Welcome back to the Learn English podcast, the podcast teaching English in context so you can learn naturally.
On this podcast, we like to talk about English vocabulary and Sains and American culture.
On today's episode, I want to focus a little bit on that American culture aspect.
I have been teaching English online for a couple of years now, and I've gotten a few questions from students about what schools are like in the United States, and if they're really like the movies.
Yes, high schools and schools in general are almost exactly like how they're shown in the movies.
Now, in the movies, they do make it a little bit more dramatic, which means they have a little bit more interesting things that are occurring at the schools.
But a lot of this stuff is very similar to what you're going to see.
If you were going to go to a school here in the United States, you would see a lot of the things that you see on TV shows and in movies.
So that's what I'm going to talk about today, how the culture of American schools is very similar to what you might have seen in the movies and maybe how sometimes it's not exactly how it's depicted.
With that, follow along because we're about to begin.
A reminder before we start to look at the description of this podcast episode and all of our previous podcast episodes.
In the description, you will find a vocabulary list of the words and phrases that I use in the episode.
That way, you can take these words, study them, and start using them in conversation yourself.
Let's talk a little bit about schools here in the United States.
If you haven't listened to our previous podcast episodes, you might not know that I am a teacher.
I do teach English online for people who are learning English as a second language, but my regular day job, as we would say, the thing that I do Monday through Friday is teach high school.
High school is about age 13 to 18.
It's a period of four years here in the United States that people complete, students complete before they move on to college or university.
And it is a very big time here.
It's a very important part of anyone's adolescence, which is when they are younger before they become an adult.
And the culture of schools here in the United States might be a little bit unique.
There are some things that are shown on TV shows and movies that are definitely true and maybe some things that aren't entirely true.
So let's talk about it, what you would see if you came to school here in the U .S.
The first thing is the yellow school buses.
I had someone say that they didn't think those were real, that those were just things that you see in movies and no, they're definitely real.
Almost everybody who has been a student in the United States has been on a yellow school bus at some point in their life.
So a lot of school districts do use those yellow school buses to take students from wherever they live to school.
That way, their parents don't have to drive them.
Not every school does this.
I would say if you're in a major city like New York, for example, or Washington, D .C., I'll be 100 percent.
I don't know exactly if they have these school buses, but if you're in a big city, maybe people would walk or use public transportation instead.
But if you live in a suburban area or a rural area where there's not a lot of houses, you will see these yellow school buses.
I have been on a yellow school bus in my life.
My mom did take me to school every day.
I didn't take the bus, but the bus was an option.
Where I live, about half a block away from me is a school bus pick up and drop off zone for this neighborhood.
So every morning there are students at that particular spot waiting for the bus.
And every afternoon, they get dropped off at that spot and walk back to their houses that are in my neighborhood.
So it is a very common sight for most of the country, for most of the people in the United States.
Let's talk about what you see when you go into a school.
So you see these yellow school buses dropping off students and then those students go into the actual school themselves.
Some TV shows and movies I know show lower income areas, show dangerous areas, and they will show a lot of police or security guards in front of the schools.
Sometimes they'll even show metal detectors in front of the schools.
Personally, I've never seen that.
I've never seen a metal detector in front of a school.
If you have a metal detector in front of the school, that is a sign that that is a very, very dangerous area.
And most schools don't want that reputation, so they don't have those.
However, there are police and security guards in front of the schools.
Now for younger students, for elementary students, maybe not.
But for the age group that I teach, I teach older students, high school students, there are.
The first school that I ever taught at is in the city that I live in, but in a very bad part of the city that I live in, a very dangerous part.
And the first day of school, it was my first year teaching, my first day of school, there was a lot of police in front of the school.
There was police cars, there were police people standing at the entrance, and the students had to walk past them.
So that is definitely true in some areas.
The school that I teach at now is a lot different.
It's in a lot nicer of an area.
So there are not police in front of the schools every morning, but there are security guards.
So security guards stand in front of the school.
They don't have guns, they don't have handcuffs like police do, but they still stand there.
They're still supposed to watch and just I guess make sure everything's safe and okay when students enter into the actual school itself.
There are police though, sometimes who do come onto campus, we do have one police officer at our school.
And there's also police that will come through with a canine unit.
Canine means dog. So a canine unit is what we call a police dog.
And though they definitely do come into the school, a couple of times a year, they'll come into the school and they search for drugs.
I don't know if in other high schools, if you're in a different country, if you've ever seen a police dog on your campus.
But when I was a high school student, I didn't go to public school.
I went to a private school and we would have them walk through sometimes.
And at the high school I teach, they do come in and they do search classrooms.
So last year, my whole class had to go out of the classroom, all of my students had to leave their stuff behind.
And the police dog went and searched the room.
They didn't find anything.
I don't think my students had anything, but it happens.
I teach at a public school, so students are allowed to wear whatever they would like.
And they're usually very expressive with their fashion choices.
And you get that certain click, clickiness, as we would say.
And that means that students kind of separate and congregate into little groups of their friends.
And because students are able to dress how they want, that is probably one of the areas that's very similar to in the movies.
So the basketball players will be with the basketball players.
The football players will be with the football players.
The cheerleaders will be together.
And the students who are kind of goth will be together wearing their goth gear.
The students who are in the band, the high school marching band, will be together.
And when you walk into the school in the morning, you see all of these different groups.
So that is one thing that they show in the movies.
Like, for example, Mean Girls, I think they go through all the different clicks and all the different groups on school.
That is very, very common in at least here in the United States in this part that I've taught at, the schools that I've taught at, that's very common.
And it's very obvious who is in what group.
Of course, I say it's very obvious because of how they're dressed.
So the football team almost always wears their football jersey, especially on game days.
And I'm talking about American football, not what we call soccer, which is what is called football everywhere else in the world.
I understand that it doesn't make any sense, but American football in the movies and the TV shows is shown to be a big part of high school culture.
And it is. There are TV shows like Friday Night Lights, movies like Remember the Titans that show how important high school football is.
High school football is probably the biggest sport on high school campuses.
I live in a particular part of the country where football isn't necessarily as big as it is in other parts.
So if you're going to go into the South, it's probably even bigger.
But football is a big part of the school culture where I am.
And our football team is horrible.
They're not good at all.
But it's still a very important part.
And the football players will wear their jerseys every game day.
So you know exactly who they are.
That was it was like that at my other school as well.
They always wear their jerseys on game days.
So you know who the football players are.
Kind of if you've seen the TV show Glee, very similar to that.
And it is the biggest money making sport for the school.
So schools sell tickets to the games and football teams usually play on Friday night, which is why the TV show was called Friday Night Lights because it was about a high school football team.
And that is the sport that makes the most money by far.
So other sports are popular.
Other sports do sell tickets to the games and make money.
But the football team is the number one revenue generating team.
And like I said, our football team is not even good and people still pay to go, which is kind of funny.
But if you actually have a really good football team, they're going to make a ton of money.
The basketball team as well, basketball team will usually wear maybe not their jersey, but they wear basketball type clothes.
So you know who's on the basketball team and the cheerleaders who are usually the ones who are cheering at the football and basketball games always wear their outfits.
So again, like you see on the movies and the movies on TV shows, if you've seen the movie, Bring It On or if you've seen other TV shows or movies about high school, yes, the cheerleaders wear their uniforms.
They wear a complete face full of makeup with eyelashes and everything.
They wear their hair up with bows and ribbons.
Yes, that is 100 percent true.
Now, the actual classes themselves, when you're in school, if you're in an elementary school, if you're less than, let's say, 11 years old, you're just in one class all day, you're with one teacher, you don't change.
But if you're in an older age, let's say you're in what we call middle school, which is in between elementary and high school, or if you're in high school, you do change classes.
So you're not with a single teacher and you are the one who moves.
So I've heard from some students that at their schools, they stay in a room and the teacher changes.
That's not what it's like here, I would say, in majority of schools in the United States.
That's not what it's like here.
The students have a schedule and they move from building to building, from classroom to classroom, depending on what class they have.
So we have about 55 minutes for a class, more or less.
And then the bell rings and then students go to their next class.
In terms of the size of our classes, in the TV shows, usually they're shown as pretty large.
And I would say that's true for the most part.
I would say most suburban areas and most urban areas have pretty large schools.
At my school that I teach at, we have 1 ,800 students.
So 1 ,800 is 1 ,800. We have about that many students and my school is considered small.
Our school used to be over 3 ,000 students.
It used to be even larger.
So people did have giant schools.
People did have a lot of people at their high schools, and that's pretty normal.
Now, another part of American high school culture are those announcements that you'll see.
The PA announcements, we call them.
So most schools I would say have a speaker in their room.
It's an intercom. And so the front office can put a message out to the classrooms.
So you don't usually do this in lower grades.
So again, if you're an elementary, if you're a young student, this doesn't usually happen.
But for the higher grades, when you have multiple class periods per day, they usually have announcements.
So originally, this class where they would have announcements was called Homeroom.
And that was the class that you went to.
It wasn't actually class.
It was just for the announcements and for getting information about the day.
It was a very short class and you would leave.
I had that when I was at school.
We had a homeroom class.
When I started teaching, though, the schools that I've taught at, neither of them have had a homeroom class, but they still do the announcements.
So it's just a regular class period.
The first couple minutes of the class period, though, are for the announcements.
So those cheesy announcements, as we would say, cheesy means kind of silly, kind of goofy, kind of funny.
Those announcements do happen.
All right. Those happen every single day.
A student or multiple students get on the PA system and they read the bulletin for the day.
They talk about what sports teams are playing, what important information students need to know, what activities are going on at school.
And they announce them every single day.
So that is definitely part of it.
At my school, they also do a video announcement once a week.
So it's a lot of work.
So they only do it once a week.
But if you have seen the Spider -Man movies with Tom Holland, where they have the video production and they do the news, yeah, that happens.
OK. And yes, the PA announcements and the video announcements sometimes are great.
Sometimes there's like those awkward moments where someone maybe messes up and doesn't know what to do, just like they show in the TV shows and movies like they show in those Spider -Man films.
Yes. One hundred percent that happens for sports teams.
Like I said, sports is a very important part.
And so we have something called pep rallies.
So you might have seen this on Stranger Things or in other depictions of American high schools.
So again, only for high schools have I ever seen this.
So this is for older students.
But there are rallies that you have in the gym.
If you see Mean Girls where they have the principal come and address all the students who are sitting in the bleachers.
Yes, that happens. Yes.
Every year we have multiple rallies for sports, which is where they have a DJ playing music and they have the cheerleaders coming out and cheering and they have the sports teams come out and everyone's supposed to applaud.
And I guess get energized for the sports teams.
So there's multiple of those every single year.
And then there's also just general announcements.
So like in Mean Girls when the principal is talking to all of the students, all the students are supposed to go into the gym and then they give some type of introductory announcements.
For our school that's usually at the beginning of the year, they talk about what the expectations are, which means how they expect someone to behave, which are expected to do at the school.
And that does happen.
So both types, the general announcement one that's supposed to be kind of more informational and an introduction to the school that happens.
And then, of course, the pep rallies and the and the rallies.
Some things that I've experienced that are different from the movies are lockers.
You'll see this almost in every TV show and movie that shows high school.
It's supposed to be for students who have multiple classes.
So, again, not elementary school, but middle school or high school.
You get a locker that you can put your stuff in because you go to different classes.
You need different books, different notebooks for different classes.
And so you're supposed to be able to come and drop off some things at your locker and then take other stuff with you.
It's shown in almost every TV show or movie.
People decorate their lockers and have lockers and there's always scenes that are in the hallways with the lockers.
I will say now that I've been a teacher, I've never seen a locker on campus.
The band members usually get a locker because they have large instruments and they're not supposed to carry those around because they are expensive.
But everyone else doesn't have a locker anymore, which means students just have to carry everything in their backpack.
Lockers have gotten taken out in recent years because they don't want students to have illegal things in them, and they cost money if they get damaged.
And so a lot of schools have taken them out.
So you see that a lot in TV shows and movies, I will say here, where I am in Southern California.
I haven't seen them at public schools, maybe in different parts of the country.
They might still be there, but I haven't seen them where I am at the schools that I've taught at and visited.
I hope you learned something interesting.
I hope you learned a little bit about American school culture, how it is similar to what you see in TV shows and movies, and how it's not, how there are some differences.
I hope you also learned a little bit of some of the vocabulary that we use, the words that we use when we're talking about certain things at school.
And I hope you enjoyed the episode overall.
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