The title sounds ominous and scary but its not, I promise. This is the post where I will finally try and talk about school in France and hopefully I will succeed without passing on too much false info. :)
I'm just going to start out by saying that the two school systems are very different. I'm just talking about high school here, it's complicated enough as it is.
In France, there's only 3 years of high school and 4 years of middle school. There are three types of lycées: general, professional and technique. General lycées are where you go and take general courses for Seconde (10th grade) and then you choose a "serie" before going into Première (11th grade). "Series" are like paths you can go down to choose a career. My lycée is a general lycée, so we have the standard "series": L- literature, S-science, ES- economics, STMG- sciences et technologies du management et de gestion and ST2S- sciences et technologies de la santé et du social. These are all options to choose in function of what you want to do for a living. Say you want to be a doctor, you would go into the serie S, because that is where they specialize in science. If you want to be a writer, it would be better to go into L (literature) than S, for example, because L focuses on writing and literature. However, you can only go into a serie if your advisor/counselor agrees and your grades are sufficient.
In a lycée professionnel, you go directly into the profession that interests you: for example, if you want to build airplanes, you go to a lycée professionnel and you learn to work on real airplanes. You also do "stages" which is like going to a workplace for a week and working there along with the employees to get a feel for the job.
After two years in the serie (11th-12th grades), the student has to take a really big test, called the BAC exam, that basically determines whether you can keep going to university or not. If you fail the BAC, you either have to retake the test (there's about 14/15 days of tests) that you didn't pass or if you failed more than one or two, you have to either redo the last year or switch series all together (but this is rare). What is a bummer is that even if you have great grades all throughout your high school years, if you screw up on the BAC, you can't graduate. Which sucks. All in all, its très compliqué and I constantly stress about the BAC before remembering that I don't have to take it. Oops.
**OKAY les amis français, j'ai fait de mon mieux pour expliquer votre system scolaire ultra-compliqué, donc ne moquer pas de moi si j'ai pas tout correcte. D'accord? D'accord.**
Anyways, for all you peeps who aren't french, that is my best effort to try and explain the school system. Its very hard to get. Even I, after 2 1/2 months here, don't really get it. OH well.
Thats all for this week!
bises,
Cecilia
(no pictures because I've been in school and its not exciting enough to take pictures there)
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