Foreign Exchange students Compare Schools systems

This year’s Arrowhead students Lola Gracia, Sarah Pan and Florian Saggau compares their own high schools to Arrowhead.

Senior Lola Garcia is an exchange student from Spain. Garcia says she comes from a small school of about 400 people. She says that like Arrowhead, students need to complete four years in order to graduate. A difference in her school is that students who want to go to college are required to attend high school for two more years.

Unlike Arrowhead, at Gracia’s school in Spain students stay in the same room and the teachers switch. Each class is an hour for them. Students do have 30 minutes to stay or leave school grounds for lunch.

Lola says she likes Arrowhead better because its less strict. At her school in spain teachers are more strict especially when it comes to bring personal devices and food to class. She says if you are late to class you automatically received a saturday.

“I like Arrowhead because the classes are only 40 minutes. The teachers are very nice when I have to go to the bathroom, in spain they teachers had you hold it,”says Lola.

Senior, Sarah Pan is an exchange student from Taiwan. Sarah says her school differs from Arrowhead in many ways. Sarah says her high school is a very tall building, with multiple floors. Sarah’s school has a lot less people, and is a lot smaller in comparison to Arrowhead.

“School starts at 8:00 a.m. and goes until 5 or 6:00 p.m. We have a one hour of lunch period, and physical education, everything else is Academic classes from 8:00 to 6:00” says Sarah.

Sara says her gym class in Taiwan sticks to a more traditional style, and students participate in indoor activities like basketball and volleyball.

“We have physical education, but its not like here. We only have really normal physical education like basketball, volleyball, and swimming. Here we can go out fishing, ice skating, and allot of other activities” says Sarah.

Sarah says her high school is very competition, when it comes to getting a good grade. In her school you don’t go to sporting events with your team you go alone. Pan was on the swim team and didn’t get to see her teammates swim or so you can’t cheer for them. Here everybody is in the pool at the same time so you can see your teammates and cheer them on.

“I like school in America because the pressure is much lower, and in my country there is allot of pressure in Academic result. If your academic result is bad, you can’t go into the university. So its alot of pressure” says Sarah.

“The rules are much different. We need to wear a uniform, with a skirt and tall socks. We can’t wear earrings, have nails polished, we can’t dye our hair, we can’t have a tattoo, and we can’t have makeup on.” says Pan.

Florian is the exchange student from Germany. He says his high school is has some similarities with Arrowhead but still has a different system.In germany kids start school in  first grade until sixth grade. They then go onto seventh through tenth grade. After they complete their 10th year they can choose to work or continue with their education.

They’re school doesn’t have sports like we do they have clubs and that involves people from other schools.

“ What i like about Arrowhead sports is that people come and see the games and cheer.  They seem proud of their school, and at mine school that doesn’t happen.” Florian

Florian also says that the teachers are very different from the teachers here. He says his teachers had a minimum requirements of knowing at least two different subjects. Instead of choosing different kinds of english, science, math or social studies classes they just had one and each year learned about it. So it was very important that you remembered things from the year before.

“ Here a lot of the classes have smartboards or computers in their classes, but in germany we had one room for computers and we don’t really use it.” says Florian