in my English class! There was even stuff I Hadn’t seen before because I have not learned it yet! I started to feel jealous that they have the opportunity to learn another language at such a high level when at home we are only required to take two years of a language. They discussed topics on figurative language,
syntax, themes, and rhetorical devices, all things I didn’t learn until very recently. So why is their English class as advanced if not more than ours, when ours is our first language? My only answer for you is that students have a certain drive to succeed and obtain knowledge and explore the world more than the students at home. I have never met such motivated and devoted students before! they all have big plans to travel the world and study abroad and have high level jobs that would not be possible without English. Another thing that was different was that the teacher really pushed them to see how much they understood. She ask them to go into further detail and analyze something into
so much depth, that students get the chance to really understand. I felt like the class was so interactive with the students that you really felt like you were learning not just reading text or sitting there annotating. I even found myself raising my hand in class to answer questions! Overall M experience in the school was very eye opening because I had once thought that America was high on top of education, but now I see that that’s not quite true. And while I love my school and would never change it, I really enjoyed the experience of high school in another country!

Happy Travels!