NCHS offers an opportunity to international students to further feel the school spirit

Claudia Garcia Dochao, Reporter
@cgarciacourant

Taking the bus to get to school, watching high school sports games, spirit weeks, homecoming and prom are things that may sound normal for most us students. However, for someone that comes from a different country, all these seemingly typical events sound like something that only happens in Disney Channel movies that they will never experience. 

Last year that was me. I was born in Madrid, Spain’s capital, and lived there my whole life, until I decided to do an exchange year in my junior year. I used to go to school there, it was in the center of the city and it was an old catholic school named “Nuestra Señora del Loreto”, it had students from 3 to 18 years old.  Before I got accepted into CLS, a program that offers scholarships to study abroad and allowed me to study in the US, getting ready to go to prom with my friends seemed like something I would never experience. I wasn’t conscious of the change between schools in the US and in Spain. However, the second I stepped into the school I knew that from then everything would be completely different. 

However, I’m not the only one who experienced this great change. Junior Anne Koowinder-Gott has attended school in both the Netherlands and Costa Rica, apart from the US, “There’s been quite a difference between all of my schools, ” Anne said. “I went to two schools, one in Costa Rica from the year 2019 to 2022 and I went to school in Holland from 2016 to 2019. My school in Holland was a public school and it was pretty big. I think there were 1700 students at that school and my school in CR had about 100-200 students in total.”

Sports in New Canaan are a prominent thing, in high school and college they offer a variety of sports people start practicing from a really young age, just like football, hockey, baseball and lacrosse among others. They become an opportunity to get a scholarship for college if you’re an outstanding player and students normally take sport really seriously. However, in other countries, like Spain, sports don’t play the same role as they do here. Not a lot of people play sports, and if they do they  “Sports here were definitely not like there, we didn’t have fun things so you wouldn’t see the sports you see here like lacrosse, football, golf, tennis,” Anne said. “All we had was soccer and the boys soccer didn’t get a team until 2020, and the girls soccer team was made in  2021.” 

In Spain this was similar. We would have a small amount of options to play sports, including soccer, volleyball and basketball. But we would only play between other teams in our city. Games weren’t a big thing either, students wouldn’t go support the school teams, since it wasn’t such a big thing. 

New Canaan offers students the opportunity to choose the classes they want to take, in order to prepare them for their future majors in college. “You didn’t get to choose what classes you took up until you were in 11th grade,” said Anne. “Until 11th grade you got assigned the simple math class, English, history, science, Spanish and gym. And when you got into 11th or 12th grade you would start your IB program and within each class you got to choose if wanted to go into the higher or standard lever and in math class you got to choose between two types of math, if you wanted to go more into arts section so you would have more art classes.” 

In Spain it was very similar, you were assigned basic classes that included math, history, english, PE, spanish, science (biology, geology, physics and chemistry), history and geography. You would have this same class until you got to freshman year, where you could add two elective classes.

 Another thing I love about school here are free periods. When I’m feeling really tired at school and I really need a break, a free period where I can go to Starbucks or Dunkin is a life savior. Even if I have to study for a test or finish a project, that hour and a half is all I need. However, in Spain we didn’t have free periods at all and classes were only 45 minutes long each, so you would have almost all of your classes in one day. Similarly, in Costa Rica, “Our classes were only 50 minutes long and we didn’t have a schedule where we had 4 classes a day, we had 6-8 classes in one day and it was the same throughout the whole week except each day the order of the classes would change” Anne said.

Apart from the normal classes, New Canaan also lets their students choose between a large variety of  elective classes and join clubs after school so they can follow their interests and learn about them. “We didn’t really have clubs in Costa Rica” Anne said, “ if you wanted to organize something you could, but there wasn’t anything specific since people tended to live 30 minutes away from school and it was hard to make them stay after school”. 

But even though there are some big differences, schools around the world also share the need to help others by organizing fundraisers, donations, community work, etc. “We had a lot of fund-raisers that were made by students, like a student would come up with a fund-raiser for a pet shelter and they would organize a karaoke night, or they would come up with a fund-raiser for indigenous families and they would come up with a movie night,” Anne said.

After this year being a student in NCHS I can say I have a whole different perspective of high school and college. During this year I could further my education in topics I like and I wouldn’t be able to study if I was in Spain with the electives and variety of classes. It’s been a great experience and opportunity for me and it has helped me prepare better for college.