Sweden vs America - School
It's time. It's finally here. My "Sweden vs America"-post. I feel like it's almost mandatory to do some kind of comparison and share it with you guys. I thought I'd bring up some of the biggest differences and similarities and then also talk about some typical "exchange problems". Let's do this.
So, just to make things clear, Sweden and America are so different that they practically are impossible to put up for comparison. I'll try, but just so you know. I get asked a lot what the biggest differences are between the two and I just say that everything is too different to compare. Impossible. And just because there's so much to compare, I'll have to divide this post into several posts. This post gets the theme "School".
And just to make sure, I'm not saying anything is better or worse. As my fellow AFS students would say: It's not better, it's not worse, it's just different.
Okay, here we find the most differences. And I'll try to cover most of them at least.
First of all we have the schedule. Here in America, we have five minutes between every class and then thirty minutes for lunch. In Sweden I'm used to at least ten minutes in between classes and then one hour or more for lunch. Time is always nice but I have to give credit to America for making the school days much more EFFICIENT. Those short breaks result in school days that never end after 3.20 PM.
We also have the grading system and the assignments. Here, you get homework basically everyday (at least if you take hard classes) and they are expected to be done the next day. You also get graded on everything you do, from 1-100, and everything goes into your grade book. Everything you do counts to your final grade. That's not how we roll in Sweden. One thing that also differs here is the fact that the grade E doesn't exist. Here you either get an A, B, C, D or you fail (F).
Teachers! So, on the first day of school for me here in America I kind of bumped into this. I was walking to my first class and the teacher was standing outside. I thought that I might introduce myself and see if I'm in the right classroom. Oh, how foolish I was. I reached out my hand to greet him and he stared at me as if I was from another planet (little did he know that I kind of am). He shook my hand, but it took him a while. Awkward. The "relationships" you have with your teachers here is not as friendly as I'm used to in Sweden. At home the teacher is more of a friend to you compared to here were it's more "do your thing and then bye". For an example, you have to greet your teachers with Mr and Ms, while in Sweden I call my teachers by their first name. Not all teachers stares at you like you're an idiot if you try to shake their hand though. I mean, I definitely did not try to shake another teacher's hand but when I introduced myself to the next teacher, she happily reached out her hand. Not all of them thought I was an alien.
Number four; friends. Maybe this is because I don't have too close of friends yet but I still think this is kind of accurate. Since people have a lot of homework all the time, they don't have time to do anything after school on weekdays (unless it's connected to school). Therefor, people don't hang out as much on weekdays as I would say we do in Sweden. This is too bad since I don't take too complicated classes and therefor I don't have as much homework as the others. Even if I finished all my homework and had some time over it doesn't mean that my friends have that time.
So here in America, if you do a sport, you most likely do it with your school. If you're good at something you might do it in a club as well, since the school sports only apply on about one third of the year. In Sweden, you might play some soccer with your school for like three days of a year, but that's it.
There's often a pretty broad selection of sports here. For example, my school has football (only for the boys though, which is too bad. I would've loved to try American football), soccer, baseball (boys), softball ("girl-version" of baseball. Yes, they have a girl-version of a sport), swimming and basketball. They are either a fall, winter or spring sport. Swimming, which I'm doing now, is a winter sport. Soccer, for which I hope to make the team, is a spring sport.
Connected with the school sports comes the love for your school. People in America are kind of obligated to love and cheer for their schools since most of the students play a sport with school. In Sweden, we go to school, stay for as long as we have to and then we rush home. Swedish people would never stick around to watch their school team play soccer for an example (mostly because there often is no team to cheer for, but yeah).
So, that's all for now. I hope you found it imteresting or maybe learned something new. Feel free to ask questions if I missed something.
Puss och Kram
Erika
