Having the possibility of hosting an exchange student at school is a great opportunity because you can learn about other cultures and daily routines, although I think sometimes American students don’t care about exchange students because they used to have them in their schools so for some of them it is not as special of a thing anymore. In Italy, for example, if a school were to host an exchange student, every student would probably be very interested about knowing that student because most of the cities in Italy don’t have students from abroad, it is normal only in the big cities. 

This is also because American schools, for Italian standards, are insanely huge, so when exchange students come, a lot of people don’t realize that they are there, while in Italy my school, for example, is half the size of Manchester High School so all the students would know if an exchange student came to the school and there will be no doubt that the student would feel special and would have all the eyes on them. If on one side some students don’t care, on the other side there are students who are very interested in knowing about a person who comes from another country and are very helpful if that student needs some help.

For example, if I need help moving on from one class to the next one. One big difference is that in Italy students have to remain in the same classroom for the entire day and for the entire school year because the teachers move through classrooms. Students also have the same classmates for all the years of high school, which in Italy lasts for five years, compared to four like in the US. This aspect could seem positive to the eyes of American students because they that it’s good to not have to run out of the classroom at the end of lesson, but actually a system like the Italian one risks becoming stressful for the students because they have to sit down on the same chairs for five consecutive hours so at a certain point it is difficult to pay attention to the lesson: a class often has the same teacher for two consecutive hours and sometimes it could happens that teacher never stops speaking.

There are teachers that are more understanding than others and decide to divide the lesson in two parts, with a break between them, but it’s just about what a teacher decides to do, school rules don’t tell them to do it. I previously talked about five hours, because that is the time a school day in Italy lasts for most of the highschool (there are other secondary schools that we call “Technic Institutes” and are schools that prepare students to get a job without needing to go to university if they don’t want to. They could last for more time than highschool but not after 2 pm usually), so it’s shorter than a school day in US. 

Another thing is that during those five hours, students have just a ten minute break. Since school goes from 8:05 am to 1:05 pm, students have lunch when they arrive home, not at school like in the US. I think this is a good characteristic of the Italian school system. 

But a thing I really love about American school is the fact that it gives the students the opportunity to practice a sport after school and there are competitions between school teams. I find this is a very funny and healthy aspect of the school here. In Italy the school doesn’t give the same opportunity to the students. If students want to practice some sports, they have to do it on their own and sometimes, for boys and girls that practice a sport at a high level, it is very tough to balance studying and their sporting activities.

It is not rare that students decide to stop doing sport because they want to give priority to school. This does not manage the dreams of the kids to grow up. Italian students often have to study a lot of textbook pages for a written or oral test, they don’t use computers during the lessons like here, and this could be very stressful for them: there are some cases of students that decide to leave the school where they study because of the anxiety and of the stress.

Generally, both schools have both positive and negative aspects. A school day in Italian school is shorter but harder and students learn more topics, but a school day in the US helps students keep a healthy state of mind because students can practice sports and can also deal with studying. I don’t care about which of these two systems is the best, I think it’s simply beautiful to discover how they are different.