The Principal´s Welcome

It takes a great deal to make a gymnasium. First, of course, there are the buildings, but you also need a tractor and lawn mower, scales and chemicals, soccerballs and rackets, costumes and mixers, a rubber dinghy and an outboard motor, computers and calculators, microphones and software, a baking oven and coffee cups, crayons and paints, test tubes and chalk, books and slides, tables and chairs, paper and pencil. Yet none of all this really matters unless there are students and teachers as well. Certainly students first of all!

A gymnasium with all its equipment is first and foremost a framework for young people's development for three important years of their lives. The teachers guarantee that the students will meet a wide range of professional and personal challenges, enabling them to grow. The students, on their part, must be willing to work and to attempt to do their best. There is no reason for regarding the gymnasium in a solemn manner, but it is necessary to take it seriously (cheerfully) for it to be meaningful.

Therefore it is wrong when the media sometimes present the gymnasium as one long break with 'catwalks', cokes and sweethearts. It is easy to film such situations - there are breaks, thank God - but for some reason the camera loses interest once the common areas are deserted and teaching starts.

You rarely witness situations where a discussion suddenly evolves, where a text opens itself, where, after a couple of attempts, a student gets the exact translation, or a complicated mathematical calculation elegantly falls into place. You do not watch the students growing with these challenges, gradually or by leaps and bounds. You do not watch a school gathering where on an ordinary Wednesday, Chris Minh Doky creates an atmosphere of all things being connected and taking wings.

We can become better at creating a good and up-to-date framework for this study and reflection, and we can become better at emphasizing the connections between subjects and the exploration of problems. We can also become better at organizing the challenges that enable them to grow. We are working at this improvement. But the crux will always be the same: Giving young people from our area an education that is good enough whereever they may go after the gymnasium.

Claus Jensen
Principal

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