Teaching students at the final stage of their studies is both a challenge and a privilege -the same could be said about textbook writing. On the one hand, you want to support and motivate the students and tell them that everything’s going to be all right, on the other hand, you need to push them to their limits – and to surpass them. As a teacher, I embrace every day as a chance to go beyond my own limits, explore, try new approaches and discover something new and exciting. This book project has been another way to invent something new and different, see things from a different perspective, and work as part of a great team of brilliant people.

I teach English at Vaasan lyseon lukio which is a fairly big upper secondary school in Ostrobothnia. Besides teaching, I am also a censor on the matriculation examination board and I’ve previously worked on the book series Insights and the digital book Abilities.

I enjoy teaching English because the curriculum for English gives me so many opportunities to focus on things that I find truly interesting and important. I can, for example, talk about multi-culturalism and diversity or nature, climate and ecology. We can plan everyday climate actions as a part of our lessons, or talk about current events around the world and analyze their effects. I love the fact that I can get carried away by the themes that our studies include and I can commit to the core values of the national curriculum. Respecting human rights, improving equality and wellbeing, building skills to lead a sustainable lifestyle – these are some of the things that I am passionate about. These are also some of the things that New Insights deals with. I hope our material will help teachers in their efforts to educate the youth, give them food for thought and make them think about what is happening in the world around them.

English has truly been my passion since I was five years old. Whether it was watching cartoons as a child or travelling the world, English has and always will be an important part of my life. Therefore, I am thrilled to share the wonders of this very same language with my students year after year while constantly trying to come up with new and exciting aspects to teaching it. Furthermore, co-authoring Abilities has been an interesting adventure with the best possible team. I really hope you find the book both useful in your studies and pleasant to use. Cheers!

I have quite a lot of experiences of textbook writing but the chance of creating material that is only going to be online made me say yes to Abilities. I guess I could say that while I am not a big enthusiast on digital teaching and testing I have learned to enjoy and appreciate some of it. I’ve been an English teacher for way over 20 years. I sometimes get tired of all the markings we need to do but I still enjoy the face-to-face interaction with students.

I miss the ball a lot when playing golf and more often than not lose the ball altogether, maybe sports aren’t my thing. My passion has always been languages. I’ve studied English, Swedish, German, Spanish, Latin, French, Russian and Japanese and have come to realize that language learning has to have a real connection to your everyday life to be meaningful and interesting.

Being a teacher is great, because you learn new things every day while working together with your students and colleagues. I want to provide all of my students, both those who already seem to know it all and those who struggle with English, with a feeling that they can and will learn more. I’m interested in developing online learning environments and writing teaching materials. And the best part is that you never have to do any of it alone: writing and teaching are team efforts.

Our Insights team received a prize in 2019 (Otavan Kirjasäätiö), but the best prize is the continuous positive feedback you can give and receive in a classroom or online.