Passages

While I have been busy visiting classrooms for 7-15 year olds, I have also been curious about what comes afterwards for these students. Finnish upper secondary school has just three grades, as opposed to four grades in US high schools. As part of their options after Year 9, students can choose to take an extra year, enroll in vocational school, or apply for an upper secondary program. Here in Jyvaskyla there are four upper secondary programs.

Last week it was my turn to become educated about how teenagers in Finland celebrate milestones in their lives. Penkkari is one of those rites of passage. One Thursday in February, the oldest students (Year 12) leave school in order to study for their matriculation exams for 4-6 weeks, which are the first and only time they will take a standardized test. You can imagine the pressure! To mark the occasion of leaving school, students parade through the city center on the back of “lorries” or large trucks. Dressed in crazy costumes (and risking the freezing weather), they throw candy to bystanders and display their feelings about leaving school through signs and songs.

As I might do back home, I cheered from the street with my American friends. We were shocked to notice that no one else made noise except for the students in the trucks. Another cultural faux pas! I thought that these “rebellious” Finns were calmer than the most reserved American I had ever seen on a parade float. Another surprising insight for me into Finnish culture.

The day after this event, I attended another country-wide custom: the dances of the new oldest students (rising seniors, as we would call them). This custom is over 100 years old and is called Vanhojen tanssit, or the Dance of the Old. Students dressed in ball gowns and suits or tuxedos to perform for their upper secondary classmates, younger students, and their parents that Friday. Then that evening, students from all four schools (maybe 440 of them) gathered at a large hall to perform the dances they had practiced for months. I was excited to not only sit in on a school performance at noon that day, but I also scored a ticket to the combined dance.

A few surprises for me: they danced an American folk dance with straight faces and a formality that was a far cry from our “square dances”. They were flawless during the Finnish folk dances, the Viennese Waltz, and the Finnish tango – which bears no relation to the fiery Argentinian version, but is a serious and sad dance. After dancing the traditional dances, the class performed a specially-choreagraphed dance to modern music, and that’s when I saw their true personalities come through.

At one point, the students came to the audience to choose partners, and yes, I had an inglorious moment where I danced in front of the entire school in my snow boots. As the informal Fulbright motto goes, say yes to every invitation!

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I could only imagine how exhausted those 17 and 18 year olds were after hair appointments early in the morning and performances all day. However, like teens everywhere, they came alive at the end of it all and partied all night on an overnight cruise where they celebrated being the “olds”. Passages.