Dear first year students =)

When I’m writing this I have only a few weeks left here at Sandvika. Then I’m off to work in the Norwegian pavilion in Epcot in Disney World Florida for a year =)

I’m sure you will get three great years here at Sandvika, but there are a few things you should keep in mind when you go a school where you have so many possibilities. Because (to sound like all boring adults) with possibilities comes responsibility.

Here at Sandvika you are using your computer in every class, and most of the time Facebook and MSN will be available for the students to use. Most students here love this and spend a lot of their time during a school day on Facebook. I’m not saying that you should stay away from MSN and Facebook because I didn’t either, but you should try not to let all the interesting web pages steal too much of your attention. It’s not fun if you have to stay home and study like crazy before a test, if you could have learned the same stuff by just paying a little more attention in class. If you make sure to take some good notes during class, it will save you a lot of time when you are doing your homework or studying for a test.

When that is said, I’m sure you will manage to balance the temptations and the school work. What I have experienced during my three years at Sandvika is that most people here treat each other really nice and with respect even if they have different opinions. Please make an effort to keep it that way. =)

Migrant workers

We just read an excerpt from a novel written by Marina Lewycka called Two caravans. It is about different immigrants were the two first are spending a day in London and the second person is trying to get a job at a farm. The two first people in the story are Andriy and Irina from the Ukraine. They are visiting London for the first time and are overwhelmed by all the different sights. They talk about all the new technology and all the well dressed people and they feel like they don't fit in at all. 

The second person in the text is Tomasz who is looking for a new job in England. He finds a job at a farm where he has to catch birds and scrub out the barn. The employer he has to work for has no respect for migrant workers, he's only interested in the foreigners because he doesn't have to pay them as much as the locals. 

The main subject in this excerpt is that migrant workers often work black with lower than minimum wages and no safety or rights. Is this really fair? Shouldn't we be thankful for having some people there who wants to do our dirty jobs for low wages? Therefore we should give them enough respect to at least give them minimum wage as long as they follow the rules and do a good job.

OneNote

All the students at my school are using computers when they are in class, but also for their homework. That is great because it makes everything a lot easier to organize. But when you have to open one file for every note or paper you are working on, you sometimes have your whole taskbar filled with Word-documents. Which can be a total chaos.  But now Microsoft has come up with a solution to this problem. With the program OneNote, you can open, edit and organize all your documents in one window. It's easy to copy web pages over to OneNote and you can record sound and video while you are typing notes.  Because I still don't know all there is to know about this program, I'll write more about it later when I have some more knowledge about how to use OneNote.

This is England

Last day of English before winter break we watched a weird movie called "This is England". It is about a troubled 12 year old boy growing up in England. The story is set in 1983. Young Shaun comes across five skinheads on his way home, after he has been in a fight at school. These skinheads become Shauns new best friends even though they are some years older than him. Shauns dad was killed in the Falklands War and he is living with his mum. He dos not have many friends until he meets Woody and the rest of his gang. They're having a lot of fun, but when the older, overly racist Combo returns home after spending some time in prison, things changes. Now Shaun gets drawn into much more serious and uncomfortable territory.

 

Senior Project

For my senior project this last semester, I am going to take a closer look at The War on Terror.

 

I will try to find out as much as possible about what the US is planning to do in Iraq and why?

 

I am also planning to compare what Obama said he was going to do about the situation in Iraq, to what he is actually doing and saying now. Hopefully I will be able to find out a lot about the whole situation, and use different sources to cover the situation from different "sides".

 

The Falkland War

The Falkland War was fought between United Kingdom and Argentina. It started on April 2nd 1982 when Argentina invaded and occupied the Falkland Islands and South Georgia, and it lasted until Argentina surrendered on June 14th 1982. Non of the two states officially declared war and most of the fighting took place on the territories under dispute and the South Atlantic. Argentina considered the invasion as an re-occupation of their own territory, but the UK saw it as an invasion of a British oversea territory.
Argentina was in the midst of a devastating economic crisis and large-scale civil unrest against the military junta that had been governing the country since 1976.

The Royal Navy expected that the British media should report the news from the war in a positive way. But most of the British media covered the events in a neutral way. In stead of calling the soldiers "Our lads", reporters just referred to them as "the British troops". It was clear that many people in Britain were against the war. Some British reporters who were sent to Argentina to cover the conflict from "the other side" were kept imprisoned until the war was over. In Argentina the media reported the events in a less neutral way. They referred to their force as "heroes" and they were "cheering" for their soldiers.

When the war ended I mid-June 1982, the UK had lost around 250 men and almost 800 were wounded. Argentina had lost around 650 and over a thousand were wounded. After the war, Britain increased their military presence on the islands, and increased the military garrison.

My hometown

I live just outside Oslo at a place called Kolsås which is in Bærum. If you google "Kolsås" you wouldn't find many interesting photos. That is simply because Kolsås is not a very interesting place. But that isn't a big problem. I only have to travel 30 minutes by bus to get to Oslo, or just 10 minutes by bus to get to Sandvika where my school is. In Sadvika, just about 400 meters from my school, you'll find Scandinavia largest shopping mall. Which probably isn't too large compared to the malls you can find in America. But you would still find everything you need there.



Behind my house lies a little mountain called Kolsåstoppen. It's a nice place to go hiking because when you reach the southern top, you have a great view over Bærum. That point is only 340 meters above sea level, but it's still a popular mountain for local climbers.


For people who are just driving through, Kolsås looks like some boring place out on the countryside. And maybe it is. But it's so close to "everything" so it doesn't really matter.

Into the Wild

My whole class have just read "Into the Wild" by Jon Krakauer, or at least they say they have. I bought the book, and I have to admit, I wasn't too enthusiastic about it. Too me, the story about a boy who wanders alone into Alaska, sounds a little like the Norwegian adventurer Lars Monsen, and more like something my father would have read. But my friend Kirsti sent me the book as sound-files. That way I could listen to it on the bus and other noisy places where it can be difficult to concentrate on reading.

The book is a non-fiction best-seller from 1996 about the young man Christopher McCandless. After graduating from Emory University in 1990, McCandless gave away all his savings to charity, changed his name to Alexander Supertramp, ended all communication with his family and began to travel around in North America. His journey ended in the Alaskan wilderness, where he starved to death after eating the poisonous seeds from the wild potato plant. He survived alone in the wilderness for approximately 112 days.
One of the reasons why I was negative about reading the book in the first place, was because I thought it would just be one long summary about everything McCandless did. But as I kept on listening to the book I started to enjoy it more and more. It was really fascinating to hear about all the people McCandless had met while he travelled around North America, and how they all had fell so in love with the young man, even though some of them had only talked with him for a short while.

Now that I've "read" the whole book, I feel that I want to know more. Not because the book wasn't good, but because I like it, and was really fascinated by the whole story about McCandless. He strikes me as one of those special people which you don't run into too often. A person I would like to learn more about. The book opens for different discussions and I would recommend other to read it as well.