The Journey to Writing a Successful Story: a tip book

American Schools Pt. 3 - High

I've seen a lot of people asking about the American school systems, so I will like to provide you the information on them. I have been to over fourteen different types of schools in various areas, so I'm using my knowledge from that and from my siblings' schools. Do know that I'm no "knowledge-keeper" when it comes to this - I know a lot of the system, but there are things that I am unaware of. If you do have any questions that I did not answer throughout any of these areas, please comment below. I will try my best to find the answer from my most wonderful best friend, Google.

Now, let's get started.

High school is pretty basic. There are no different types of names - it's just called high school. However, if in a town that is overly populated with students, and there is a junior high that goes to ninth grade, then that town's high school will only hold tenth grade to twelfth grade.

But generally speaking, high school is a four year school.

High school is from ninth grade to twelfth grade. Their grades and ages look similar to...

Ninth grade (freshman year) = 14-15 years old.

Tenth grade (sophomore year) = 15-16 years old.

Eleventh grade (junior year) = 16-17 years old.

Twelfth grade (senior year) = 17-18 years old.

By graduation, you're generally between 18-19 years old.

Before moving on, I would like to point out that high school does have an early graduation for those that wish to not take the full four years of school. I will get to that later though.

There are two sayings out there. The first one states, "High school is preparing you for college." Which is basically true from all the hard work you will be doing. The second states, "High school is preparing you for life." I will go through what this one means in detail, but for now, it's fully true.

Middle school and high school are fairly similar to each other, but depending on the area, the high school can be a bit different.

From going around the website and talking to people about different schooling systems here in the U.S., I've actually found out that there are more different types than what I've been saying - but because I don't know them, I'm going off of my observations and experiences. So if anyone's schedule is different than this, you can state so in the comments below to let people know how your schedule looks.

But basically, I've seen three types of schedules. You have a block schedule and a period schedule. The next type is more of an addition to either of the two.

Block schedules are where you have four classes a day. And yes, much like middle school, you do have to get up and go to those classes (same with the period schedule, too). The teacher stays behind unless they teach other types of classes or they share a class. It differs. But the block schedule is where you have four classes per semester and term. If you don't know, we have two semesters and four terms. A semester is four months and the term is two months. There will be glasses that are term classes (you take only for two months) and you have classes that are only semester classes (you take only for four months). Then once the new term/semester comes around, your schedule completely changes.

From my understanding of block schedules, semester classes are your core classes, things like social studies, science, math, and English. Term classes are electives. The reason why I believe this is because this happened to me. My zoology and geography  classes was more of an elective and they lasted two months each. My biology, pre-algebra, and World History classes were more of my core classes and they lasted four months.