Read time: approximately 15 minutes

This week

• Sunday, 22 March traveled to Vadsø, Norway, via three planes and the milk route (basically when the plane becomes a bus), each of which got progressively smaller as we got closer to our destination. Vadsø is as far east as Istanbul! To its south-southeast is Russia!
• Monday, 23 March taught two writing workshops at Vadsø Videregående Skole. Went for a ride with the host teacher to the island of Ekkerøy where we took a post-teaching Arctic beach walk.
• Tuesday, 24 March taught three writing workshops at Vadsø Videregående Skole. Went for an afternoon hike to the luftskipmast, where a blimp was docked in 1926 that eventually made its way to the North Pole. A teacher took me out to chase Northern Lights, which we saw. And we heard whales breaching.
• Wednesday, 25 March taught an Art Remix workshop, a writing workshop, and the teacher version of the writing workshop. 
• Thursday, 26 March taught a Systems of Oppression workshop and writing workshop. The teachers gifted me a new book! The Witches of Vardø, which I have started and am so excited to read. Went to the Vadsø Museum. Around sunset a few teachers took me to sauna, in a new one that just opened in December. It was a beautiful sauna, very Scandi in design. We swam in the freezing and refreshing water! Inside our sauna an entire wall was a window which offered a majestic view of the luftskipmast.
• Friday, 27 March flew home via two planes with an extended layover in Tromsø. 

I have heard a lot about Norway’s northernmost county, Finnmark, where I taught at Vadsø Videregående Skole (VGS) this week. My introduction to Finnmark was in our Fulbright Orientation, where an Arctic geopolitical scholar showed us maps that disoriented me because they centered the North Pole and told us about Norway’s shared border with Russia. Norway shares a border with Russia?! 

In the fall, some Rover colleagues and I got a tour of the Norwegian Maritime Museum and the Norwegian Folk Museum, where at the latter we saw model homes from each region of Norway. Because much of Finnmark had been scorched between 1944-1945 when the Germans burned it on their way out of town (Norway was occupied by Nazis from 1941-1945), the Norwegian government sent what I understood as Sears homes, so that the people of Finnmark could rebuild. The model Finnmark home contained a sauna, and it helped me understand how important sauna is to Norwegians.

Around the same time in the fall I was reading with my ears The Mercies, which is one of my favorite books of 2025 (recommended by my favorite Norwegian book recommendation site). I have always kind of been interested in witch hunts and this one offers a portrait of women as more than simply charged with and executed for witchcraft. Because I was reading with my ears, I also learned the pronunciation of towns like Kirkenes, Vadsø, and Vardø [I couldn’t find a good one—listen to The Mercies!]. 

When I have met people who have lived in North Norway, they speak about it with such affection. This, about a region of Norway that gets no sunlight for about two months and then gets the midnight sun also for about two months. The weather is also extreme, with winter lasting until the midnight sun makes an appearance. In the US’ northeast, I have found many people to be standoffish and short (not by height; like curt and clipped in their speech), and have always associated this attitude with the cold. What would people be like, I wondered, if they spent most of the year in the cold? 

So I’ve been thinking about North Norway for a minute! A friend of mine, who works with me in the Center and who used to work at Vadsø VGS, showed her former colleague my Fulbright page and we went from there! To be honest, I was excited, but hella intimidated. I was intimidated about the journey (just looking at how to get there made me tired), and the location (would I be able to withstand the cold), and the week (it was a lot of workshops to do in four days). What if the students were mean? What if the teachers were cold? What if I was stuck in North Norway teaching 10 workshops over 4 days and absolutely miserable? 

It wasn’t like that at all. It was a magnificent week, and I would say it was one of my top Rover experiences in Norway.

The first part that made this visit amazing was the teaching and the welcome I received from the students, teachers, and even the school chef. My Writing Workshop hasn’t been requested at all, but Vadsø VGS requested it 7 times for students and once for teachers. I love teaching writing, and teaching teachers how to teach writing, so I set up my lessons! Being so deep into Roving, I was able to understand how I could design a lesson that could be bound by the time we had and hit on keys of learning how to write: how we make writing choices through considerations of the rhetorical situation (speaker, audience, subject, context).

We began the workshop by writing about what we would recommend, to whom, and why. We shared some ideas, then I gave them some notes on the rhetorical situation and how we make writing decisions while considering the elements of the rhetorical situation. Then we examined a mentor text: a letter of recommendation from The New York Times. Each student selected one element of the rhetorical situation to read for, and we brought it together in notes. That’s all we had time for, but I explained the rest of the lesson to the teachers and left the additional mentor texts I had brought to scaffold students’ independent work of using considerations of a rhetorical situation and a mentor text to write. 

The workshop felt good and students’ exit tickets showed that they were learning! Many had not before considered writing with a rhetorical situation in mind and they found that breaking down their writing decisions in this way was a useful writing heuristic. They also noted that the rhetorical situation helps them understand the kinds of details to include, and helps them focus on what to read for. And they noted that when writing about something that was interesting to them it helped them write. And many said it was a really fun lesson and that I am a good teacher. They were very sweet. Teachers said that this was a way to offer instructions to help students structure their writing without being prescriptive, and that they were excited to do the activity the students did so that they could better understand the assignment, its affordances, and constraints. It was also really great that a portion of the teachers who came to the professional learning session for the writing workshop had been in the class where I taught writing to their students. The teacher version of the workshop offered the behind-the-scenes look into how and why I designed the writing workshop the way that I did. 

For the two additional workshops teachers requested, the Art Remix and the Systems of Oppression, these are two of my most requested workshops, so I had that sequencing pretty much down. But I have still been making small adjustments, including flipping the order of art in the Art Remix workshop and using Rockwell’s The Problem We All Live With to facilitate scaffolding into how systems of oppression persist. The students did a great job with the materials, even though it is dense and heavy.

Because I get to work with such a range of learners, the youngest I’ve worked with being 4th graders and the oldest being secondary teachers and teacher educators, I am often asked which is my favorite group to teach. Funny enough, I don’t ask myself that question anymore nor have a favorite group because for me, it’s become about figuring out how to help each group of learners learn. That may sound super cheesy, but it’s true, and it’s a lot of the reason why I became a teacher educator in the first place. My interest is in how learners learn and how I can scaffold a lesson to get them there. So although I facilitated the writing workshop 7 times this week and had the same learning goals for each workshop, each iteration was kind of different in how I asked questions, how long I spent on each activity, even what I said in my introductory bits to help students get to know who I am (for example, with the students in the sports vocational program, I talked more about my coaching experience and athletic pursuits). For me, what’s become my favorite in teaching is figuring out how to best teach every kind of student to maximize their learning.

Before I stop talking about teaching this week, I have to tell you about the canteen chef. When eating food at school or conference functions, I tell organizers that I’m a vegetarian. I don’t really like to eat meat that I or another trusted person hasn’t cooked, because it’s often underseasoned and/or overcooked. And I need to eat so that I can teach! Because this week I was going north, to the land of cod (torsk in Norwegian), when the host teacher asked about my food accommodations because they were going to feed me lunch each day (this is so nice not every school offers this) I told her I am pescatarian. So the school chef made me a special lunch every day if there wasn’t a vegetarian or fish option on the menu. I had a traditional cod dish with sauce, carrots, and rice; a fried cod burrito with jalapeños (Norwegians don’t really eat spicy foods so this was a welcome addition); pasta and fried garlic and cod (the garlic and fish in this dish were super salty, but the pasta was yum); and a focaccia with Norwegian cream cheese (less dense than US cream cheese) and laks topped with arugula salad, balsamic vinegar, and freshly ground pepper. This guy knows how to cook! The teachers were saying that he’s really great and loves making different things for students and teachers. I was impressed with all the flavors I got to eat this week! 

There was also a Thai restaurant around the corner from my hotel so one night I went there for take-out. I may have written about this before, but always a joy to hear and speak Thai. Same questions from the Thai people that I usually get on why I speak Thai and are my parents full Thai (I don’t have the kind of Thai face that people expect), but it was okay. For me, Thai is home, so it was good to be able to practice. And eat Thai food. 

Speaking of food, I haven’t really missed the food back in the US except for this week. The students often ask me questions about the food in the US, wondering about what our fast food tastes like and specifically what I think about Raising Cane’s. Funny enough, this week I got a Nextdoor message that they’re building a Raising Cane’s in Loveland. Anyway, this week I was also reading Few Blue Skies (recommend!) and they were talking about all this Mexican food and all I wanted to do was to eat a taco. To eat refried beans. To eat a tamale. I kind of understand the draw that the students have to asking about and wanting to taste these foods they see on their socials. 

Besides the teaching, it was fun to do so many after school activities to explore the region! I went for a ride with the host teacher to the island of Ekkerøy where we took a post-teaching Arctic beach walk. We saw reindeer and the teacher told me about how climate change is affecting their access to food. I went for an afternoon hike to the luftskipmast, where a blimp was docked in 1926 that eventually made its way to the North Pole. I mean, this is Roald Amundsen’s (a Norwegian) expedition to the North Pole we’re talking about here! The town is celebrating the voyage’s 100th anniversary this May. 

Having not seen very many northern lights (nordlys in Norwegian) because I live so far south and don’t get to travel out of it all that often, a teacher took me out to chase nordlys. We had to get away from the city lights, so we drove a few kilometers east. When we got to what she said was a good spot, we got out of her car into the night, which was so quiet. We started walking and you could hear just our footsteps on the concrete dock, crunching small rocks and remnants of ice. The ocean lapped on one side while a salmon river lapped on the other. Even though there is no relationship between whether or not nordlys show up and your volume, it felt like we had to quiet even our breathing in the cold and dark night air, as thin as the air in Colorado. Our patience paid off and we saw nordlys. Faint, but there, dancing in the sky. While our faces were upturned I thought I heard whales breaching. I asked the teacher. We listened some more. Yes, she said, her eyes sparkling off the low moon light, those are whales. What a delight for the senses this chase was.

I also got to visit the Vadsø Museum, which is a museum to learn about the Kven peoples, or those with Finnish heritage. It was a small museum, but highly interactive with images and text about their lives and culture. 

And finally, when I arrived in Finnmark the host teacher said, this might sound like a strange question, but did you bring your bathing suit? I chuckled. Of course I had brought my bathing suit. There’s a sauna, right, I only half joked. Yup, she said. Let’s sauna this week. So on the last day of teaching, some teachers took me to a new sauna that had just opened in December. It was the most beautiful sauna I have been to so far in Norway. It was at the end of a long strip of land and was across the water from the airmast that anchored the blimp that expeditioned to the North Pole. When we entered the sauna, my breath was taken away because of the amazing view: one wall of the sauna was a window that looked out on the water to the island with the ship’s mast. After some time opening our pores and sweating, we got into the water. There was no jumping option because of the rocks, but there was a staircase. After the first freezing cold dip, I told myself that I would dunk my head on the next one and to try to stay in longer every time. It was so cold. But also so crisp and fresh and refreshing. And then came that feeling of being extremely cold when you reenter the sauna and your body is not just trying to get warm, but is warming up because of the sauna. It’s like you’re cold and hot at the same time. It’s one of the best feelings in the world. 

The teachers all told me this week how much they loved living in the North. It’s quiet. It’s small. People are always looking out for each other. They know all the students. I get the draw. When I landed back in Oslo, or even in the airport in Tromsø, I felt like there were too many people and not enough fresh air. Being in the North helped me understand more about Norway, its people, and the variety of the ways of life that exist here. It reminded me about one of the goals of Fulbright: to turn nations into people. The US is now moving from its 4th to 5th week bombing Iran. Just like I get to show students and teachers a different facet of the US: we don’t all support this war, some of us believe that the president is unhinged, I get to meet a variety of Norwegians too. And they told me about how they have Russian friends and for them, Russia isn’t a monolith either. We contain multitudes! Being in the North this week has been a nice reminder of the many ways of being that we can embody.