Iceland review - 2006, Blaðsíða 72

70 ICELAND REVIEW
gymnasium, the route that 93 percent of students in the country go
when they finish primary school. students generally finish their last
year of primary school, also the last mandatory year of education
in Iceland, when they are 16. gymnasium, much like an American
high school, is four years.
Though students can use credit they accrue here toward their
degrees in gymnasium, the school is private. Tuition, which runs
IsK 164,000, or about usD 2,500, for a semester including housing,
food and most supplies, pays for the teachers’ salaries and for the
school’s general maintenance.
When sigrídur sigurdardóttir told her friends in selfoss, a small city
outside Reykjavík, that she’d be coming this semester, most of her
friends and family were supportive. But not everyone.
“I got the attitude: You know how to iron shirts. Why don’t you
want to learn something else?” sigrídur says. After she applied to art
school in Reykjavík and didn’t get in, sigrídur, who’s 20, enrolled
on the Internet.
“I really like it,” she says. “How to iron a shirt, how to prepare
food… I didn’t learn it that much when I grew up. People don’t
teach their children it anymore. Everybody just uses microwave
food. Pasta. Hot dogs. That’s not the future.”
Thráinn, of course, has also encountered the reputation that the
school “is only for country girls who want to be farmers.” He argues
that the curriculum is less about teaching students how to sew a
straight seam or bake a good cake, and more about the process of
learning how to do it. The traditional Icelandic school system, he
says, places too much importance on a few categories of learning.
“nobody thinks about the student who needs something else,” he
says. “I feel like I can do something for these people.” Coming here
removes kids from the proverbial rat race. living on their own with
rules to follow helps some kids focus.
It worked for him, too, in a way. Thráinn never planned on being a
principal-counselor-social-worker-teacher to teenagers living in the
middle of Iceland’s first national forest. He left Iceland in 1993, and
after living in norway, Egypt, spain and, most recently, Oaxaca,
mexico, he didn’t think he would move back. But he stumbled into
this job through his experience in restaurants, and teaching and
running the school eclipsed his old life. “I discovered something
about myself,” he says. “This is what I like to do.”
now, his office is lined with old books, and a grandfather clock
sounds periodically in “the castle,” where, in another era, the
students would sit in the evenings with their embroidery and listen
to the founding principal, sigrún Blöndal, read aloud for hours.
“I had two or three restaurants in Reykjavík. I had a big nightclub.
I was in the middle of the shit. But in the end, it was something I
didn’t want from life. When I came here...,” he pauses, “What else
do you need? When you have enough, you have enough.”
THE nExT mORnIng, I am late for breakfast, again. I bump
into the other cooking teacher, who will be leading class this
morning, and ask if I can sit in on her class.
“Today is a very traditional dish,” she tells me. “Do you know svid?”
ane Korner teaChes stuDents hoW to Weave on olD-fashioneD looMs.