Two Classrooms, One Question

Sunshine Times · “Two classrooms, one question”

Last January I swapped the palm trees of Sunbeam Bay for the snow of Helsinki. For one term, I was an exchange student at a secondary school near the city centre, and I expected the experience to be cold, quiet and rather serious. It was only the first of those three things.
What surprised me most was not the famous lack of homework. It was the timetable. Lessons lasted seventy-five minutes, but after every one there was a fifteen-minute break, and nobody seemed to worry that this was time lost. Students went outside, even at minus ten, and came back with red faces and clear heads. At home, I am used to running from one forty-minute lesson to the next with a sandwich in my hand.
The second difference was assessment. At Sunshine International, we sit a mock exam every term, and our results are displayed as percentages on an online dashboard that our parents can check at any time. In Helsinki, I hardly ever saw a test result as a number. Teachers wrote comments, and students assessed their own work against a list of goals. There is a national exam at the end of upper secondary school, but before that most assessment happens quietly, in the classroom.
Some of my friends at home think this sounds too relaxed. “How do you know if you are falling behind?” my friend Leo asked me in a message. The answer, as far as I could see, was that the teachers knew. Classes were small, and when a student struggled, a special support teacher worked with them that same week rather than at the end of the year. It is this early help, rather than any clever technology, that seems to keep so few students from dropping out.
Teachers also have a great deal of autonomy. My history teacher, Ms Laine, told me she chooses her own materials and decides how to cover the curriculum. “We are trusted like doctors,” she said. “Nobody inspects my lessons with a checklist.” In Finland, teaching is a respected and competitive profession, and every teacher I met had a master’s degree.
Even lunch felt different. Every student gets a free hot meal, and teachers eat at the same tables as their classes. On my first day I sat opposite the head teacher without realising who she was, and we spent twenty minutes talking about ice hockey. Nobody wears a uniform, students call teachers by their first names, and yet the classrooms were calmer than ours. It made me wonder whether respect really comes from rules about clothes and titles, or from something less visible.
Not everything was perfect, of course. Some students admitted that the freedom made them lazy, and a few said they would have liked more feedback in the form of marks. Others complained that the high-stakes national exam at the end comes as a shock after years without pressure. And I missed our clubs: at Sunshine International, after-school activities are part of school life, while in Helsinki most hobbies happen outside school.
So which system is better? I am no longer sure the question makes sense. Sunbeam Bay prepares us brilliantly for exams; Helsinki seemed to prepare students for learning. What I would like to bring home is not a whole system but a few habits: longer breaks, fewer numbers and more trust. What I would never give up is our clubs.
— Emma Clarke, Year 11