I know they’re not going to be totally realistic - you won’t have that many teachers who wow the toughest class in the space of two weeks - but I mean the mundane stuff.
Do you have individual desks set in rows?
Do you have new students come up and introduce themselves if they arrive mid-semester?
Are there a lot of classes where the teacher just stands up front and lectures? That kind of chalk ‘n’ talk is pretty unusual in the UK these days.
Does the class get up and start packing up when the bell rings, even if the teacher’s in mid-sentence? And, if so, does the teacher often plan their lessons so badly that they finish in the middle of a topic?
Can non-students often wander onto school grounds, like Seth Rogen does to his GF in Pineapple Express, or Oz does in Buffy before he rejoins the school?
That’s just for a start.
Yes, most of the time. The teacher can set them up however they wish, but most of the time the desks will be in rows, facing one direction.
Midsemester? No, almost never. Beginning of the year, almost always.
Depends on the class, but mostly yes. Stand up in front and talk. Maybe with some time in class to do “practice” problem if a math class. Like I said, depends on the class, but yes most of them involve some amount of standing and talking.
No and no. To clarify, the class is usually very wound down by the time the bell is to ring. Very rarely would a class go to the last second. If a class did go to the last second, everyone would stay seated until the teacher finished, which usually wouldn’t take long. What would go into “overtime” was a teacher forgetting to assign homework earlier, so he/she had to give it to us at the very end.
If you go onto school grounds as a nonstudent, you have to sign in and wear a Visitor sticker. If you fail to do this, depending on your age, they may mistake you for a student and that will cause a lot of problems if you’re trying to leave in the middle of a class or not in a room when class starts.
Where did you go to high school, Magical Fairy Princess Land, where classes are taught by unicorns?
Let me tell you, if a teacher thought teaching after the bell was a good idea, it didn’t matter, because we got the fuck out of there the microsecond the little hammer hit the little ringy thing.
These days, now that we live in a paranoid crypto-fascist utopia perpetuated by the gummint Fear Machine fnord this sort of thing is probably more common. But it was rather unheard of last century, the tail-end of which I was in high school.
No, the teachers were less than attractive humans. Something else that should be addressed with regards to television: the female teachers are almost never in their 20s.
But I could tell some stories about the one that truly was in her 20s.
Often, yes. I also had one class where the desks were all around the perimeter of the room, with the teacher in the middle. Lots of discussion in that class (history and geography). A couple had a sort of L-shape, with the teacher in the crook. Our language classes had two-person tables instead of desks, and we spent a fair amount of time working in partners, practicing conversations and the like.
If we ever had students enter mid-semester, I never heard about it. But then, I went to a fairly small school, and we all pretty much knew each other anyways. I think we might have done some introductions freshman year, but after that, you had largely the same classmates throughout.
Not just lectures, but stands at the front with a chalkboard, yes. The closest I had was a chem teacher who didn’t really do discussions or anything, but there were still exercises and demonstrations and such. More often, there was a lot of calling on the class, and discussions (for humanities), practice problems, demos, that sort of thing. Even our math teachers had us come up and demonstrate stuff, or work in groups.
Nope. Some teachers were less prepared than others, but we still had to wait until they let us go. Although, often teachers would save group or individual work for last, so that you really could just pack up and take off at the bell.
Well, it probably depends on what you look like, but for the most part, yeah. I know I’ve done it after graduation, and also at the other high school in town. Now, in theory you’re supposed to get a pass at the office, but as long as you looked like you belonged there, it wasn’t a big deal. We had study halls, usually one period per semester, so there were always kids wandering around, and nobody to stop you if you were in the halls.
The first four vary from teacher, the last one from school to school or district to district. There’s very little centralized control over anything in the US school system.
I guess, with people wandering onto school grounds,in UK schools they’re always either parents or other official visitors. Students wear uniforms, so it doesn’t matter how young you look.
I can pretty confidently say that you fail Internet Messageboard Conversations.
The OP probably isn’t so stupid so as to think the whole U.S. is going to be exactly the same, school to school.
Perhaps he knew there would be differences and wanted to you know, hear our stories of high school with regards to his question?
I have no choice but to strongly suggest you take remedial courses in how to properly converse with people on messageboards. Perhaps with a side of general communications skills.
I guess what I see in the movies/ on TV is either California or the Midwest, with maybe a splash of New York. If most regions are nothing like the situations in my OP, I’d like to know that. Individual experiences will be interesting in themselves - even if the poster admits that they’re unusual.
The basics of US high high schools are just so very different to my UK secondary school experiences, and I’ve always been curious as to how close they ever came to reality.
There’s no reason to believe that there’s no overwhelming convention one way or the other on those questions. I was simply pointing out that there isn’t.
I’ve been out of high school for about four years.
Usually, yeah. Some classes had big tables with chairs–these were usually science classes. And stuff like art was different, too.
As far I can remember, no, not at all. And none of that assigned new-kid-buddy stuff either. That I remember. It was a huge school and no one cared.
Pretty common, yes.
It depended on the teacher and how much respect the students had for him or her. A respected teacher might be able to hold us (squirming) in our seats for a few seconds. If a teacher repeatedly held the class beyond the bell, they lost that respect pretty quickly, and the class packed as soon as that minute hand neared the mark. It wasn’t uncommon for teachers to keep talking through the bell. Heck, to bring an example from my university experience, a professor I had last quarter ALWAYS talked through the official end of class. It really pissed people off. We’ve only got so much time to get to our next class. By the end of the quarter, the class left as soon as it was time, talking or no talking.
My high school was closed campus, so no, definitely not. We were locked in. You would have to hop the gate and dodge the security guards.
That’s the thing, though, it not even regional, really. You might be able to answer yes to all of the first four in one class, and no to all of them one classroom over. The last one may occasionally be governed by state law, I’m not sure.
I’m in the US, specifically NY / Long Island so my answers will tend toward that. But the US is a big diverse place so things might vary per locale. I suspect things might also vary between public / private (rich) / private (religious) / private (experimental/philosophical)
Yep. Occasionally a specific lesson will have us moving them into a circle, but then they get moved back. Depending on the teacher, we may be seated alphabetically, or we may get to choose where to sit.
I don’t recall that ever happening. And if it did happen I’d think it would only happen in elementary school where everyone has the same teacher and is young enough for the adults to be worried about them feeling included. I myself transferred to another school midway through a year, in 4th grade. I know for sure I wasn’t made to get up and introduce myself, but it’s possible the teacher pointed me out as new.
That was the majority of my school experience. I mean some used projectors instead of chalk. Not counting classes like lab or art of course. English and History had a little bit of class discussion but were still mostly lecture. Science and math had even less discussion. There definitely was some interaction, but nothing compared to the UK, if The History Boys is any indication.
Pretty much yes, although my high school experimented with not having bells at one point, and just having the teachers watch the clock. Kids definitely start packing and get restless, but they won’t actually leave until dismissed, even with the bell. Teachers aren’t generally cut off mid sentence though - they keep an eye on the clock.
On the other hand, you don’t have the movie phenomenon where the class somehow ends after three minutes.
Depends on the school. Some have open campus, some don’t. Some you need hall passes and can’t loiter in hallways, some you don’t. It’s obviously easier to tresspass on the grounds with large groups of socializing kids than to tresspass in the hallways during class. I went back to my school after I graduated to visit some teachers and got stopped and sent to the principals office to get visitors passes. I think things are even more secure after 9/11. There’s probably cameras and guards at some schools now. In any case the official policy is that all guests have to go to the main office to get passes before going anywhere else at my alma mater.
I teach high school and one thing that really bugs me about Hollywood representations of a high school class is that it usually plays out like this:
Bell rings, teacher gets students to settle down
Teacher introduces the day’s topic, one or two students ask questions or make comments.
Teacher makes incredibly insightful observation or asks a question that challenges the students’ way of thinking, understanding dawns and admiration is evident on students’ faces
Bell rings, students leave
All within about 2 minutes. :rolleyes: There is no indication of any longer passage of time in the class. Seriously, pay attention and you’ll notice this is quite common.
I understand the need to compress time in a movie or TV show, but this practice is SO misleading. It totally ignores one of the biggest challenges of teaching–keeping students interested and involved for up to 90 minutes at a time. Of course they can’t show a class in ‘real time’ but they could at least cut away from the classroom scene without showing a dismissal bell ringing just minutes after the class began. But of course that wouldn’t be as dramatic.
Another thing I’ve wondered about is the concept of hall monitors, and the idea that you have to have a written permission slip from your teacher to be out of the classroom during class. Is this something that’s done in real life as well?
In my high school, no, we didn’t have that, but I understand that others did.
My high school had block scheduling, which I have never seen represented in any movie or TV show, ever, but is somewhat common in California, at least. We had three hundred-minute long classes a day, alternating classes every other day. So, on A Day, I would have History, Biology, and Geometry, and on B Day, I’d have English, Spanish, and Band. (Wow, I can’t believe I remember my 10th grade schedule, but I’m pretty sure that was it.) 0 Hour was optional and since it was only 45 minutes long, it was every day.
IMO, the classroom stuff is the MOST realistic part of Hollywood’s version of high school. The social stuff has virtually no similarity to real life, though, at least my real life.
This is a very :dubious: statement. First of all…how do you think the older teachers got there? Were they in waiting in their 20s and then when they hit 30, they are let out of their cage? I had a fair number of young teachers in my time in school. A majority, of course not, but certainly more than a couple.
When I was in school there were no hall monitors, and us “good kids” didn’t usually have passes. At one point somebody somewhere had some kind of hall pass hissy fit and the teachers started handing them out for, like, two weeks. It was annoying and impractical, because it was my senior year and all of the smart kids were hauled off to the damned guidance center every five minutes.
Of course, now they all have lanyards with ID cards and such. When I was in early college I could just wander back in, with a wave at the office. Now I think there’s a cavity search involved. My boyfriend is just four years younger than I am and his school experience was radically different, as some of it was post-Columbine.
I had a teacher in junior high who, besides being one of the least-respected teachers overall and was notoriously anal retentive (rumors about his homosexuality notwithstanding), would get annoyed if he heard books closing or backpacks rustling, coats being put on and all the other usual noises one hears as the final few seconds of class time approach. He would roll his eyes, sigh impatiently and say, “Class isn’t over yet, people!” and expected everyone to remain fully attentive up until the very moment the bell rang. He was an ass and everyone hated him.
