scrubbedexpat099

I do remember my school days:

2 x 45 minutes
Break 15 mins
2 x 45 mins
Lunch, 2 sessions, 75 minutes total
3 x 45 minutes
9 till 3.45
BUT
6 days a week, Wednesday and Saturday afternoons were for sports.

9 weeks summer hols?

snowbunny

If your child could benefit from having more homework time, or learning better organisational skills then I think a conference with the teacher(s) and counsellor is the best bet. Take advantage of the American system of pathologising everything and ask that your child's special educational needs be accommodated.

Bill Gates and other entrepreneurs who are disorganised no doubt have personal assistants who keep their schedules and issue reminders, many times daily. You may have to become your child's personal assistant in this regard.

With respect to mind-numbing work: that is down to high-stakes testing as introduced by Ross Perot in Texas and spread by George W. Bush across this country. It is *EVIL*. Your choices are to protest this in every way possible and to try to convince your school and/or district that teaching without a strict curriculum can still produce children who will pass the high-stakes tests; or to remove your child from public school in favour of either homeschooling or private school.

See http://www.fairtest.org/ for information on opposing these tests.

Also, this man does not "teach the test" but helps create fantastic minds:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...toryId=4608476

ImHere

Yeah but all that bollox is in America. Move to Spain or somewhere similar and see how much people give a shit about deadlines being met.

britnyank

Dare I ask if there's anything I can do now here in the UK to prepare my two girls (who will be 14 & 16 when we move next year) for the US system?

dbj1000

Oh yes, Spain. That powerhouse of the European economy, and model of innovative business practices.

Portugal and Greece are pretty laid back about deadlines too, in my experience... and it's clear that their economies are a roaring success.

Elvira

Hi! I don't have much time as I'm meant to be walking the dog , but here are a couple of things for starters:

It is up to you, as the parent, to inform yourself about the American school system. www will no doubt help, as will this forum. Be sure to look at sites that relate to the state that you are moving too as things vary a lot from state to state.

The US system is not currriculum based, i.e. you do not cover the various subjects in a straight line,as it were. Instead you accummulate 'credits' for different subjects, and these are split into different sub-subjects. For instance, you don't just do history and work yourself through the centuries and different wars and revolutions; you do US History, World History, World Civilizations, etc. The difference is probably most difficult for British kids to adjust to for Maths (which they call Math here - no s...). Instead of working through the various 'Maths bits' logically, they do Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry separately. My son, who had just got an Maths GCSE grade 'A' before we moved here, found this really difficult because he was ahead in algebra but behind ingeometry (or maybe vice versa...).

May I also quote from my previous post:

You will probably find that counselors (who are meant to assist students in subject selection etc.) are pretty hopeless: it's up to parents to ensure that their kids get all the subject credits they need, not just to graduate from High School, but for the college(s) they are planning to apply to. (NB: university is always called College here.) It is important to realise that what is sufficient to graduate from high school may not be sufficient to meet the requirements of universities. And don't expect the school to tell you when said colleges have moved their goalposts.

Some of these requirements do not make any sense at all. It can be particularly difficult for those who move to the US halfway through high school as schools here won't know what to do with your precious GCSEs. We had to fight to get the proper credits for our son. To help get proper credits for schooling in the UK, you will not only your daughters' grade sheets (called 'report cards' here....), but a detailed list of what was studied in those years (i.e. subject curriculums). This will help the school determine what credits to allocate, which in turn is vital for graduation from high school.

For anyone moving: when they ask you 'how many years French has she done', bear in mind that here they do each subject every single day. So a child doing French here would have 5 lessons a week, whereas in the UK they normally would have only 2 or 3. If possible, try to see if your daughters can look at the text books of some of the courses being considered for them, to see whether it looks too easy, too difficult, or seems to follow on from what they have been doing in the UK.

Schools can be very competitive here. In our kids' high school we found that all the bright kids were in classes for the very able and the 'normal' classes were reserved for the not very bright/not interested in learning/not very well behaved. To get them into the classes for the bright, they had to be tested by a psychologist, i.e. do a kind of IQ test, to prove that they are bright enough to cope... All the US kids had done this in elementary school, paid for by the schools, but we had to fork out several hundred $$$ to have this done privately.

Okay, the dog really needs to go now - HTH for starters!

AdobePinon

Funny thing, is if they are doing well now, they'll probably do well (academically at least) in the US system. My college teaching years showed that very few US students had covered any calculus in high school unless they had done college prep or AP classes, probably about half had never done a science experiment that required apparatus of any kind. Most can't do arithmetic without a caclulator. These are not the priorities of the US system.

Your kids' biggest difficulty is likely to be fitting in socially.

mandpete

Don't forget you will have to supply the school with medical records proving that your children are up to date with all their vaccinations. Children aren't routinely given hepatitis shots in the UK but in NJ, not sure about other states, no child can attend school without these shots. I suggest you get them done in the UK before you come over.

Elvira

Agree about fitting in socially being a likely problem. When we moved our sons found that their classmates were completely 'scheduled out' and didn't have time to make new friends...

As far as coping academically is concerned, I guess it depends where you are. Here, most of the bright kids seem to be doing calculus in high school, and tons of AP classes.

Ah, AP classes - another thing to beef up on! Advance Placement, i.e. college level courses undertaken at high school. Becoming increasingly important when applying to 'good' colleges. Can be very high pressure. Nice thing, though, is that they get college credit, so fewer credits needed to graduate from college. Which may mean graduating sooner. Which in turn means less college fees.

Oops, just opened another can of worms: college fees
:scared: Does the previous poster have a college fund? If her older daughter is 16, 18 months from now she'll be applying for college. Chances are they won't qualify for financial aid (including loans), and most of the scholarships are open to USCs only.

Elvira

Oh, yes, that's another requirement. BTW, we are talking about hepatitis B, which requires 3 shots at months, 0,1 and 3, so better to get this done sooner rather than later.

Elvira

Just remembered something else that is important for anyone with kids close to college: SATs!

Entirely different from UK SATs. An absolute requirement for anyone going to college here. Requirements have changed this year, so to get up to speed on the latest requirements, go to www.collegeboard.com.

NB: Info on AP classes/tests are somewhere on the same site, I believe.

ImHere

I didnt say they were, but to be honest Spain is doing as well as the USA at the moment, for whatever reasons...
http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/...s/sp.html#Econ

And lets be completely frank, to a lot of people theres more to life than working 70 hours per week to pay for endless consumer products they dont need. It seems there are an awful lot of unhappy people here who would gladly swap their endless work drudgery for the more simple and often fullfilling life of actually spending time with their families, even if it meant giving up the new cars, massive houses and 56" TV's.

TouristTrap

Oy mate. Don't know where you get your idea from, but Portugal is FAR from laid back. They just hosted the most brilliantly-run Euro Cup, and are not laid back when it comes to business in the least. (Speaking from personal experience here).

Plus, they all sit at the cafes after work and sip an expresso, take a full hour or two lunch, and have 4 to 6 weeks' vacation a year to enjoy the important things in life.

If Americans had a clue as to what life in Europe was truly like, they'd all revolt.

snowbunny

I already have!

ImHere

I have to say I much prefer the European work/life balance as opposed to the US work/work imbalance. Its no wonder divorce rates, single parent family rates and the number of kids with serious societal problems are so high here compared to the EU.