The American school system

As you may know, I spent a year in the US for my 9th grade year at school. At first, I wanted to present you a day in my life during this period but I had way too many things to talk about, so I decided to present the pros and cons of the American school system.

First I’ll start with the advantages (because, positivity is good):

I really liked the school system. During class it isn’t always hard work; they learn by having fun. We didn’t have to copy multiple pages of lessons (#handdestroyed) ,they were already all typed with maybe sometimes some words to fill in, which enabled us to concentrate more on the class. All of the teachers were very nice; we had a close relationship with them but with some distance not like in France where there is a very large distance. This enabled me to be more confident in my work. Succeeding at school was quite easy, you just had to listen well in class and do a little bit of homework. I remembered that I was never seated at a desk at home for more than 15 minutes or just in general, I never spent my whole weekend working. I liked that the class was more about discussions and group projects than personal work. School ended at 3pm which enabled students to practice an activity. I did field hockey for fall, I was part of the theater group to paint the backgrounds for the scene the day of the show and for spring I did lacrosse (loved them all!). I think it was very good to finish school early and do an activity because it encouraged students to do a sport since everything was on the school campus.

Now some drawbacks:

I didn’t like that we had the same program every single day, it was boring and sometimes I felt that I was living the same life over and over. Also I hated, especially at the beginning of the year, that teachers obliged you to turn around during class for a moment and talk with someone. I was petrified since everyone knew each other and I was alone, not knowing what to do. At those moments I felt time going suddenly VERY slow. Last but not least I think the school canteen should really propose healthier meals. Every day, the menu proposed burgers, fries, chips, ice creams, fried chicken or pizza (well there were vegetables but they were not good). The only healthier item was corn but with a lot of pepper, but still with lots of butter. As a consequence, I always brought my own meal.

Isn’t it so contrary, encouraging doing lots of sports but having a lot of unhealthy food at a cheap price and the healthy one is super expensive??

My blog post is coming to an end. I hope you enjoyed seeing some of the things you maybe never knew about the schools in the US; also, American high schools are not at all like in the series, I’m telling you!

Aude