Imagine moving to the other side of the world to go to an American high school, thousands of miles away from home, without your family and your friends.
Each year the U.S. welcomes over 30 thousand foreign high school exchange students. This school year, San Marcos High School hosts two exchange students from Europe: Marta De La Vallina, a Sophomore from Spain and me: Liv Lange, a Junior from Germany.
There are some major differences between high school life here and in Europe.
School days in Germany start at 7:50 and end at 1, there are two days a week where school ends at 3:10. The schedule varies day to day, meaning each day you have different subjects. For example Math, Physics and History on Mondays and Biology, French, Politics and Theatre on Tuesdays. This means students have up to 14 different subjects per year!
In Germany the classes you take are mostly decided for you. The only thing we can choose from is if we either want to take French or Latin, if we want to take either Arts, Music or Theatre and if we want to take either Religion or Philosophy.
The range and variety of classes you can take here is definitely a big change between school here and school in Europe.
De La Vallina agrees saying ”Here I’m taking Tennis as a subject which wasn’t a subject in Spain. I’m also taking sculpture which I didn’t have in Spain.”
The size of the school is a big change too!
”My school in Spain was 30 people per grade. It went from preschool to 12th grade”, De La Vallina explains. Schools in Germany usually go from 5th grade to 12th grade but only have around 1000 students in total.
What definitely stands out the most to both me and De La Vallina is definitely the school spirit.
”School spirit in Spain doesn’t exist”, De La Vallina says, “I love to go to the football games because you can feel the school spirit there”
In Europe, there are basically no school sports. You usually play sports in a club separate from school. Usually there are no school dances or school events like pep rallies either.
Even though there are some differences that we first had to get used to, we are looking forward to the upcoming school year and our time at San Marcos!
