Once you’re in your fifth year of studies to become a teacher in Iraq, you start training in a primary school or a kindergarten. It takes about forty days, and on some of them, your professors come to the class and evaluate your teaching. When they’re there, it’s important to give an exam that shows off your abilities and what have you learned during those five years.

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Kathrin’s recent entry mentioned Simon, whose worries as a pupil made me think about something relating to education beyond universities. A favorite topic among those getting ready to graduate: the gap year.

As I understand, it’s quite popular in Western countries. A spare year is open to you; it allows you to broaden your horizons while learning something new or doing some part-time work – or simply travel. One of its aims is to give you some extra time to plan your future. It’s natural that your interests may lie in different spheres by the end of school – so I think it’s good to take some time to think them over and decide where you want your path to lead. But for some reason, this positive phenomenon is practically unknown in lots of countries, including Russia. Why?

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Recently, Emmy wrote about the effects of and potential for e-learning in Kenya. In Germany, the Internet has changed the way educational content can be accessed and how it is taught at schools.

For instance, I use a lot of websites to look up words or study vocabulary. Each week in Spanish class at my university, another person uploaded the most recent vocabulary to the website Vokker. All of my classmates could then access them and study at home.

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Once I finished my thesis around this time last year, I began that most dreaded journey: the job hunt. Optimistic, full of energy, I trawled the internet, revived old networks and subscribed to various job advertising websites. The journey looked promising! I’m sad to say that more than 200 application letters later, I have only had 2 interviews and no job offers!

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I read Pavel’s entry, and I was thinking about how extracurricular learning environments work here. Clubs obviously exist, but access to them is limited by how much money families have. Pavel suggests in his entry that people tend to look for alternatives outside of the educational model because it hasn’t kept up with the world’s development. For poverty stricken communities in my country, it’s the opposite: kids are falling out of the educational system because they can’t even keep up with its basic demands. That’s due to the fact that their needs are unmet.

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In my last entry, I talked about the problems in Iraq’s fine arts institutes. In the last decades in Kurdistan, I think people have come to a better understanding of art in general – and music specifically – but this is not true in every area of my country. Some families do not allow their girls to study music – or sometimes even their boys – because of religious beliefs or because they think it’s inappropriate to make music. You’ll find this view mostly among people who live in the countryside but also among people who have left their villages for small towns or cities or, finally, those with very conservative minds. I know a famous Kurdish musician who studied music for five years away from his hometown without letting his father know what he was studying there. It was only after he graduated that his father found out – otherwise he would have stopped his son’s studies.

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We’ve got warm weather and sunny skies right now in Germany. Most kids here are now going to open air pools, looking forward to six weeks of summer holidays. But some are also afraid of the end of the school year. Their grades aren’t good enough to go on to the next class level or to stay at their school. I talked with one of my mom’s friends, Gaby, about such worries.

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In her article, Kathrin mentioned Germany’s clubs where young people have the opportunity to attend courses they’re interested in – to learn something new or pick up additional skills. I found the topic really interesting because I also try to find ways of getting extra education in my life.

In any generation, there will be young people with no desire to study. However, among people I work and communicate with, the majority are eager to go on and get a degree. The problem is that the conventional model of education can’t fully satisfy their needs as it hasn’t kept pace with the world’s development.

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I felt like my last entry on women and education didn’t cover everything. There was one vital part missing: how do women themselves feel about the opportunities they have in Argentina?

In reading Emmy’s entry, I decided to take the question further: what is the role of women in society and why is it important that they get an education? I am convinced that societies should give free access to education to everyone in an equal way. However, I found that I struggled in justifying why – and I’m not the only one.

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“Hey, do you have that new mobile phone application for transferring money from your bank account to your phone?”

“You mean I can now pay my electricity bill with my phone?”

“Is your phone twin-sim?”

…these were the kind of discussions I came home to after two years of being away. So much had changed.

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