I’ve taught high school students in this country but I’d never actually been inside an American high school until yesterday. So I decided to share my impressions with my readers.
As you can see on the photo, the school is very beautiful. Many American schools look like penitentiary facilities on the outside, which is why I’m happy that our local school was designed by somebody who doesn’t associate education with incarceration.
Inside, the school is really beautiful and very clean. Classrooms are decorated with course-related materials, photos of students, and things students made themselves. Students look very happy, comfortable, and excited to be there. There are endless lockers for students to use. In my country, the concept of school lockers is non-existent and it is a horrible drag to lug around all of your stuff with you all day long.
Bathrooms are clean and they have doors. Soviet school toilets never had doors in the stalls, so you can imagine the daily joys of urinating, defecating, and changing your sanitary pad in full view of your classmates. This is why I was very excited to use a high school toilet that had a door.
Of course, we need to remember that this is considered to be one of the best schools in the area. We are a small town but our high school graduates thousands of students each year. People bring their kids from all over the region to our school.
One thing I found strange is the environment in the classroom. I don’t know whether it is always as relaxed and undisciplined as it was during the class I visited. Maybe it’s just the personal style of the teacher who taught that particular class. I’m used to a much higher level of discipline in the classroom, so I was quite taken aback by the amount of talking, shouting, walking around, and discussing things that had nothing to do with the class that was being taught. I’d say that about 15-20% of class time was wasted on this unruliness.
I loved being in this school. The moment I walked inside, all four generations of teachers in my family that came before me awoke and started screaming with joy. There is something very special about being in a school. It gave me such a positive charge of energy that I kept walking around with a goofy smile on my face until the end of the day.
Clarissa's Blog 
The unruliness must be common because all my freshmen expect it.
That’s a rich school district. Here we don’t necessarily have functioning restrooms, etc.
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Yes, this is a highly ranked prestigious school.
I also have a problem with my freshmen but it’s a different kind of problem. They are so passive as to be almost dead. I can’t seem to be able to wake them up. They look comatose half of the time. Great kids but SO quiet that I can hear myself breathe in the classroom.
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“I’d say that about 15-20% of class time was wasted on this unruliness.”
This must be a good school. I’ve had estimates from teachers that they only spend 15-205 of their time teaching, the rest is dealing with classroom discipline.
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These were great kids. I had a feeling that it would be very easy to manage the classroom if the teacher had that goal. But it didn’t seem to be the goal. Maybe it’s some kind of a pedagogic system I’m unaware of.
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For your comments about lack of discipline, do you mean that the kids were misbehaving? Or that the classroom had a casual atmosphere? I’d say that the former is pretty typical of poor schools and the latter is pretty typical of rich ones in the US.
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The students kept sharing the stories like “My Mom tried starting the car today, and it kept making funny noises” and “Look at the ring my boyfriend gave me.” The teacher didn’t do anything to stop that or turn the conversation more towards the subject matter of the course. That’s what I found surprising.
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Just out of curiosity, is that a private school?
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No, it’s a regular district school. I was there on a work-related assignment.
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Clarissa, do you happen to have a morning class? Because that sounds like all of my freshman morning classes. My earliest morning class was at 8:30, and most of the students hadn’t yet adjusted to the idea that sleep deprivation was normal.
High schools, gah. My English class was totally disrupted by this one rich-kid brat. Of course, most of the students were from fairly well-off families, but this kid took the cake. He kept whining aobut Shakespeare being boring, and wouldn’t pay attention at all. The teacher finally had to get him moved to another classroom. And we had another kid who continually bored us with his health projects on veganism. And this was a fairly tightly regimented high school- barely 20 kids to a class. I can’t imagine how a teacher can even keep a semblance of order with 30+ kids in a room.
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No, this is an after-lunch class.
But I know what you mean. Today, I showed a film about the survivors of the Spanish Civil War. I’ve watched it 7 times, and it still makes me emotional. After we watched it, I asked students to discuss the film in groups.
“What’s there to discuss?” a student asked loudly. “It’s just a bunch of old men blabbing.”
These are adult students, mind you. And the idea that maybe it isn’t supersmart to antagonize the prof at the end of the semester is alien to this student.
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Human psychology: a feature of a bygone era. People rarely know how to address each other for the best outcome anymore. You rarely find someone who pauses to consider what the results of any particular mode of speaking might be. Often, people adopt the tone, “take me or leave me!” They actually have no idea that it is well within my abilities to “leave” them or not to engage at all. The assumption of the majority, that we are all in [whatever individual situation we seem to be in] together, must be a feature of contemporary education systems or something. It goes along with the assumption that we are all obliged to be “nice” and to put up with any kind of unnecessary idiocies that happen to appear.
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Some of my worst repetitive dreams involve trying to find a clean cubicle toilet that does not put me on public display. I end up going up and down rows and there is never a clean one, or they don’t have any doors.
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Did you have such experiences in Zimbabwe?
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I don’t believe I did exactly. That is the weird part. I remember in primary school the toilets always smelled of “lifebuoy soap”, a very cheap, red soap. In high school, people used to wet toilet paper and throw it against the ceiling of the toilet block, so that it stuck. I’m not sure what my dreams are about.
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Interesting. On my part, I could write a saga about the toilet-related horrors of the Soviet Union. 🙂 I’m still very excited in a profoundly exaggerated way about clean, functioning toilets and toilet paper.
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I didn’t have such a good experience on my recent trip (last year) to Zimbabwe. The plumbing doesn’t work in a lot of places and you have to collect water, from down the street, in order to flush the toilets. Somehow, the idea of leaving an unflushed toilet bothered me deeply. There was not always water available throughout the day.
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” Somehow, the idea of leaving an unflushed toilet bothered me deeply. There was not always water available throughout the day.”
-Oh, I know the feeling. We once had 3 months without running water in a huge industrial city where I lived. The stench was overpowering. I was getting married for the first time and I was a very unwashed, sweaty bride. 🙂
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Wow! That could make the occasion… memorable.
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Together with a groom who got a stomach flu during the wedding meal, it was, indeed, very quirky. 🙂
I think it’s great that I was born in a 3rd world country because I have a very fresh perspective on many things and a very different level of appreciation for many basic daily realities. Don’t you feel the same?
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Weren’t you born in a “second world” country, according to the Chairman’s definitions? I don’t mind being at odds with the current zeitgeist, as I find it so patently bizarre. I think we might both share the sense that hardships make life stranger and more interesting. I can’t understand the notion that we are supposed to strive to eliminate anything unpredictable or eccentric from our lives. Wouldn’t that be to eliminate life itself? Long live life — and your sweaty and discombobulated marriage!!
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‘Weren’t you born in a “second world” country, according to the Chairman’s definitions?”
-It felt like a 3rd world one. 🙂
‘ Long live life — and your sweaty and discombobulated marriage!!”
-Finally, somebody mentioned the word “discombobulated” on my blog. 🙂 Now I’d just like to see “defenestration” mentioned, and I’ll be content. 🙂
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