The other week, I pulled some paragraphs from a few news articles around the web about education and had my students practice paraphrasing them in writing. This one (article source) stumped them, not just because it was pulled out of context, but because so many of the assumptions it was based on were foreign to them:
Namely,
1. The idea that a school would need to attract teachers. In this case, I explained that it was because certain schools (underfunded or low-performing or poor or whatever) are a less favorable place to work than others. This was also strange to them. It's not that every single school in Finland is equal, but they have nowhere near the amount of variance that we do in the US.
2. The idea that a teacher would have been in the classroom in the first place without a master's degree. That's not how it works in Finland.
3. The idea that a teacher could be teaching while also getting said master's degree. Again, that's not how it works here, for the most part.
4. The idea that an MA could have been out of reach for a classroom teacher, since they'd have to pay for it themself (and thus be lured by the prospect of the district paying for it).
All of that from just one paragraph! Interesting differences.
