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Back to School, Culture, Education, Exchange, Exchange student, French, Gustave Flaubert, Morocco, School, students
I’ve been going to school for two weeks now, so I thought I’d give you an update on my experience so far. I don’t want to be falsely positive about my experience, so I’ll share some of the difficulties I’ve been having, but in every difficulty is an opportunity for growth, so I’m not complaining!
The school, called Institut Gustave Flaubert d’Agdal, is a small private school, with around 120 students in three grades. It’s a French school, and the students attend to prepare for their bac (short for baccalaureate), the intensive tests at the end of the French education system.
In French high schools, each student chooses a track, or a concentration, for their studies. The decision is important; the track determines the type of college and career that the student will have later in life. My school offers three tracks: Science, Economic Science, and Business. I choose to be enrolled in the last year of the Science track, with a concentration in math, to avoid sharing all my classes with other YES students.
So I’m taking Biology, Physics and Chemistry, Math, History and Geography, Philosophy, English, and Spanish. So far my favorite class is Math because I already know the material and can follow everything that’s being said. My best school moment so far was when I solved a math problem in front of the class and was rewarded with a collective “oooooh!” from the class. My least favorite class is Physics because I’ve never liked the subject, even in America, and the combination of difficult theoretical concepts and French makes it very hard to concentrate, much less comprehend anything.
School here is different from school in America, which is to be expected. Here are a few ways that I’ve found school differs:
- Classes are two hours long, but scheduled more like in college, where you attend the class once or twice a week. I love the scheduling, because most days I only have around 4 hours of class!
- The focus here is on memorization, not in-depth understanding. This has been frustrating for me to adjust to, because I believe that the value of education lies in critical thinking skills, so I don’t like it when students just parrot answers they found in their textbook. Even the textbooks are written more like review sheets than explanations of concepts.
- There are few class discussions. Most of my classes were lecture-based in the US, but they were structured to allow time for student participation as well. Here, students answer questions and copy down exactly what the teacher dictates to them. There’s no place for debate.
But school is also the same!
- Students here mess around, they make jokes, and sometimes they’re disruptive in class. They’re teenagers struggling to create their own identities, just like teenagers in the US.
- In general, I’ve found the teacher-student relationship to be similar to that I experienced in the US. My teachers here demand a lot of respect from their classes, but are also willing to joke with the students and answer any questions.
- We’re covering very similar material to what I learned in the US. That doesn’t make school easy, though! Trying to recall biology concepts from my freshman year of high school is extremely taxing and sometimes thoroughly impossible. So this year will be valuable to me as a type of review.
So far, school has been frustratingly difficult. I’m one of two girls in my class, and although the 12 boys I’m with every day are kind, it’s hard to know how to relate to them. Plus, the way they all shout out, at the same time, the answers to any questions the teacher asks gives me a headache! Sometimes the opinions expressed by students in my classes about Americans, religion, and politics are close-minded and ignorant. But the difficulty of school means that I’ll definitely grow as a person throughout the year in learning to relate to my classmates and cope with a different teaching style.