Being a Teacher at Sea Options

[Janet_Warburton]

Hi Ruben and Welcome to the Virtual Base Camp!

I was wondering if you could further explain how you got to be a Teacher at Sea and ended up on the Healy? I know that you will soon be meeting up with the Oden. Are there other teachers on that vessel?

Regarding teaching - what are some of the challenges/issues that you face as a teacher in Sweden?

Thanks and we look forward to reading your journals!

Janet

[Ruben_Fritzon]

Hi Janet!

I ended up here more or less by luck. We have networks for teachers, usually one for each subject, in Sweden partially supported by the government. They normally have a website but they also send out information by mail. In January i found out by one of these mails that the Swedish Polar Research Secretariat had a scholarship for joining Hotrax 05/Beringia 2005. Before I got that mail I didn’t know anything about them. I applied and and got it! So now I’m here! We had a ice liberty at the North Pole today. Healy and Oden parked close to each other and we all got the chance to meet the people from the other boat. There was another teacher on Oden the previous legs this summer but right know I'm pretty shore that I am the only Swedish teacher in the Arctic Ocean



The schools in Sweden are still pretty good even though endless cutting in the budgets... This affects the amount of extra recourses for kids with special needs, which means I have to take care of them in an ordinary class. The regulations tell us to teach each student individually, easier said than done… Especially in math were the students needs to make up to the goals set by the government to be able to reach gymnasium which is the nest level in our system.



Ruben