Posted on 04/09/2010 5:31:50 PM PDT by Justaham
Last year more than 100 foreign delegations and governments visited Helsinki, hoping to learn the secret of their schools' success.
In 2006, Finland's pupils scored the highest average results in science and reading in the whole of the developed world. In the OECD's exams for 15 year-olds, known as PISA, they also came second in maths, beaten only by teenagers in South Korea.
This isn't a one-off: in previous PISA tests Finland also came out top.
The Finnish philosophy with education is that everyone has something to contribute and those who struggle in certain subjects should not be left behind.
A tactic used in virtually every lesson is the provision of an additional teacher who helps those who struggle in a particular subject. But the pupils are all kept in the same classroom, regardless of their ability in that particular subject.
Finland's Education Minister, Henna Virkkunen is proud of her country's record but her next goal is to target the brightest pupils.
''The Finnish system supports very much those pupils who have learning difficulties but we have to pay more attention also to those pupils who are very talented. Now we have started a pilot project about how to support those pupils who are very gifted in certain areas.''
(Excerpt) Read more at news.bbc.co.uk ...
Yeah it was a riot. Kimi goes to turn it off and you can see the guy get scared.
Kimi was totally respectful when speaking with the guy. The test ride was great. The interviewer was pretty scared and he is a Finn used to fast driving.
I loved the part where he asks Kimi about the German guy with the lap record at that Ferrari test track (Schmacher). Kimi said yeah if it was dry we could try to beat it.
Finn 93.4%, Swede 5.6%, Russian 0.5%, Estonian 0.3%, Roma (Gypsy) 0.1%, Sami 0.1% (2006)
The US has 309 million people vice 303 million. We have added 28 million since 2000 or over 5 times the size of Finland.
Yes, that’s true. I can barely pronounce some of the rally car drivers’ names (a lot of Finns amongst the race car world). Like Estonian and Hungarian, Finnish is a Uralic language according to Asta, my friend’s wife. Most European languages are considered Indo-European.
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