Here is our VAGAB students’ summary of Theme One:

This is our second year at the school, and we love it. It’s a great school with great teachers and great classmates. It is now called Arna upper secondary school, it used to be called Arna vocational school. At our school you can attend different lines of study, such as Health and Social Care subjects, Construction, Arts, Crafts and Design and Technical and Industrial production. There also used to be Restaurant and Food programmes, but not anymore. Luckily, we have still got the kitchen and every second Wednesday we make our own food there. We study on the line that’s called Health worker.

School day starts 08.15 every day. We normally finish school at 13.00 or 15.30. At our school we have a cafeteria, where we can buy food and something to drink. You can eat hamburger, bread rolls, pizza, noodles or a normal sandwich. You can buy cola, water or orange juice! You can also buy chocolate and sweets. The cafeteria is open in every recess.

When we have P. E. we go up to a big gym that’s called Bjørnarhallen. Or we go up to the big soccer field. Our head teacher’s name is Elisabeth, and she's very nice! We have different teachers, depending on which classes we have. At our school there are about 200 pupils, we think. In Arna there are only two schools, our school and another school called Garnes VGS. A lot of our friends go to that school, so we often meet them on the school bus home! Charlotte lives so close to the school that she can walk to school, but me and Marte have to take the school bus. At our school we use the computers a lot, in almost every class.

The school is a bit old, but it’s big and the people are so nice that it doesn't matter. It doesn’t have all that many students, though. There are fewer than 200 and some 35 employees. We just love our school!

When our parents went to school compulsory school was only up to 9^th grade, we have up to 10^th grade.
Three of our parents don’t have a real education, but they have really good jobs now. Now you need education to be anything. Even to be a cleaning lady you need to have an education. That’s weird.
We think that’s the biggest change since our parents went to school.
We even had some of the same teachers in middle school as our parents. Our parents married at an earlier age. These days people like to travel and see a bit of the world before they settle down.

When our grandparents went to school the teachers were much stricter. They got punished every time they talked without raising a hand, but now we talk if we want to most of the time. We are not allowed but we don’t get punished for it.