Plans for the future

What I mean by my plans for the future, is what I want to study and what and where I want to work. But everyone also has a secret or not secret dream job they want. It can be an actor, a famous musician or even a professional athlete. I also have a dream job. I wish I could be a major league baseball player. This dream job is more of an american dream than here in Finland. I love baseball. I’ve played it since I was  five years old. Baseball is a sport I would like to play for the rest of my life, thats how much I love it.

But moving on, my studies are still not fully planed but I am starting to get ideas of what I want to do. But for my job I was hoping I could do something related to software engineering. This interests me, because I think electronics will play a big part in the future and I’ll have an advantage over it in this area of work. Also, I am interested in electronics more than other things like going to the office and doing paperwork. I’m not saying there won't be paperwork where I want to go, but I’m hoping there's less.

Will finding the job be easy with all this unemployment? Personally I don’t have much experience in getting a job, but by what I’ve read I think it will be fairly hard. But if I get the right education that not many people have, then I think it will be easier. But now finding some job experience is kind of hard for a person in my position, seeing that I go to America every summer, but I will try. Also, I’m not sure that employment is the same in Finland and in the US, but in the end I hope my life goes happily and successfully!

Finland's is number one in education!

I read this article, that says that Finland has the best education system in the world followed by South Korea. The thing that amazed me in this is how two completely different school systems are both top ranked.I live and go to school in Finland so I know how the school system works here and my English teacher showed me a video about her teacher exchange in South Korea and it was totally different. In the South Korean school the studying hours for the kids is mesmerizing compared to my school here in Finland.The kids got up at around 7:00 to go to school and after school ended at 15:00 they would go to extra tutoring and then they'd get home at around 22:00 and go to sleep. The thing I wonder is, how can they be so different but still they both come out on top.

“The rankings are calculated based on various measures, including international test scores, graduation rates between 2006 and 2010, and the prevalence of higher education seekers.“ The international test scores are in my opinion, the only good way to rank countries and the schools themselves. They show the knowledge that the students have learned there and puts it in an easy form to rank. The other ways are also effective but the tests are the most.

I also watched this video which shows first grade students using smartphones for their class work. The kids red small stories from their school books and then filmed them by making paper cut outs and filming them with the smartphone. The idea is to get the kids to read and understand what they read and add something fun to the learning, which in this case is the filming. I think this is a great idea, because it gets the kids to learn better because they're doing something fun and enjoyable and they also learn how to use the smartphone which is needed in these days and in the future. It also seems to work well by how the kids work and take part in the lesson.

An open mind

“Education's purpose is to replace an empty mind with an open one” - Malcolm S. Forbes

To be open minded, as Malcolm Forbes is trying to say, means you are open to new things. For example to new foods and to try new sports. In the dictionary, the definition for open minded is: ”Receptive to new ideas or to reasons; free from prejudice or bias.”

But does education help you to became open minded, like Malcolm Forbes is trying to say? In my opinion no. I have learned to be open minded from my parents, but my father mostly. I remember being young and I did not want to try a new food that he had made or we bought from somewhere, but he always reminded me to stay open minded. Now that I have written this far I am going to change my mind on Forbes's quote. Education does give an open mind by teaching us things and us wanting to go further with it. Although this is hard to explain, i'm sure everyone at some point has heard something in school and gone home that day and tried it themselves and sometimes they just might want to go a little further.

In close, Malcolm Forbes's quote is right, but also wrong. An open mind is “obtained” mostly by how you see people in life and and how you are taught in life. Your educational years also teach you, but then again we're always learning.

The young today

Being young today usually revolves around electronics and social networks. Our daily chore is to check facebook or twitter and then go to youtube. Younger people have the upper hand now by knowing how to use all the different electronics that are needed everywhere you go. But what some young people don't understand yet is that their education is the most important thing they're doing right now. Education is the key to our future. But the thing you need to find is what you like doing.
Our generation today is something new everyday. We can learn about places all over the world in minutes. We are learning and discovering new things everyday. But there are some people who do not wish to adapt to these new technologies and live plain simple lives. These people are called amish. The amish live in the countryside in little towns.They pretty much live off themselves by growing and cooking their own food. Why I am bringing this up is because I wonder why? Why do these people choose to stay back in a certain century instead of adapting to the new things.
For me, being young today is the best thing in the whole world. My favourite thing that has become very good is local transportation. Local transportation used to be a couple buses going to certain places but now you can take a bus anywhere. Its the most useful thing now and some people don't notice that. Also, gaming consoles have also been a big thing in my life. there a good way to have fun alone or with friends although some people might disagree. Communication with cell phones is now also much easier because you can talk to someone anyone at anytime. Its good for if you're going to meet someone and you notice you don't have time or if you get lost. But those are main things that affect my life now, in this generation.

My trip in America!

There is nothing particularly amazing that happened when I was there. It’s just the feeling of returning home to were you once lived. My trip starts at Helsinki airport where I take a struggling 9 hour flight all the way to Minneapolis airport were I meet my dad. I do the flight alone with my younger brother. I’ve traveled alone many times but I always have butterflies in my stomach and the feeling that I’m going to miss my flight. When I meet up with my dad we started driving home, but we stopped and get something to eat (fast-food) that they don’t have in Finland.

The first couple of days there was just relaxing and getting used to everything. After that the baseball season starts, which is one of the main reasons why I went there. Baseball is my favorite sport. I love watching it and playing it. When I was there, I, my dad and my brother went to a major league baseball game which was really exciting. The game was tied most of the time, with one team getting in the lead and then the other team tieing it up again.  The stadium has an amazing 39504 seats so you can imagine the noise. We got to the stadium early so the gates were still closed. The big lines were just waiting to get in. When the ticket collectors came to open the gates everyone cheered and rushed in. When you walked around the stadium you could see all the different foods and hear the sellers trying to sell shirts and hats.

But enough on baseball, if you haven’t noticed I’ve been saying a lot about food. My favorite place we went to eat was a BBQ restaurant called “Famous Dave’s BBQ”. The name tells it all and the food is the best. The food is traditional American. They serve pork ribs, chicken or beef briskets with you choice of BBQ sauces (and my favorite cornbread). The restaurants are decorated with old pictures and paintings which gives a traditional feeling to the place. Also from inside the restaurant looked like a log cabin.

Also the weather in Minnesota is something I loved. The humidity on sunny days and the lighting storms that went on for even a whole day. The weather was mostly sunny. The humidity was so strong when you got out of the house or car with air-conditioning, the heat wave will hit you and would make you feel “lazy”, like staying in a hot tub for a long time and just wanting to lie down. The storms were continues and usually came at night. You could hear the thunder continuously every minute or so, shaking the windows and making a loud boom.

In the end I encourage people to go see Minnesota at some point in their life. You can see the city, the food, or the wild life they have it all!

How I learned English

I was born in Minnesota, USA so you can guess how I learnt English. I lived in Minnesota most of my childhood with my mother, father, older brother and younger brother. I never remember learning English at school or at home, I only remember speaking it to other people and learning new words.

When I was six years old I moved to Finland with my mother. It was a big change for me because I was not much of a Finnish speaker. Luckily my mom and dad got me into an English speaking school. On my first day of school I felt nervous because I did not know anybody, but thought that everyone else knew each other and were all great friends. Luckily they were not, and I am still friends with most of them today. I remember sitting at my desk on the first day of school, my teacher was calling out our names. There was one student that sat in front of me, and for some reason I could only remember his name. Maybe it was the fact that he sat in front of me or then his name was different.

In second grade we had English class almost every day. I couldn’t spell, I could barely read and I never did my homework, the only thing I could do was speak English. Although I was bad at English I had a very nice English teacher who helped me a lot with my spelling and some of my reading. We had spelling tests every week on different words that we had learned throughout the week. I did not get good scores on the tests so I started studying harder and harder for the tests. Eventually I started getting better and better. But writing was not the only thing holding me back. Reading was always a big challenge for me but at school they had a book series that had different levels of reading (level 1: easier and shorter texts, level 10: harder and longer texts). They were a big help for me and went at a good learning speed that was appropriate for me.

But I did not only learn English at school, I also learned it at home. My dad bought me a book series that we read together and we would always race who read the book first and then talk about it after we both read it. I also spoke English with both my parents and my brothers.

When I was in fifth grade I got a new home room teacher and he was my new English teacher also. The only thing I can say about him is that he was more hard working and gave more homework. He had a different style of teaching. We had the same kind of word test every week except he would put us into groups. There were three groups: Green (very good), yellow (good) and red (bad). Green had hard words and red had easy words. I was always going up and down between red and yellow but never made it to green. We would always write the ten new words after the test so we would have time to study them, but I did not really use that time studying.

In the end I do not know when I got good at English. Maybe it was from all the reading with my dad or all my spelling tests or maybe it was from everything. But this is where I am now, exe English class, Kaarinan lukio.