Brain droppings

in honor of George Carlin....

-- From reading my posts on teaching, you may have noticed things are a bit different here than in the States. There is an Education Law that covers essentially all aspects of schooling in one way or other, and we are required to abide by it. So when a student disputes a grade in my course, as happened this week, she writes a formal letter of challenge, citing bits of the Education Law to bolster her argument for why she should receive a higher grade, and then I am required to respond in writing to argue my side, also within the framework of this law. The principal then decides the argument and settles the course grade.
The goal of all this administrative paperwork is, of course, to ensure that grading practices are applied fairly and equitably everywhere in Norway, which is certainly a good thing to aim for, but it does make things more complicated. This year's first- and second-year high-school students (11th and 12th grade) are subject to a new series of reforms in the Education Law, and discussing the implications of these changes has been the subject of many a faculty meeting. Just to name one example: teachers are now expected to base course grades solely on the student's competence in the subject at the end of the course. So, for instance, if you get C's on your English essays until spring, when you experience a quantum leap in quality and get all A's, the teacher can't split the difference and give you a B for the course. The appropriate course grade should be an A since an A is the measure of your competence in the material at the end of the year.
But what about, say, gym? If gym teachers can only grade students on their skills and not on their efforts, do you flunk the basketball unit if you can't dunk? The answer in that event is apparently to consider intangibles such as knowledge of the rules and the like as skills, not just each student's points per game average -- but we had to sit down and come up with all of these answers before we could start assessing our students according to the new rules.

-- Ella and I went wandering for hours Thursday night in an effort to get her to sleep while Inki was in Oslo on business. My colleague Ole Kristian had had us over and offered us some yummy elderflower nectar he'd made, so I thought we'd go looking for elder trees and collecting for juice and wine. We passed one of the local graveyards and noticed a bunch of red stickers on a number of the headstones; these are put there by the administering authority responsible for graveyards to ask visitors to these graves to let them know there is still someone tending these graves. Graves 25 years old with no visitors will be removed to make room for new ones, which is a bit of a horrifying thought to me, coming as I do from a place where "Rest In Peace" doesn't come with an expiration date. I understand that space is at more of a premium here than in the States, but still....

-- The weather seems to have taken a turn for the better, which we're all happy about. We had two fabulous, uninterrupted weeks of low 80s and sunshine in late May and early June -- an almost unheard-of event in the rainiest city in Europe (in Northern Europe, as Inki pointedly reminds me) -- but then the rain and clouds came back just in time for a three-day visit from Gregory, a former student of mine from San Francisco Eurailing across the continent. My dad and his wife had much better luck when they visited last October; we were a bit worried about their choice of visit date, since that tends to be the dreariest part of the fall, but there was nary a cloud in the sky that entire week. So who knows? Hopefully Bergen will be in the mood to show itself off to greatest effect when Rosalyn comes to visit in August.