My first days: middle and high school

It was cold. It was wet. Very wet. On my first morning I wrung at least 5l of water out of my cord trousers into the sink of the washing room. I'm glad I didn't catch a cold on my bike. Helsinki's weather is stirring towards autumn storms already. Started with a drizzle, ended in a rain storm. My rain jacket meant nothing to it.

Anyways! Valimotie is located in a big office building on the second floor. (Fun fact: Finns don't have the concept of a ground floor so first floor is ground level.) I started work with another house tour (they have really cool painted murals!), got my own account in the school system and a Laptop to work with. I set up my account and then learned to cover textbooks with protection film. I proceeded to cover textbooks for Mathematics called "Pii". How ironic. I never really liked Math in my second part of education. Not my strength... Students came to pick up their new Biology books for the year. Those who didn't have a library card had to fill out a form in exchange. After side-eying the teenagers from my desk I found them to be only a bit different in behavior than the ones I know from Germany. But still overall more quiet. I could get used to that... ;)

My mentor continued to tell me how they can acquire new books for the library system: usually ordered online, sorted out books from the public libraries, bought on sight and reimbursed is all possible to them. They also get requests from teachers but usually they can choose the books freely. The budget comes from the school and "The Friends of The English School" (association).

Next was how to put Items into our inventory in the system and how to prepare the physical book. The stamp of ownership is put on the title page as well as the barcode number. The barcode is a running number, which is at 31080 now after I put the math textbooks in. My mentor started with 1 when they began working in The English School Library roughly 3 years ago. Textbooks do not get a shelf mark compared to regular library books. They are stored in a separate storage room together with the books for the reading circle and general books for lessons.

Funny enough, on my first day at Valimotie library they held the school event "European Day of Languages". We got some dates from the Iran stand. Very tasty. I got introduced to the director of the school and the principal of middle/high school and then we headed to work again.

Covering books in film is a very satisfying task in my opinion. I like the meditative simplicity of it after three days of elementary school chaos. And I really think it's great that schools in Finland have the compulsory subject "Health Education" (HE). It's supposed to promote health, well-being, and safety related competences in various areas, like aging, drugs, healthy eating and nutrition, communication, common health problems and more to reduce risky behavior. It also includes an introduction to the health care system. I would have loved to have that in Germany when I went to school.