Week 7: Art and teaching at a Dutch school

This Monday wasn’t quite exciting: in the afternoon we had the concept of education (Arendt; if you want to read more about Arendt and this subject, please read the paper I made with Gokcen), followed by Dutch culture. Ana and I had to present our topics. I talked about Orange, made in Holland and clogs (this presentation is also included in the portfolio). I missed Ana’s presentation because I had to go to my own Dutch lessons (Verzorgd Nederlands and Creatief Schrijven).
To talk and learn about my three subjects was interesting. I never thought about the question why the Dutch people use orange as a sort of national colour. Now I know why (thanks to William of Orange).

On Tuesday I was to teach a lesson at a Dutch school. You can imagine I was a bit nervous. Not that I don’t have any experience teaching, but, as I already observed through my visits at some schools, I dare to state that Dutch pupils are a bit more “extraverted” than Belgian pupils.
This lesson was to be taught at the Juliana department of the Calvijn school.
First I got a tour by Janneke Verloop (one of our coordinators of the international class) because she used to work there. Then I followed a lesson of ‘Mens en cultuur’. The teacher and the pupils were doing an exercise on how to analyse a picture (in the exercise it was a picture of U2). The pupils had to follow seven steps which were all thoroughly explained in their books. To be honest, this exercise didn’t really work out because the teacher was solving the exercise on its own, with hardly any help or response from the pupils.
After this period, I followed the pupils to their next lesson, drama. The teacher just got back from pregnancy leave so she treated us to some chocolate éclairs and showed us pictures of her baby girl. After this very nice introduction she wanted the pupils to think about words they linked with ‘fairy tales’. A whole lot of words appeared on the blackboard (written by two pupils who could be ‘teacher’) and one of the word combinations was ‘Little Red Ridinghood’.
This fairy tale was to fill the rest of the period’s time. The teacher adapted the story to these modern days and with the help of some pupils, she acted out the entire story (the adapted version). I think this was a very nice way to work during a drama lesson. The pupils have a nice brainstorm as introduction, they can think a lot for themselves and they have to use their creativity.

After this lesson I joined in on a few lesson periods in the technology classroom. First the teacher did an experiment with water, fire and a piece of paper (something you shouldn’t try at home), afterwards the pupils worked on their assignments (something to put their mobile phones in).
During this lesson it was hard for me to concentrate because a) I hardly know anything about technical things and b) the next period I was to give a lesson on my own!

Finally, the moment had arrived: I was to teach a class of 27 15-year old Dutch pupils (VMBO, similar to BSO in Belgium) of whom only 5 or 6 had a Dutch origin.
I started my lesson by letting the pupils rise from their chairs. I said good afternoon to them and they repeated it to me. Then they could sit down again.
I asked why I made them to such a thing. The answer (in short) was: “Because you are from Belgium and they have more discipline over there.”
We talked a bit about the differences in disciplinarian matters between the two countries. From these differences we started talking about language differences.
In the Netherlands, people think that because we still use ‘gij, ge and u’, we are very polite people, although in Belgium ge and gij are most of the time considered to be used in dialect.
To point out big differences between the language variations, I let the pupils listen to a song by Flip Kowlier. He’s even hard to understand when you’re from Belgium. The pupils had to write down words they thought they could ‘translate’ (the English ones didn’t count of course). Not a lot of words came up that moment but I gave them the lyrics and the translation as well and then it was much easier for them to look for differences.
After discussing the lyrics, we thought of some ‘Flemish’ words that were known to the pupils but without the pupils knowing what they meant. Things like ‘allee, amaai’ are known in the Netherlands thanks to programs as ‘De Pfaffs’, ‘Spoed’ and ‘Flikken’ being broadcasted on television.
Now it was the pupils’ turn to learn me something. First I asked them to teach me some typical things from Rotterdam. Unfortunately we had to leave that path relatively early because the pupils didn’t really know a lot of typical Rotterdam words. Words they did know were things they use ‘on the streets’. We decided that they could give me a list of words from the street language they use in every day life. Nice to remember here is that they are aware were that street language comes from. Because Rotterdam is such a multi-cultural city, they take over words from the different languages such as Turkish, Moroccan, Surinamese and Cape Verdean.
After this lesson I was very happy that everything worked out just fine. The pupils thought it was a nice lesson and so did I , everybody happy.
It was a true challenge for me to teach these pupils. You hear a lot of things but I always manage to clear my head and make sure my pupils have a fair go.
That’s really important to me. Ever since I started teaching during practices I kept in mind some things that you heard about the pupils (because you can’t ignore everything) but the pupils always started with a clean sheet in my lessons. I think it demotivates pupils when they know the teacher has ‘branded’ them, even before they’ve entered the classroom.

Wednesday promised to be equally exciting as Tuesday, although I wasn’t going to teach another lesson. This day Mrs. Jildou Zandstra was taking us out to discover the creative corners of the city.
We started nicely with a mug of hot chocolate in front of my face at café/hotel Bazar (Witte de Withstraat). Bazar is a very special café as you can find all sorts of food there, menus in Turkish and Spanish (and other languages) and each member of the staff has another nationality.
Because the Spanish and Turkish ordered something typical for their countries, I decided to take hot chocolate and a piece of chocolate cake, as it was the only thing on the menu that made think of my country. After eating and drinking that amount of chocolate I joined Jildou and the Spanish people to go to the Witte de With museum. In this museum there was an exhibition with video art.
I’m not really fond of video art to be honest. I’d rather see paintings and sketches because then I have the ability to look at every singular detail and to think about it at my own pace. The 3 films that were projected were all interesting, although I had to watch them twice before I could grasp what the artist wanted to tell us, spectators.
After this experience we went back to Bazar to fetch the Turkish people and go to the rehearsals of one of the best dancing companies of Europe, the Scapino ballet of Rotterdam. We saw a bit of a lesson of classical dance. I didn’t know professional dancers still had lessons. They did this because they had to stay focussed and perhaps they could get nice ideas out of it.
After this fragment of a lesson, we got a tour by one of the dancers, a Dutch lady who has been with Scapino for quite a long time. It really startled me that there was a lot more to dancing companies than just the dancers: there was a fashion atelier where the costumes were made (by two very nice women), there were people taking care of technical things such as lighting and sound, managers, (very important) art directors, etc. It was nice to hear that the dancers did know that they lived under a very strict regime but they thought it was worth it because they turned their hobby into their profession. The last stop of the tour was the cafeteria where we got have a glass of water, coffee or tea and eat our sandwiches.
When we were done with eating we went back to the dancing hall where rehearsals and corrections for the show of that evening were going on.
Corrections are things from the last show (the day before) that had to be better the next show (so the evening of this Wednesday). After only 30 minutes of witnessing this we had to go because we had an appointment at the other side of the city with three very interesting visual artists.

At the other end of the city there is a huge industrial building standing, very close to the Randstadrail (which connects Rotterdam with Zoetermeer and The Hague). This industrial building houses a few enormous ateliers, three of them always in use, the rest of them part time in use.
The three visual artists I mentioned earlier on, use the three ateliers which are always in use. Once in a while they invite artists from all around the world to come and work there. After one of those foreign artists finishes what he/she was working on, they have an exhibition.
When we entered we could get a cup of coffee or tea (very remarkable, everywhere you go in this country, people offer you coffee or tea), after this cup we went to visit the three ateliers.
First I visited the atelier of a sculptor who worked with wood. He explained to us the concept of these ateliers and where he got his inspiration from, the two things we really wanted to know). He showed us some of his best work (others too, it was all very nice) and then he guided us to the next artist.
She was a female painter who had a very organized atelier. Everywhere around there were paintings made by her and it was all about colours and stripes. Now she also works with a lot of other shapes.
Our last stop was at a draughtsman’s atelier. He worked with all the material I liked to work with when I was still at the art academy: charcoal and pencils.
He had drawings of flowers and trees and he got his inspiration from a whole range of different things (as he travelled a lot, he found a lot of inspiration abroad).
After this we went to have another cup of coffee (which I didn’t drink because I had enough coffee to drink) and we said our goodbyes to the artists.
We were leaving them to get to Zoetermeer on time where we were going to see the Scapino ballet perform their show ‘For the Joyce’.
We hopped on a Randstadrailtrain and got off at Zoetermeer where we first had something to drink or eat in a so-called English pub where the only thing English was the language in which we communicate.
We left the pub in time so we wouldn’t be late for the ballet. The show started with a piece called ‘The Green’. In this dance only men perform on a fake-grass foundation. This dance was really powerful and alive, the energy really vibrated through the theatre.
After this we witnessed a very special thing, a solo dance called ‘Äffi’, performed by Tadayoshi Kokeguchi and developed by Goecke. This dance really took my breath away. It was tragic but funny, grotesque but intimate, it had got everything. The thing I remember most was that the dancer’s face hardly showed any emotions but that it was all about the way in which the body moved.
Then we got a few minutes to regain our energy after this dance that wasn’t only exhausting for the dancer himself but also for the audience to keep up with him, physically but especially mentally.
After the short break it was up to the ladies to dazzles us in a dance called ‘De Bruiden’. These brides weren’t really up to the marriage thing and being tied up to someone so the dance was also very lively and full of emotions.
The last dance of the evening was called ‘Der Rest ist Schweigen’. I read somewhere that this was a controversial piece so I paid attention to things I would find quite extraordinary. Some musical and less musical sound fragments, the way in which the dancers moved sometimes and little shouts of them were all things that were out of the ordinary. I have to be honest: I thought it was all quite funny.
This evening was really heavy and tiresome so I was glad that I could put my head down to sleep at 12 o’clock.

Especially because the next morning I had to think about parents’ participation.
I think that parents’ participation is essential for the development of the child and for the development of the school as being part of society. My opinion on parents’ participation can be read in my reflection paper on this subject, also included in this portfolio.
In this lesson we talked about the next statements:
• Why are parents important to the school?
• Give a definition of parental involvement and parental participation.
• What can the school do to stimulate the participation and the involvement of parents in the school in your own country?
Especially this last question interested be because it’s clear to me that parental involvement is a necessity for the child’s development but it’s not clear to me why there aren’t a lot of parents who are involved in the school.
Most of the parents care about their children’s grades and perhaps help them with their homework. But what’s going on at the school, or helping the school, are other things. How do we have to convince parents that it’s not only helping the school but also themselves and their children to participate in school life? To be honest, at the end of the lesson I still didn’t have the perfect answer to this question. A lot of parents don’t have enough time to participate in school life, that’s the biggest problem. To change this, we should change the way in which society thinks: it’s not all about work. I reckon this is very difficult and this can’t be solved in a day, it will take years.

In the afternoon we were supposed to meet Mrs. Tonkens but due to an example of bad communication we missed out on her and she missed out on us so I went home to fetch my bag to get to Amsterdam where I would be joining my fellow-students and Mrs. De Pauw from Belgium.

Once I arrived in the capital city of the Netherlands it took me 1 hour to get to the hotel which was only 10 minutes away from the Central Station. Yes, I got lost. It turned out I missed my fellow-students at the Anne Frank House so I went to the Vincent van Gogh museum to wait for them over there.
As soon as they arrived we entered the museum. I was really anxious about this museum because van Gogh is according to me one of the greatest painters ever. One of his paintings made me decide to go to the art academy, not to become as great as he was but to be able to understand things he and his colleagues did.
Inside the museum we saw a lot of van Gogh’s most important paintings, such as ‘The Potato Eaters’ and a version of the ‘Sunflowers’. The thick layers of oil paint were very clear to the bare eye and you could almost touched them (although that was forbidden of course).
When we saw every sketch and painting we went downstairs where I discovered that the painting of the Dead Ophelia by John Everett Milais could be seen at the museum at that instant. Unfortunately, most of my fellow-students much rather got back into the rain to go and eat something and return to the hotel. Maybe some other time I will have the change to see this famous painting.

After a short walk we found a cosy and funny little restaurant where everybody ordered croques instead of me, who ordered a pancake with bacon. It’s one of my convictions that when you’re abroad you should try the country’s specialities, especially when they’re as tasty as pancakes with bacon. When we finished our meals and desserts, we went to the hotel. Jens, who turned out to be a perfect boy scout, got us there save and sound using a map that was literally falling to pieces.
Back at the hotel Eline, Jens and I decided that when you’re in Amsterdam you couldn’t go to bed before midnight so we went to have a drink.

Next morning, after a deserved night of rest, we got up early because we had a meeting with a guide who was going to tell us all about this city.
The guide turned out to be a very pleasant young man who could really capture whilst telling stories of the city’s history. The last stop was the Anne Frank House where we said our goodbyes and thanked him for the interesting guided tour. As quick as we could we got into a café where we ordered some hot drinks to get our bodies up and running again because it was like they didn’t really want to go along anymore. When we felt we were warm enough again we left the café and went back to the hotel to get our bags and leave for Rotterdam.

In that other big Dutch city I was to be the guide, not a pleasant young man (but a pleasant young woman!). I prepared a tour of approximately 2,5 hours throughout the entire city with lots of sightseeing and opportunities to take nice pictures and to hide from the rain. The tour went from the Central Station to the Lijnbaan, to Blaak (kubushuisjes), along the water to the Erasmus bridge and then in the direction of Museumpark. At this last point we had a choice to make: or we were going to take the tram to the station and the train back home or we were going to visit the beautiful Boijmans-van Beuningen museum. I said that if there was a tram coming right now, they could take it and otherwise we would go to the museum. Just as I said my last word a tram arrived and suddenly 3 of my fellow-students rushed off, yelling “Bye!” and into the tram. Mrs. De Pauw and the 2 other fellow-students were standing there rather dazzled and said their goodbyes properly and thanked me for the nice tour (you’re welcome!).
I waved them goodbye and took a tram back home.