hey guys welcome back to the forum yesterday we're gonna be checking out a video titled
german high school cultural shock should be a really interesting one i've never actually got a
perspective from a student uh she's an exchange student from uh america i've actually seen an
exchange student from germany in america uh the university that i was going to actually go to
coastal carolina university it's in south carolina i've seen germans that i think that was the first
time i've ever actually met a german from germany um because they actually came there and um yeah
they were pretty tall i'm if i'm being honest um the girls were literally almost my height and the
dudes were a little bit taller than i am some of them not all of them obviously right but uh
that was probably the first time i met german's uh you know handsy on like that but
it was pretty interesting but yeah we're gonna check out this video right now i've never been
an exchange student i've never even been to college before i'm an idiot don't go to school
i'm dumb i'm stupid whatever don't really care but um yeah uh we're gonna try to see what's going on
in this video so uh here uh this uh woman's perspective and uh see what's all about so
if you're new to four guys please do like and subscribe and uh welcome to the forum rest we do
before reactions here and uh everything done here i did before into the reactor which that's who i
am i'm moving to europe i'm actually resident of finland i'm moving to europe soon so y'all want to
go check out the other channel where i'm learning finnish currently right now so a link for that
will be in the comment section so click it and you guys can go check it out i'll leave a link
for my instagram and also for my tic tac because i want to do live videos with you guys once i'm
actually in europe so stay posted for that but you've always got to start into this video hey
guys welcome or welcome back to my channel my name is caroline and today i'm going to be comparing
german and american high school so high school oh so we're not talking we're not talking about
uh college we talk about high school oh she did say high school in the title wow i'm an idiot
so i've been in my german school for about two weeks now and this is just kind of what i've
noticed like the big differences and i just wrote them down so if you see me looking down that's why
okay so my first like german school culture shock is that everyone dresses really nice like
i have barely seen any german teenagers wear like athleisure like leggings and stuff um basically
everyone wears jeans and like nice tops too like everyone looks very put together another thing
that i find kind of funny is the guys usually wear like tighter jeans like skinny jeans and the girls
wear like the baggier like mom jeans another big difference is that they don't have like ac in the
school so you have to open windows so at least at my school my gymnasium uh there's two people
well then i would have never thought about that no ac ac is like a a must component in america like a
must like literally of us just like a fire alarm it's like a must like what no ac dang people that
sit by windows that open and every time you go in that class you have to open the window
a really big difference in german schools is that you don't switch classrooms for example back in my
high school in the u.s if i had biology i would go to the biology room where the biology teacher was
if i had math i would go to the math room but here in germany you have a designated classroom
that you stay in with the same people and then the teachers are the ones that switch so when i have
math class i'm with the math teacher and then the math teacher leaves and like the english teacher
will come in another big difference and this one i really like there's very frequent breaks in german
high school so the classes are 45 minutes long but sometimes there's double sessions at least
in my school so if i have two math classes in a row we do those and then we have like a five to
ten minute break and then we have a longer like 30 minute lunch break or something like that but
basically there's breaks after like every class so you can talk and eat and just hang out outside and
have a break from wearing your mask in my american high school oh so she she'd been she'd been at uh
the ex uh she'd been an exchange student doing covet bro covet is a slap in the face bro like
oh oh man covet like kobe literally did so much like did covet affect me i think
it affected me but i'm not going to say covet affect me negatively because i'm a
type of guy who i look at things in a in a uh you know this negative actually caused this positive
that happened so that's why i'm so i'm more of an uh optimistic type person in terms of
um when something seems not to go the best for me i actually look at it in an optimistic way
that it's given me a gateway for something else so that's really how i look at that but
most definitely covet affected a lot of people a lot of people lost their lives you know it's
it's crazy man it's like it's crazy i'm really happy that kovit is not as dominant as it was
it is still active in doing what it's been doing but it's not as you know potent i had one break
and that was lunchtime the only other breaks we had were like switching between classes and
those are only like four minutes long so you basically have time to go to the bathroom and
go to your class so i really like the breaks at my gymnasium um another big difference is
that there's no cafeteria so in my american high school the school day was like seven hours long
and then you would have a lunch break in the middle of the day like 30 to 45 minutes and
you would eat and catch up on school work if you had to and there's like a designated room for that
like you go to the cafeteria you buy your food or if you brought lunch you you eat your packed
food um so that's what my american high school was like in my german gymnasium there is no cafeteria
there's no designated eating place usually during the breaks people just snack on like a protein bar
or apples or something like that and they just stand and talk with their friends while they eat
and specifically at my gymnasium there's like a little food stand and you can buy some typical
german i guess like baked goods there so there's like a dump noodle i don't know how to say it
right um pretzels and then there's some candy bars too so you can buy food but there's no designated
lunch area another really major difference between my american and german high school is the time
so like i said earlier in my american high school i woke up at like six to go to school
and then i would be there for seven hours and in my german gymnasium it's not like that let
me go grab my schedule real quick and that will explain it better okay so this is my schedule
so as you can see every day is different the classes i take are different how long i'm in
each class uh the time of day i get out of school so for example on monday my classes start at 805
and end at 15 15 which is 3 15 for my american viewers so that day is like a typical seven hour
school day but on like tuesday my classes start at 8 05 but end at 13 15 which is 1 15. so it's
a much shorter school day i hope that explained it decently but um in the u.s every day is the same
and then at half of the year the classes change so for example in the us i would have biology
spanish calculus and social studies and those would be my only four classes for the whole
first part of the year and then halfway through the year it would change to something different
but every day is the same every day is the same length so overall it's a really big
difference between the us and germany um another rule that i was kind of shocked by
that's pretty different um in germany there's very strict phone usage rules in school
like you're not even supposed to have your phone out on lunch break like you're not supposed to
have it out on school grounds basically at all most people take their phones to the breaks
but if you have them or you get caught with them in the classroom like they get taken away
in comparison to the us that's really different because in the us normally some teachers would
let us have our phones on the table as long as we weren't like calling someone or texting someone
while the teacher was speaking it wasn't really that big of a deal but here it's a lot more strict
my last difference i haven't seen that much of my school but at other gymnasiums like other
people in the program have told me smoking is really common among teenagers here in germany
and not like smoking vapes like smoking cigarettes and it's so common that teachers and students will
be smoking cigarettes like right outside the school grounds which is like completely unheard
of in the us normally people will like vape in the bathrooms which obviously isn't allowed but
people do that and then overall no one really smokes cigarettes in the u.s
especially not younger people i think it's pretty unfortunate that it's so common here because it's
obviously not good for you but it's definitely a big difference and it's been interesting to see
oh i also have one more difference that i just thought of so language classes are much different
here than they are in the us so i took like three years of spanish in high school and i
only learned really basic vocabulary and phrases here in germany like in your first year of taking
a language spanish for example you're already forming sentences the books for the class are all
in spanish the teachers strictly speak in whatever language they're teaching which i think is a much
more effective way to learn because it's basically by immersion because you're forced to learn faster
so you can understand what the teacher is saying and it's definitely a lot more effective because
students here are bilingual trilingual most germans here speak multiple languages so i
think learning languages is definitely something see i just tapped in on something unlimited
lingual well shout out to the germans i had no idea that the schooling system was so different
like everything that she said was like literally night and day like that was totally different like
personally for me the only thing i wouldn't necessarily really like is the um two things
uh the phone restrictions oh three things three things phone restrictions the air condition
i really do think it's wonderful to have multiple types of ventilation
um due to the fact that air conditioning can really make you feel really locked in in the
class and sometimes you know getting a little bit of fresh air outside would really be nice as well
and um the phone restriction i really am not the biggest guy on phone restrictions because
you know unnecessary restriction in my humble opinion kind of causes you know people to rebel
for unnecessary reasons so i'm not i've never been a fan of um you know abandoned phones unless it is
um during class like you're currently using the phone during class but uh the four the third
thing is definitely the smoking i would never be happy to see you know people smoking knowing that
it literally says it on the box of the cigarettes you know it's not good for you like i would never
stop anybody from doing it but i would never want them to be doing it because you know i
i don't want anybody to die as badly as um vladimir is when he's invading ukraine i
would rather for him to just seize sees his operation and just you know change his ways
i'd rather for that rather than him dying you know so life is a beautiful thing and we only have one
of it so that's definitely a thing that i would not necessarily celebrate but everything else i
think uh german schools slam dunk bro they doing it better so shout out to germans man y'all be
doing good stuff over there keep doing what you're doing and um yeah i'm out of here guys peace