María tells us about the first day in Kokkola

On our first day in Kokkola we had plenty of things to do. First, we went on a tour around the school, which really impressed me because it is so much different from ours: every classroom is decorated on the subject it is used for, the chairs have different colours and the school walls have cartoon paintings on them!

Then the headmaster, who is very cheerful, nice and extrovert (which is not very common among headmasters) gave us a general view of how Finnish education works, and now we can understand why Finland is at the top of the Pisa results: students are free to choose almost all their subjects and they have a lot of practical subjects such as cooking, textiles, drawing, music and so on... I think that if you are allowed to choose, you feel more encouraged and you get better results because you are doing the stuff you like.

Thirdly, we split the group and some of us attended a Spanish lesson and others went to English class. My group had Spanish and it was really fun because we learned 20 curiosities from Finland like they have a sweating competition, or a race where men “carry” women on their shoulders and that Finland is the country with the highest rate of coffee consumption in the world, an average of 9.5 coffee cups per person in a day!!!

Finally, we went on a guided tour around the town, which is really small and quiet, and we finished the day at a really fancy cafe called Mediacafe.

María Sánchez Poncela 4°ESO B