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My Four-Months Visit to a High School in America

美国金克斯高中与成都七中是友好学校，每年两校派多名师生互访，下文是我校外语组老师在美国金克斯高中交流所见所闻：

In the early morning of September 3rd, 2005, a delegation(代表团) composed of (组成) twelve students, a Chinese teacher and an English teacher (me) from Chengdu No. 7 High School left Chengdu airport, starting our trip to visit the sister school of Chengdu No. 7 High School ---Jenks High School in Tulsa, Oklahoma, America. During the first month, the students and teachers lived in their respective(各自的) partn er’s houses and made presentations about Chinese culture, attended classes and took some tours in Tulsa.

Three weeks later all the students were back to China, I began to make presentations and attend classes. So far three months has passed since we arrived in America. The following is what I get to know about Jenks High School.

Jenks High School includes three grade levels: Sophomore, Junior and Senior, which is similar to senior 1, senior 2, and senior 3 of the senior middle school in China Jenks High School has about 2,100 students. Majority of the students is Americans. The minority(少数民族) includes Mexicans, Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, Indians and so on. The students all come from the neighborhood of Jenks district. The school is financially(财政) supported by the state through tax. That is to say parents of the students needn’t pay tuition(学费). The school doesn’t have dormitories(寝室) for its students. All the students either drive their cars to school or take the school bus, or their parents drive them to school every day. In America, students are allowed to drive cars when they are above 16. Eighty six percent of the students in Jenks High School drive their own cars to school. In order to afford their gasoline, students do part-time jobs. They may work 25 hours a week and earn about $5.5 per hour. Many students work in the restaurants.

There are six class hours in a day with school starting at 7:50a.m and ending at 2: 30 p.m. Each class is 55 minutes. There is only a 35 minutes’ lunch break when st udents and teachers eat either the cafeteria food or the food they take from home. The school doesn’t have walls or gates, but usually no students will go outside for their lunch, because there is no restaurant in the vicinity of the school. If you drive t o eat, you won’t have enough time.

Teachers are required to arrive at school 20 minutes before school starts and stay at school twenty minutes more after school to help the students to solve problems in their study. Usually most of the teachers will do some preparation work for the next day and stay at school until about 4: 00p.m. There are about 150 teachers in Jenks High School. Most teachers teach five hours per day and have one hour as conference hour. Take my host teacher Paulette as an example. The first hour is her conference hour, during which, she can either do some preparation work for her teaching or meet the parents if there is an appointment, and she teaches from the 2nd to the 6th hour.

Unlike in China, teachers in America stay in the same classroom and students shift during the seven minutes’ break between every hour. The classroom is also the teacher ’s office. It is furnished with a desk top computer which is connected with Internet, a TV, a telephone which the teacher can use to call either the other classrooms or the outside of the school, an overhead projector(投影), a white board and file cabinets(陈列柜). Each teacher will be paid by the school about $50 a year to buy some teaching necessities such as marker pens. The teacher is the “owner” of the classroom, so he or she is in charge of everything. He or she will d ecorate the classroom according to his or her favor and make sure the classroom keeps tidy. And the teacher keeps the key to the classroom. So if the teacher is late, all his or her students will be waiting in the hallway.

Each student’s daily schedule kee ps the same during the weekdays. Students make their own study plan with the help of Course Planning Guide and they have a lot of different choices.