I was an exchange student in high school with AFS (formerly American Field Service); I went to Bolivia. When I arrived at the high school, over 30 years ago, my math and science were significantly beyond what they were studying, and my two years of high school Spanish were comparable to the level of English of the students. When my sisters and I were in high school, our family hosted kids from Sweden, France, and Chile. The students from these countries were not able to keep up with the honors classes at our high school and enrolled in easier classes.
Today, it’s a completely different story.
Virtually every AFS high school student comes to the US ahead of our kids in math, statistics, chemistry, physics, and biology; even ahead of our elite kids.
The experience of the two students we hosted in our house is pretty typical. Both took the physics and honors math classes. While very difficult for most of the American kids, AP physics was just a review for our exchange students, both of whom had completed their sophomore years. The types of problems that our students are expected to solve are simplified versions of the problems that they are expected to handle in their classes. While our homework problems involve at most two or three steps to solve, they were used to solving intricate word problems that involved multiple principles.
As an example, one of our physics tests had a problem to calculate the speed of a roller coaster car at the top of a full loop. Our Chinese exchange student couldn’t believe the problem was that simple, so she went on to compare the speed to the pull of gravity to calculate the spot in the loop where the car would fall down, because the speed was not high enough to counteract the force of gravity. These were all formulas that had been studied in class, but American students were not expected to be able to integrate all of the different principles to fully solve the problem. In fact, only about half of the students were able to solve the simplified problem.
Over the last five years, I have worked with over 50 high school students who have come to the US for a year; most are A or B students in their countries and go to public schools. In talking with AFS students from France, Italy, Germany, Thailand, Austria, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Uruguay, Brazil, and Bolivia I hear the same story. The classes that they take at their American high schools are a year or two behind what they take back home.
Additionally, the English language skills of the AFS students are far superior to the foreign language skills of our students. They have a larger vocabulary, they are expected to read books in English every year, and spend time watching English language films and television. In the five years my son took Spanish, including AP Spanish, they never read a single book. |
