By: Fleur Strik
My name is Fleur Strik and I’m a foreign exchange student from The Netherlands (or Holland- it’s the same country). I’m a Senior at Redwood but already graduated in Holland. This means I have a Dutch diploma, and the diploma I’ll be getting here won’t be valuable. The only mandatory classes I’m doing here are Expository Reading & Writing and US History, the rest of my classes are all electives. So basically, I’ll have a very easy year here with barely any homework, which is what I was counting on. The school system and classes, however, are very different.
For starters, we don’t have a big campus like Redwood High School. We have one big building which is our school, a field for sports, and two classrooms outside for PE. I have eight periods a day, but you don’t always have all eight, sometimes you have six periods per day, or a class gets canceled because the teacher is sick, which means you have even less. When that happens you don’t have that class and can go off campus because we don’t have to sign off. We don’t have substitute teachers unless the teacher is gone for a long time.
Every school day has a different schedule, but every Monday is the same, every Tuesday and so on. We have two breaks instead of one, the first one being a twenty-minute break for snacks. Another difference is that we don’t need a pass to leave the classroom, we can just leave the classroom after asking our teacher.
The biggest difference is the way the grades are divided into schools. The classes you can learn and the school spirit. We have fifteen grades and from those grades, the first eight go in one building, and the other five go in a second school, which we would call “High School”. After the third year of our “High School,” we have to decide which classes we want to do in the last two years. We can choose from four bases of classes which are based on culture and society, economy and society, nature and technique, and nature and health. Besides those bases, you can pick a few classes that you would like to do. This choice is very important for us because you need to take certain classes for certain colleges, so we need to know what we want to study much earlier than in America.
We don’t have electives in Holland, they’re all educational classes, except for art. We also don’t have levels in our different classes, you learn your whole education on a certain level. We have eight levels. The main reason why I wanted to go to an American high school is because of the school spirit. We don’t have school dances, we don’t have cheerleaders or dance force, and we don’t have a football team to support. We don’t get chances to play sports at school either.
In Holland, you just go to school to learn and prepare for the future, they don’t make it any more fun than it is, and we don’t have fun classes or school trips as here. This also means that we don’t have homecoming or any of that stuff. I wanted to be a senior, instead of a junior even though I just turned seventeen, so I could do the graduation ceremony and get a cap and gown.
There are a ton of differences in education between The Netherlands and the United States, but for me the one that makes high school in America so fun is the high school spirit and activities. We are very prepared for the future in Holland, but they don’t make high school a lot of fun. In America, they do both, but education is not always a challenge for everyone.
I couldn’t tell you which educational system has my preference because I don’t do any hard classes here, but I can definitely say that I love the high school experience I am be getting here.