I think we’re talking at cross purposes. Strictly lecture is definitely gone from the vast majority of American high scools. In fact, I can’t even remember a strictly lecture-based classroom showing up in recent TV or movies unless it was a parody of the old teacher who’s completely out of touch trope.
Wow. I can’t imagine walking around school all day with a dried film of sweat sticking to me. Yuck.
That has been the big push in the last 15 years or so. “I talk, you write” only works for a basic level of material. If you want students to know the material they have to work with it and manipulate it. It also heavily depends on the subject being taught. With the amount of stuff we have to cover in AP Euro, lecture is going to still be the primary tool 60% of the time.
HH, if I’m going up to the second the bell rings, it’s because I think the information is important enough for them to get it down that day. Rude students prevent this from happening. All it takes is to nuke a rude one early on in the school year, and it ceases to be a problem. I rarely run into the bell, and the kids know I won’t do it unless it’s important, so they don’t worry about it.
I asked about this exact thing in a thread a couple of months ago and got quite a few interesting answers. Lemme see if I can find it.
ETA: Yup, found it - Didn’t you shower after gym-class?
Apart from the odd science or ‘practical’ class (art, technology and so on), all the classroom scenes I can think of from movies and TV are chalk and talk. That’s not counting things like the Wonder Years - I imagine there was a lot more chalk and talk in the UK back then too.
I’m not sure what you mean then. Any scenes in a classroom will be two minutes out of a 45-90 period. Any scene more substantial than that has always shown discussion or a special project in addition to lecture. Even that bastion of realism, Saved By the Bell, showed plenty of class discussion.
I had one class that was pure chalk and talk, American History in…I think it was 11th grade. For the full 90 minutes, the teacher wrote stuff on the board, the students copied it down, and that was it.
Once I realized all he was doing was copying straight from the textbook, I stopped bothering with notes. I just read the textbook in class. (Hey, it had pictures!) Since I consistently got the highest score on his tests, he didn’t care much. I learned the material, just not the way he was presenting it.
I mean that those snippets of classroom life were always chalk and talk. I can’t think of any longer segments, really; even in films and shows that were specifically about school, they didn’t spend that much time on the actual lessons (because that’s, naturally, not as interesting as focusing on the relationships between the people).
We must be watching completely different TV shows and movies, I guess, if you don’t think TV and the movies nearly always show chalk and talk in US classrooms.
I didn’t really watch Saved by the Bell, I’m afraid - I simply couldn’t bear Screech’s voice. Obviously, he was meant to have a horrible voice, but it was just too horrible for me to stand!
[QUOTE=scifisam2009;11261912Can 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?
:D[/QUOTE]
I’m in NZ - my school days are so long ago I can’t remember what happened with outsiders on the grounds.
At my kids school you are meant to report to the front office, but its not enforced.
& this year they have tightened up on kids wandering off the grounds in lunch break. Now only the 7th form are allowed to do so. My Year 12 wasn’t allowed to have lunch with me in town a couple of weeks ago - which I thought was ridiculous. (we did anyway, cause I thought surely they don’t want me to send him back from buying a school uniform polar vest hungry, but we won’t do it again)
Just edited to say I found your account of school in the UK very interesting scifisam - I didn’t realise that 6th formers went to a separate school. Over hear school goes up to 7th form.
Not all sixth formers do, and I can’t find any stats that say how many kids stay on at their school rather than go to a sixth-form college or vocational college. But the majority of state schools don’t have sixth forms, and with those that do, many kids move onto college anyway (either because they want to do a different course or because they want a different environment).
Bizarrely, sixth form is still called sixth form even though it’s actually 6th and 7th form - two years of courses, not two put together in one year - and even though such form numbering has stopped for all the other years at school. Sometimes, it’s referred to as year 12 (for both years), and sometimes it’s years 12 and 13, but usually you go from year 11 to sixth form. 
This is pretty similar to the American high school experience. I didn’t realize you thought the entire class was nothing but the teacher talking, with no interaction with the students.
If you get a different impression from American movies, it’s probably because it’s more interesting to watch a teacher lead a class than to watch students staring at computer monitors or working on worksheets.
scifisam2009, if you go back and read the thread carefully you’ll see that I asked you twice to tell us about British schools, and several other posters also asked you to do that.
The depiction of high schools in American movies and TV is often out of date just because the movies and TV shows are written and directed by people who are long out of high school. Things that don’t happen much more are shown just because the writers and directors don’t bother to check it with current high school students.
And, of course, they are inaccurate simply because all American movies and TV are inaccurate about many things. American TV and movies are basically lies. If you hope to learn about American culture from them, you will be greatly disappointed.
I really didn’t know whether the entire lesson was like that - hence asking on this thread. With movies and so on, I wouldn’t say it’s actually more interesting to watch the teacher lead a class - it doesn’t really matter that much, since we’re not usually interested in the actual lesson, but the interaction between the students, and, occasionally, the teacher. They can do that just as well while working on a worksheet or staring at neigbouring computer monitors. (I do remember a couple of Buffy episodes set in IT classes).
Don’t get me wrong - I’m not attacking the American school system or anything like that. I’m only satisfying my curiosity about the differences between real life and what’s shown in movies when it comes to these basic classroom routines.
However, a lot of people are saying that the class is chalk and talk for pretty much the whole lesson. I thought asking whether there were many classes where the teacher ‘just stands up front and lectures’ made it clear that I was asking about classes where most of the time was spent with the teacher standing up in front of the class and lecturing. But it could be that people missed the small word ‘just.’
I have NEVER seen anybody bullied the way movies make it out to be. In Superbad, for instance, at the beginning of the movie one of the “cooler” kids tells Seth (Jonah Hill) that he can’t come to his graduation party, and then spits right on his chest. I have never, ever seen anything like that done to a senior by another senior. Maybe - MAYBE - a senior might do that to an underclassman in some act of sports-related hazing or because he really pissed him off somehow. But I simply can’t conceive of one senior showing that kind of disrespect to another senior, just days before graduation.
In Drillbit Taylor the high-school bullies are shown openly beating younger kids up in the hallways, shoving them into lockers, etc. No way, no how, at least in my experience and I think my high school was a pretty typical American high school. Nobody would do anything like that - they would be expelled if they did, first of all, and second of all nobody admires someone who beats up smaller, younger kids. There may be a few sociopathic assholes in high schools who do that but they are not the “cool” crowd. More common would be verbal hazing, especially in sports.
The movie Bully provides one of the more realistic examples of bullying I’ve seen (although not in a high school context.) A weak-willed and passive person will often enter into a destructive symbiotic relationship with a cruel, abusive person, as happened in that film (which was based on a true story.) The weak person will develop some kind of Stockholm-syndrome type complex and latch onto the mean person out of fear that he/she will never find another “friend” as close as that one, and the bully will go through cycles of kindness and abuse to the weaker person because the bully knows that nobody else would put up with that shit. This happens in platonic as well as romantic relationships. I think this might be more common than random acts of violence and abuse from “cooler” students directed at other students.
I was in high school in the late 80s. So you basically chose one of several student archtypes (or cliques) - Jock, Hood, Preppy, Brain or Freak - and then associated only with those people. On rare occassions, you might get placed in some sort of detention together where you might learn to see each other as real people.
That’s if you are white. All the Black and Hispanic kids (and a few token Whites who transfered in)went to the tough school where most were in gangs, they all had rough home lives, the most promising students were usually killed in drive-bys and if you were lucky, you were in the class with the inspiring teacher.
Nowadays, apparently there are a lot of choreographed song and dance numbers at your typical high school.
Ah, sorry - I went back and checked and there are two posts from you and one other (not several other) posters asking. General I open a thread by clicking on ‘first new post,’ and sometimes it skips ahead. There was another post in there that I really don’t remember reading at all, so I think perhaps that’s what happened.
Nice that you’re interested enough to ask so strongly!
Well, I wasn’t expecting the movies to be completely accurate - I expect them to be movies. Somehow, I doubt US high schools really have that many werewolves, teachers in miniskirts and teenagers who are really 35 years old. I’ve also always suspected that the high school cliques you see in movies aren’t as exclusive as the movies depict.
Like I said, I was just curious about whether the movies had even got the basics right, like the way the desks are arranged. So I asked people who’ve actually gone to American schools, which is a good way to learn, no? Should I not have asked?
BTW, sorry that I haven’t responded to more people’s posts on here - it’s the sort of thread where you mainly read the posts and digest the information rather than need to make comments on it. I am reading them. It annoys me a little when someone starts a thread and then appears not to bother reading it.
And in some cases there was also a sociopathic blond-haired guy in a white suit who had the personal mission of ruining any relationship between a boy from the upper class and a girl from the lower class. There were also occasionally elite groups of karate students who will make your life a living hell.
Yeah, I always KNEW everything I’d learnt from movies was right!
But where did you sit?
Ha!
Of course, there was only one developed Black/Asian/Latino kid. The rest were thugs, gangbangers, etc. The only Black/Asian/Latino kid is always in a clique of popular kids and might say something smartass.
Actually, if you’re Asian, you’re going to be a stereotypical nerd with a ridiculous name and a strong accent.
Back to reality, I can remember kids getting thrown in trash cans, stuffed in lockers, etc. in the mid-80s by the seniors. It was actually kind of an acknowledgment that you mattered as a freshman. Because you were pretty much invisible to upperclassmen anyway. So yes, Dazed and Confused was more like a documentary than entertainment to me.
scifisam2009, in posts #30, #41, and maybe #44 there were other posters asking you to tell us about British schools.