Understand the American high school credit system.
Most American high schools implement the credit system. In San Francisco, for example, students must complete 230 credits in high school, including English, mathematics, science, social sciences, foreign languages, visual and performing arts, health, college and vocational education, physical education and elective courses. The diversity of subjects often makes people feel that there is no pressure to choose courses in American credit system high schools, but in Fang's view, the "freedom" of the credit system is only conditional freedom, and American students also have pressure to enter higher schools, and the subject setting is progressive. High school should take AP courses, and there must be no less related basic courses.
Li and Li are tenth graders at Linkin High School. They are good friends. At eight o'clock every morning, after the bell rings for the first class, Deng Qiang goes into the classroom 30 1 and has an English class there. Li walked into classroom 303, and his first class was geometry. In the sixth class, they will attend Class 204 together, because they all choose the career course taught by Teacher Fang.
Lincoln High School is a public high school located in San Francisco, California, USA. Like all ordinary high schools in California, Lincoln High School has a credit system.
In the United States, if the credit system is implemented in high schools, the credits for graduating from public high schools are determined by the education committees of each campus according to the requirements of state governments, universities and educational certification institutions. In the San Francisco Unified Campus, high school students must earn at least 230 credits to be eligible for graduation. Of course, the requirements for graduation are not limited to these. In addition to obtaining at least 230 credits, students must pass the California High School Graduation Examination to obtain a high school diploma.
The high school credit system in San Francisco United Campus is like this: among the 230 credits required for graduation, students must take 40 credits in English, 30 credits in mathematics and 20 credits in science (including biological science 10 and material science 10, such as physics, chemistry and comprehensive science). ) 30 credits for social science (including world history, American history, economy and American politics), 20 credits for foreign languages, 5 credits for visual or performing arts 10, 5 credits for health education, 5 credits for college and vocational education, and 20 credits for physical education; The rest of the credits are elective courses.
How are the credits determined? Usually, if a student can get "D" or above in a class in one semester, even if he gets 5 credits, he can get 10 credits in one year. In Lincoln High School, students have six classes at school every day, and the classes are the same every day. In this way, if students pass all the courses, they can get 60 credits every academic year. Therefore, students usually study for four years from the ninth grade and pass all courses every year before they are eligible to graduate.
However, if a student fails one course, there is no credit, and students are not allowed to attend more than six classes every day. Therefore, this student must attend summer school to make up lessons before graduating from high school, or study one or six months more than others.
How much freedom does the credit system give students? Can students take any courses they want? The answer is no.
First, every course has so-called "qualification requirements", that is, what conditions are required for students to take this course. For example, "Calculus" requires students to pass the course of "trigonometric function" before taking the exam; "trigonometric function" requires students to pass the course of "advanced algebra" before taking the exam; Advanced Algebra requires students to pass Elementary Algebra and Plane and Solid Geometry, or attend classes at the same time. Therefore, as long as they are classmates in the same grade, more than 80% of the students who enter the third year of high school are in the same class, but at most the teachers are different.
Secondly, some courses are specially designed for students of a certain grade. Students who do not meet the qualification requirements in this grade can of course participate, but they will soon find themselves at a loss.
For example, most ninth-grade students will take the course "University and Vocational Education". Of course, students can take classes in the twelfth grade. However, they will soon find that career choice education has been teaching students how to prepare for college applications since the ninth grade, and they have been delayed for two years. Many things that should have been done in ninth grade have been missed.
For another example, 11th grade students usually take American literature as their English course and American history as their social science course. In this way, what we have learned in literature and history can be compared with each other and deepen our understanding. But if a student studies American literature in the tenth grade, because the social science class in the tenth grade is world history, it loses the effect of mutual comparison.
Will the credit system implement "quality education" so that students can choose a series of courses according to their hobbies to improve their quality? The answer is also no.
As a system, the credit system really wants to give students some freedom (for example, 60 credits is an elective course) to choose courses that can improve their quality. Therefore, Lincoln High School set the goal of 1940 as "promoting the all-round development of students" rather than "preparing talents for universities". Therefore, the elective courses currently offered by Lincoln High School are: computer art; Computer network maintenance; Environmental science; Accounting preliminary; Wealth planning; Office clerk training; Banking training (jointly organized with big banks such as Citibank); Bioengineering technology; Photography and darkroom technology; Stage technology; Interior design; Architectural drawing; Psychology; Journalism and a series of sports elective courses include golf, fencing, fitness, bowling, archery, shooting, swimming, weightlifting, various ball games, wrestling and so on.
However, these very attractive elective courses are only taken by very few people every year, so that many courses are simply not enough for students. Why is this happening? It turns out that most of these elective courses do not play any role when applying for universities, and the annual "enrollment rate" is 97%. At Lincoln High School, 49% of the students are from China.
It turns out that because there is no so-called "college entrance examination" in the United States, when a famous university considers recruiting a high school student, whether the student has a certain academic level and can continue his studies in the university mainly depends on what courses the student has taken in high school and how his grades are. This is especially true for popular majors in prestigious schools with fierce competition.
In addition, because many courses in the first year of American universities can be delegated to high schools in the name of "advanced placement", high school students can get university credits as long as they complete these courses and pass the national unified examination hosted by the university board of directors. The more credits a student gets from a university, the more he can prove his academic ability.
Because everyone wants to go to college and study famous universities and popular majors, of course, they try their best to choose elective courses that can help them win in the competition. For example, the electronic engineering major at the University of California, Berkeley is a very, very popular major. Because there are too many competing students, the threshold for admission is rising, and now high schools basically require students to take calculus before college; It takes one and a half years of physics and four years of foreign language to meet the minimum requirements.
However, students must be qualified to study calculus in pre-university and must study high school mathematics for five years (geometry in the first year; Advanced algebra in the second year; Trigonometric function in the third year; Calculus in the fourth year, calculus before college in the fifth year); To obtain the qualification of college physics, students must first take biology; Chemistry, biology or chemistry before college, and advanced physics in that half year can't be taken at the same time as high school physics in that year. Therefore, many students have to take two math or science classes every day in order to meet this requirement in the four years of high school.
Students can only have six classes a day, how can they have time to take elective courses? Even if there are, students will not take those irrelevant elective courses, because academic courses have overwhelmed students. Let's take a tenth grade student as an example. If he wants to go to a famous university, his daily schedule may be like this: English, advanced mathematics, AP pottery, AP world history, physical education and chemistry.
The tenth grade English class requires students to analyze 10 novels. So they have to read dozens of novels every day, and at the same time find materials to analyze. One hour is for sure; Math class must have an hour's homework; World history is a university course, and it takes about two hours to find information, read and do research study in the library. Chemistry homework is usually difficult, it takes about an hour. Although students finish school at 3: 30 every afternoon. But you must spend one hour doing English and two hours doing world history homework every day. One hour of chemistry homework and one hour of math homework. Together, it takes at least five hours a day to finish all the homework.
In addition, if you want to prepare for the exam, or students' English ability is not so good, it will take more time to understand the textbook by looking it up in the dictionary. Everyone says that studying in the United States is easy and stressful. However, as I have taught, all students who want to go to a good university have to do their homework until late at night every night. Many people even go to bed at six in the afternoon and then get up at two in the morning to do their homework, because they can concentrate in the dead of night. With so much pressure, who dares to choose bowling instead of trigonometry? Unless he doesn't want to go to college!
Even some very good elective courses are often ignored. For example, the courses offered by Lincoln High School in cooperation with some big banks allow students to study and have paid internships in banks, or even work in banks after graduation. However, because these courses can't give students a competitive advantage when applying for universities, there are few candidates.
On the other hand, due to the above-mentioned elective courses, teachers must have relevant licenses to teach. For example, the teacher who taught Auto Repair before Lincoln High School not only had a license to teach auto repair, but also provided technical guidance for Toyota Motor Corporation to train auto repair technicians. However, because there are few students in elective courses, they can't start classes, and people who want to be teachers won't read licenses. Therefore, when the teacher retires, Lincoln High School can no longer hire a licensed teacher to teach the subject of "auto repair".
There is no so-called "academic value", that is, elective courses recognized by universities, which gradually disappear with fewer and fewer students taking elective courses. In high schools in San Francisco, courses such as Home Economics, Sewing Machine Maintenance, Woodworking, Metalworking, Typing, Computer Programming and Cooking have disappeared. Courses such as "auto repair" and "banking" have long since disappeared, and only one high school is struggling to support these courses. When the teachers who taught these courses retired, it was time for these courses to enter history.
However, some indomitable schools and teachers are still tirelessly saving these elective courses. The rebirth of the endangered course Photography and Darkroom Technology is an example. The teacher who taught this course successfully changed the course to "digital photography technology" and applied for recognition from the university. As a result, it was recognized as one of the courses of visual arts and successfully squeezed into the queue of "academic courses".
However, not all elective courses are so lucky. As long as students and parents think that going to college is the only way to gain a foothold in society, the fate of elective courses will not be bright.