I have been looking at the structure of the Finnish school day and seeing how it differs from our Canadian ones.  I have talked you through the typical school days for both elementary students and high school students here in Finland. We know now that the main difference between the Finnish school day and the Canadian one is time spent in the classroom. I began to wonder just how much time difference there was. Were Canadians spending a significantly more amount of time in the classroom? I began to dig a bit and found an article for the CBC written by Robert Smol and titled “Why Finlands schools are the the best in the West.” (http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/why-finland-s-schools-are-the-best-in-the-west-1.1088886). In this article Robert looks at and compares the time spent in the classroom. He finds that not only do Finnish students spend less time in the classroom than Canadian students, but also less time than any other western country.  “Finns spend 640 hours in class over a school year as opposed to 810 hours on average for the OECD countries.” The OECD is the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and has some 35 western countries belonging to it. After my observations over the past weeks I now have a very strong opinion that one of the reasons for Finland’s major success in education is the school day structure. Spending less time in the classroom and more outdoors and in practical education settings seems to be one of the keys to success.