Work Placement

As part of my course, I am spending 6 weeks in a voluntary work placement. I say voluntary because it's not paid, but it's not actually voluntary. Or, you could say, I'm being paid by way of the unemployment benefit.

The reasons... I'm not entirely sure. I bet if you ask the politicians it's because I need experience in being part of the workplace. Fair enough; except, this course contains only people with educations - there are no illiterates in the class and it is primarily people with work histories and tertiary qualifications. We know that you need to dress appropriately, turn up on time, and be respectful. In that regard, the work placement scheme would be more appropriate for the "slow" class (primarily refugees and other immigrants who arrived in Finland unable to read or write in their native languages). I had these kinds of clients in my previous life, people who honestly didn't know that you should dress nicely for a job interview. Well, how could they know, if nobody in their social circles had ever been to one? Sometimes, what appears to be stupidity is merely a lack of life experience. Without having seen a formal dinner table, you'd never know that the knives go on the right, and so on.

However, the teachers have all talked about this work placement as being a time to practice speaking Finnish. Sadly most of us, at around level B1, are not at the level required to understand ordinary conversation from a Finn.

I'm doing mine at the local library. I quite like it - the people are pleasant enough and the work is not stressful. In the first few days I spent most of the time on my feet. I swear, I have not known such foot-agony in my life. Even back in the days of a checkout operator when I was standing up for 8 hours. But the biggest frustration is the language. I have now lost my chance to practice each day at the lunch table with my friends (the library staff carefully stagger their lunchtimes to be alone, so I just sit and read as I eat). The main supervisor is very nice, but I understand almost nothing that she says. She will repeat it when I'm confused, but it still isn't any easier for my beginner ears. Then, she'll just pantomime it or switch to English.

The big boss is very patient with me and dumbs it down so I understand, but she's got other libraries to run as well, and I'm lucky if I see her for ten minutes a day. The other staff mostly just switch to English, or begin in English. I also spend long hours of the day doing tasks by myself.

None of it is the fault of the library staff. Really, they have been very kind and appreciative of me. They've even offered me things for free - like, food - why there's so much in the library kitchen I don't understand, but there always is - and any of the books for sale, I can take home for free. It's not their job to improve my Finnish. I'm just really frustrated and worried that I'm going backwards. Worse, even if I don't go backwards, I will be sliding down the class as all the others improve.

I had coffee with my classmates on Thursday (it was WONDERFUL!) and two of them have noticeably more fluent Finnish already, after just 6 days in the placement. One has hit the jackpot, with two co-workers whose entire working lives now seem to revolve around their new helper. A second one's boss has thoughtfully forbidden anyone from using English or Russian with her, ensuring that she gets plenty of practice in nothing but Finnish for at least half her work day.

But I'm not alone. One guy is chopping vegetables all day. His Finnish knowledge is excellent, but he says he's completely unable to talk as he works. Another student (also excellent Finnish) has unwittingly discovered that her boss cherishes her other language skills, and she has found herself speaking Russian all day with tourists.

I suppose on the balance of things I have it ok. It is merely marking time; we all know that in about 6 weeks' time we will be forcibly ejected back into the world of unemployment, equal to Finns in the eyes of the law, but with a myriad comparative disadvantages, meaning we'll never get selected from a pool of applicants, unless we somehow find the position which only a foreigner can fill. We (mostly) haven't got enough Finnish to even function in a conversation with the local shopkeeper. The Finns, meanwhile, pretty much all have the English skills that some jobs require. And yet we can't study to improve our Finnish. Those magical skill numbers declare that we're finished. If we want that, we're kicked off unemployment and told to go apply for student benefit - which will be rejected (there is no provision for an adult wanting to study at anything less than degree level). No, we can't even go to a course that's ONE night per week, ONE hour per week.

Where's the logic? They say they need immigrants - particularly skilled ones - but let's imagine I were a trained nurse. How many of us would still bother to stay, after being here almost four years and still can't get work thanks to the language? Even the ones who WANT to stay, aren't allowed to study Finnish in order to get there. Net result: we nurses take our (educated, skilled, Finnish) partners and children and we leave Finland. Net result, Finland just lost four potential taxpayers.

The only recourse for me is to choose between three difficult roads. Illegal study using a false name (I am not very fond of this route). Or sitting at home unemployed, looking for work and being slapped down non-stop (not fond of this one either; even the main employer of cleaners requires fluent Finnish, and supposing I got work from somewhere else, I would still be... a cleaner, not a life's ambition of mine). Or, thirdly, somehow using my own skills to become self-employed. Except I don't know what I can do. English is not a selling point for me and no advantage whatsoever, despite being not only native and fluent but able to use it to a business level. I don't have relevant qualifications (my computer skills are excellent but so are half the country's). I have, variously, made money by blogging, writing articles, selling jewellery, and completing surveys, but none of these really suit me as a full-time career.

My career is just... it's an endless cycle of wondering. It's an exercise bike. It's not goin' anywhere. I don't know what I am. Husband just tells me to continue being "awesome" but it's just more spinning wheels, in my head. I don't know...

A Plus

On the (more) plus side, it turns out that I am not the only student who wants to practice conversation and has noticed that all Finnish courses seem to be severely lacking in speaking practice.

Since we finish early on Fridays, P and I have tentative informal plans to regularly hang out at the school for a while after class and just chinwag in Finnish over a cup of tea. I am hoping to get other students involved, since I've tried to do it before at other classes but didn't have any other students with the same enthusiasm like P does. She truly grasps exactly why it's in our best interests to do it and how badly we'll stumble if it doesn't happen.

She has also noted the general assumption by schools and teachers that "all students have somewhere to practice what they learn". No, no, hell no! I did a quick poll of who has Finnish friends. Only P does, and she stated firmly that personal friends are not interested in spending precious scarce quality time together teaching her Finnish. I agree, because that's not fun for the friends, just like it's not fun for my family.

We have a golden opportunity to practice and it's with new acquaintances. There is no friendship-history in English or Russian or Chinese. There's no past bullshit in the way and no time-pressured environment. Fellow-students are still relative strangers, so there is new information to learn at a level we can understand (where you grew up, talking about your family or interests, discussing the weather, and so on). You already know where your best friend grew up... and your best friend is more interested in talking about what happened this week, which probably isn't in the Finnish 101 handbook.

I never have managed to form long friendships with other students, because mostly, they left me behind in Finnish and now have other things to occupy their time. I really hope that this time I can keep pace with others' learning and make a friend or two.

What a week

A ridiculous rollercoaster, but at least we got off the ride without vomiting.

We have a main teacher who's Russian (and great), plus a second teacher who's a native Finn, and I'm sure she must be one of the most intelligent teachers I've ever had. I say "must be" because there is no way to know for sure apart from the fact that I don't understand 99% of what she says.

Last week (and the week before) I practically lost my voice saying "slow down" and "we don't understand" and "please speak more simply". Over and over again. Alright, I didn't come close to losing my voice, but I sure said those things so many times that she should have heard me. To no avail. I know that my comprehension is poor, but in this class I'm somewhere near the top and I happened to know that another 16 people in the class didn't understand her. (Lunchtime discussions are great.)

Finally on Tuesday she began revising something that we hadn't understood the first time, didn't understand the second time, and she managed to confuse half the class and send people into panic mode over finding their own workplace practice position. (Mention "writing up your CVs" and that people have to go to work soon, and students "wtf" and "huh" quite a bit.) I turned around and loudly asked who understood. Nobody. I started simplifying it based on my memories of last year's class mentioning it. The smart guy asked me to use English because he didn't even understand the basics in Finnish.

And once he understood what she had been talking about over and over that day, he exploded. "Half an hour! Half an hour we have been discussing this, and we don't even need it! This is high school work! We have all had jobs, we are not children, we know how to write our CVs! Why? Why? (He repeated the Finnish word for comprehensive school, which doesn't even apply to immigrants, the Finnish word for compulsory army conscription, which doesn't even apply to immigrants, and the Finnish word for being able to speak Finnish fluently, which doesn't even apply to us.) Why we need these words? How this help us learn Finnish?"

I felt sorry for the teacher, because on a personal level, I like her a lot. And she has to teach what she's told, because the government makes the rules. But she also has to teach so that we understand, and she wasn't.

She wisely put the jobsearch-talk away and gave us a pamphlet on the health benefits of milk. And then, unbelievably, she talked for an hour in such ridiculous complexity that I'm not sure anyone understood a thing. We are people still struggling to form sentences about what we did on our weekends, and faced with information on complex carbohydrates, saturated fat's effect on blood cholesterol levels and the natural food sources of the chemical Selenium, it was an exercise in futility. I'd say half the class don't even understand those things in their native languages.

At the end she tried to tell us it was good practice. I disagreed, loudly. She tried to tell me that I understood the idea and it was good to learn new words. I explained that the text was far too difficult, that if there had been 20 new words perhaps it would be ok, but 100 is too many and that on our own it would have taken four hours to look up every word in the dictionary to understand.

She kinda went quiet as classmates nodded.

The next day she turned up with a far easier exercise and spoke noticeably slower and more simply. I probably hurt her feelings, but there are only so many times that a whole classroom should be expected to endure a lesson which wastes their time, regardless of the fact we HAD to attend.

But I gave her feedback, that I had spoken with others at lunch and people could now understand her, and I thanked her for slowing down.

And then we had the third teacher today. I like her too, because she's also Russian, so she knows how to speak simply to other immigrants. At the end of the day I thanked her for being a teacher who speaks slowly so that we understand. She commented that sometimes she doesn't understand native Finn teacher herself.

So it's not just students having problems understanding native Finn teacher. Hallelujah, there is a Dog.

Weekend.

Perspective

Today I started at a new school. I was terrified and really didn't want to go. Everyone else has been there for six months and are great friends, so I'm the outsider and feeling really self-conscious and new. We play games involving remembering names (which I suck at). They get them all right. I get EVERY name wrong. For the rest of the lesson, I don't understand much of what the teacher says, so I'm also feeling really dumb by this point. At break time, I'm feeling dumb, confused, tired, lonely, self-conscious, and I also notice half of them have yummy-looking takeaway lunches, so I'm jealous, and embarrassed by my boring apple and dorky thermos of home-made coffee. So I slink off to the kitchen, pour myself a cup, then come back, and the only spot to sit is on a sofa, in the middle of the group. I sit down. Did I mention I've lost the cup from my thermos... so I have this really embarrassing plastic yellow cup instead? Anyway, they are all discussing going to buy fancy coffees from the machine. I'm wishing I could buy a latté or a double mocha or whatever fancy coffee is available. I'm sitting there blowing the steam from my cheapo coffee, trying to be invisible and feeling sorry for myself and my crappy coffee from home, hoping nobody laughs at my ridiculous smiley-face plastic cup. And then one of them announces that the coffee machine is broken. They complain. They wail. They're very unhappy at missing out on their caffiene fix.

I sit there with my awesome home-made coffee in the hilarious cup, blowing it and feeling smug and quietly grinning to myself.

PERSPECTIVE!!

Finnish Lessons: 2010

Over the Winter, my Finnish has basically frozen in time, just like the weather. I'm now in yet another beginner class. The grammar is just fine, I can read and write the lessons no problems. I can merrily parrot the answers to the teacher's written questions. Unfortunately, the moment anyone opens their mouth and speaks to me in Finnish, the babelfish in my ear turns it into perfect Swahili. It's not an exaggeration either - (well, maybe the Swahili thing is) - I'm presently on my 12th teacher and bored stupid by the course contents, but utterly unable to undertand what the teacher actually says.

The part that's REALLY sad isn't that I'm crap at oral Finnish. The part that's saddest is that when I confessed this to a classmate, she knew exactly what I meant. A bystander overheard and admitted that she, too, had done this class before and had returned because she couldn't use any of the grammar she'd been taught. Incredulous, I asked one of the guys. Same old story. People all over the place manage to grasp grammatical structures but never actually speak Finnish outside the classroom.

So an epiphany of sorts is just waiting to be seen by the powers that be. Newspapers reporters churn out article after article about how "difficult" Finnish grammar is and how Finland simply MUST spend more on teaching the grammar to the immigrants. Universities conduct studies on newcomers and find that nobody finds the Finnish courses very useful. Staff examine the course contents ad nauseum, writing new books and inventing different approaches to the same thing: imparting the grammar. And all for naught.

It isn't grammar alone we need to learn. Books can do that; why attend a class if I can study a grammar book at home? Will learning to create a perfect sentence help me, if speaking a sentence is so awkward? Isn't it better to talk "like a weird foreigner", my mumblings full of grammatical errors, but knowing enough to get my meaning across?

We need to practice speaking. PRACTICE; what a concept! Guess what, universities, hosting a conversation class is cheap - just take a copy of the Metro into class, no other preparation required. No photocopying, no exams to mark. Just have conversations about different topics. Or is that too simple?

Jam 5 immigrants into a classroom with a teacher and no pens, papers or books. Lock the door for an hour a day. They'll learn more in that 60 minutes than in the last 60 hours of homework.

FIGJAM

For those of you not conversant with super-special-awesome-abbrev., it stands for F%@k I'm Good, Just Ask Me. You know, that state of mind where you're so full of your own brilliance that you almost break your wrist trying to pat yourself on the back and grope your own arse. I get that way sometimes reading my previous blog entries. But today, there was a second sensation interwoven: mainly something like, "Damn, how the hell did I write stuffz that good?"

Sometimes I forget that I'm a published writer. Sometimes I wonder if I'm intermittently possessed by an alien space being who knows how to write - and that in the interim moments I'm replaced with a dull Australian girl from the streets of ghetto Sydney whose Task Of The Week is to learn to tie her own shoelaces.

My Finnish lessons are going well. I've almost exhausted my supply of "things I already know and am merely revising", and in some ways it's akin to being in the front of the speeding train while the brick wall looms ahead at the end of the tunnel. When I reach that point, my friends and neighbours, I'll fall rapidly from the top of the class, hurtling downwards to take my proper place in the gutter amongst the dregs of society beginner students.

At that point I suppose I shall see whether I have regained any of my childhood ability to learn stuff. I'll keep you posted.

School x2 (Warning! Rant Enclosed)

My turn for school. I have enrolled in basically the only course vacancy I could find - emphasis on "basically", because it's a basic course. This is the third time I've started from the beginning. So far I'm enjoying it. Not really learning anything new, but it is still good to shake out the rusty brain and practice the things that were trying to disappear from my neurons. I'm almost to the end now and have enrolled for the continuing course. And almost at the point where the material is new. :)

The children, on the other hand, are annoying hubby and I. Or more precisely, their schooling is much cause for concern. After a month at school they came home with their first exam papers, and to my horror, it was nothing but "write the name of the item under the picture". ARGH. An entire month and all they've been taught is the words for mouth, nose, run, jump? For Pete's sake.

I wrote a rather terse email to the teacher to advise him that the darlings know how to conjugate verbs and that perhaps they could come home with the so-called "daily homework" he had promised and which I'd yet to see even once. Fast forward one week and Aria presents her new school textbook; she's almost in tears, because she was expected to complete a certain page. On looking at the book, the work is way beyond what she understands. It was chockablock full of complex grammar and tenses, using vocabulary she couldn't even attempt to guess. Hell, it was way beyond me, and I'm supposedly way beyond her. Hubby was aghast.

I think I must have asked poor hubby four or five times: Is it too much to ask, that her TEACHER should know her level? Have a vague idea of what she can and can't do? Know, regardless of his level of English, how she is at FINNISH? You know, by doing an ASSESSMENT?

I know school is different here, but I thought that was a gimme! Teachers assess pupils, right? How can you know whether a child is moving toward a goal if you don't know where they started and whether they're progressing from one level to the next?

Today the maths exams came home. Aria scored abysmally on one of them, chiefly because the questions were all written out in words - in Finnish. I know they have to learn to do their exams in Finnish, but when nobody tells you what the words say, it's grossly unfair to merrily score them 7/24 on MATHS. There's a space on the page where I'm expected to sign my name, and return the page to the teacher. If I have to send that paper back to the school, there will be more than my signature in that space, let me tell you.

School

The kids have started it, and it's a bit of a mixed thing really. As predicted, the opinions on its merits swing wildly between "awesome" and "suX0r", if you care to ask the children. They're particularly displeased about some mornings beginning at 8am.

Overall they seem fairly ok about it all though. I can only imagine how tough it must be when you don't really know anyone and the teacher resists translating to English.

Jay complained about this loudly during the week, and then commented, "How can we ever learn Finnish if we don't understand what he says?!" Then not five seconds later he said, "Half the kids in my class all know heaps of Finnish, they 'blah-blah-blah' so fast!" I waited a moment to see if he understood how those two sentences were related, but no penny dropped. I had to explain that perhaps the teachers' idea about using exclusively Finnish might have had something to do with the fact that the other kids had learned a fair amount of Finnish in his class. Jay wasn't impressed. We shall see how much soaks into their brains over the next nine months.