Period: 2012–20223 min readPublished:
Match the Teacher to the Quote. One Said “Adidas!”
In spring 2022 the pupil magazine at Helsinki’s SYK school printed six things teachers say and six teachers’ names. Readers had to match them up.
Most school tests ask what you know. This one asked who you had been listening to.
In spring 2022 Oras, the pupil magazine at SYK in Helsinki, printed six remarks teachers were known for, next to six teachers’ names. Readers had to match them.
“You could sell me my own trousers!” belonged to Väinö Kuukka.
Marcus Ellonen could be identified by the considerably shorter “Adidas!”
A whole teaching career, for the purposes of this quiz, came down to a sportswear brand.
The answers were printed upside down at the bottom of the page, so a reader whose memory failed could simply turn the magazine round. Schools rarely make checking your answers this convenient.
It is a small, affectionate piece of pupil knowledge: what the adults sound like once you have spent long enough in the same rooms as them. Every family has the same quiz. Ours would be short. “Shoes!” is me. “Has anyone seen my keys?” is my husband. “I didn’t do it” is shared, by rota, between the three children, and the youngest has started saying it before anything has happened, as a precaution.
The same issue of Oras ran a longer piece by an upper-school pupil who had arrived at SYK in third grade, in 2012. Her parents had applied without asking her, and then left the final decision to her. The big concrete building made her nervous, and so did leaving her old class. She chose to go.
Parents can fill in the application, but somebody smaller has to change schools.
Ten years on, she had warm words for her teachers, especially in languages. She also had complaints: fewer music opportunities, and new upper-school pupils missing out on theatre because nobody told them it existed. She wanted her schoolmates to push for languages and the arts.
The nervous newcomer had grown into someone who asks for more. That, too, is what a school sounds like after ten years.
I tried the SYK quiz on my own children at dinner, with quotes from their teachers. They got all of them. Then the middle one set a counter-quiz with quotes from me.
They got all of those too, faster. My husband scored highest. The quote he identified first was “I am not shouting, this is my normal voice.”
It was printed, the middle one pointed out, upside down at the bottom of the page.
About this story: the scenes and dialogue are imagined or freely retold. Facts about the schools mentioned come from published sources, which our school profiles cite.