Zoë Perkul is a 9th grader at Berlin Cosmopolitan School in Germany and is working through an internship with Village Green for two weeks for course credit. With permission of the administration, she shadowed a 9th grader from Maplewood for one day at Columbia High School last week. These are her observations.
Let me start off by saying that I do not go to a public school in Berlin, Germany, so I can’t compare public school to public school, but rather public school to private school. I went to Columbia High School for a day to see what it’s like and how it is different from my school, Berlin Cosmopolitan School, an “non-profit international school with a focus on the sciences, music and dance” in Berlin.
I grew up here, in Maplewood, and attended Seth Boyden School from kindergarten through half of third grade, but moved to The Netherlands when I was eight, so I never got the chance to experience American middle school or high school. The only knowledge I had about it was from movies and from the media, and, for the most part, the schools are never portrayed in a positive light.
Right off the bat I was astonished at how big the building was — I definitely would have gotten lost had I not had a guide. The other thing that amazed me were the masses of students pushing their way through the halls. I felt claustrophobic in 10 seconds flat. My school has less than 800 students and it ranges from kindergarten through 12th grade; in the 9th grade, there are 44 students in all, which is considered a large amount.
At one point during my day at Columbia, I was waiting in front of the next classroom that I had to be in and witnessed how, as the bell rang, everyone simultaneously flooded into the hallways. It was exactly like in the movies, as if they had all spoken beforehand and had perfectly timed it.
The size of the school also allowed for many more rooms that were all assigned to a certain subject; in my school every classroom has to flexible for many subjects. My social studies room is also my German room and it is also my philosophy room, if that tells you anything at all.
My school also doesn’t have a bell signaling the beginnings and ends of class periods, so the first time the bell went off I thought it was a fire alarm, which solicited more than a little laughter from my guide.
As with every school, there were some classes that I enjoyed, and others not so much, but when I visited Mr. Boni’s World History class (Napoleon apparently had no game with the ladies) and Mr. Nugent’s Biology class, I thought they were funny and entertaining. I had heard stories about both teachers beforehand, showing that I wasn’t the only one who thought so.
While sitting there in many of the classes, with not a clue what students were learning about, I think I perfected the art of people-watching. Creepy? Yes. However, it did give me a good sense of how the other people felt towards to the class. In the two classes that I just talked about, most of the students were engaging in the lesson, and only a few were online shopping.
Can we please talk about the phone usage at the school? At my school if any staff see that you have your phone out it gets confiscated immediately and there is no way for you to change their mind, I’ve tried. When I was at Columbia everyone was walking around in the halls or sitting in class with their phones out. I asked one student what the rules were concerning the phones and apparently there was a ban on them but there is not enough staff to enforce that with 1,930 students roaming the halls staring down at their screens.
Going to lunch at the 7-Eleven next to the school seemed to be popular because who doesn’t want to spend the majority of their break standing in line? The 7-Eleven has a rule of only having a few students at a time in the store presumably to prevent theft, and the rest of the students have to stand outside the store to wait their turn. Fair enough.
However, I would have to say that by far the biggest difference was the excessive use of the word “word.” Never in my life have I heard that many people say “word” that often and without sarcasm.
Overall, my day at Columbia was really interesting and was even a glimpse into the life I could have had had I stayed in Maplewood instead of leaving for Europe. As for the dissimilarities between my school and Columbia, it couldn’t have been any more different! Just based off of pure size of the building and of the student body, it was slightly overwhelming, to say the least, but at the same time, it was really eye-opening.
