Canadian Schools vs. American Schools

When I was in California with a friend, we were out front of Knotts Berry Farm for the shuttle to take us back to our hotel. As we were waiting, a woman came up to us and started chatting with us. She asked where we were from and once she heard Canada, she started to ask questions, the one that stuck out the most was if Canada was like anything like Degrassi. Which got me thinking of how different schools are in both Canada and in America or how people think what they see on TV is what Canada is really like. There are things that Canadian schools don’t have or don’t do and people assume it's something that happens. 

We call it grad, not prom and it’s something we don’t obsess over. When it’s that time of year, we start talking about it. We also don’t have Prom Queen and King. It's something that I’ve never heard happening in Canada. Grad isn’t something that we spend a lot of time focusing on. We do have something called dry grad that happens after the dinner/dance and goes well into the early morning hours. We would fundraise for that throughout the year and it's something you don’t have to do if you don't want to. Just like prom, we don’t have homecoming and we didn’t have homecoming king and queen. 

A lot of school districts don't have middle school or junior high. The school district I went to had at point middle school and junior high. One of the elementary schools was originally a middle school, but by the time I was old enough to attend school, there wasn’t any middle school or junior high. Elementary school was kindergarten to grade 7 and high school was grade 8 through 12. That transition from elementary school to high school was easy for me since by the time I got to grade 8, my brother was already in grade 11 so I knew a lot of people already by the time I got there. 

My high school was originally a senior secondary school, but back in the early 1990s, the senior and junior secondary schools joined together to become a secondary school and moved into a new building, which is still standing in that spot more than 30 years later. 

In Canada, we don’t call grades, freshman, sophomore, junior or seniors. We may use senior and junior for sports like senior boys basketball or junior girls volleyball, but if we’re talking about grades, we say either grade 8 or the 8th grade and since a lot of school districts have high schools with grades 8-12, we wouldn't have a name for the 8th graders. 

SATs aren’t a thing in Canada. I never had to take them. College isn’t really a big deal in Canada. You can go to college or university if you want too, but there’s no pressure in having to start applying to colleges in grade 11 and 12. There’s no pressure in taking extra classes to get that extra credit or taking a class that may look good on your college resume. You don’t have to do extracurricular activities like student council, debate team or being the star quarterback of the football team to make yourself look good for college.

Sports are different as well. We don’t have Friday night football games where the whole town comes out and watches and cheers for the home team. I’ve never been to a high school football game. The only school sport I went to was basketball. My brother was on the team so I went to watch him play. It also helped that the other players on the team had siblings that also went to the games so I would hang out with them during the game. They were also the same group of players that also played baseball with my brother so it wasn’t like I didn’t already know their brothers and sisters. Baseball wasn’t a school sport that my school district had. It was a club/city sport. 

We’re not as competitive with sports as in the states. We had other schools that were our "rivals,” but it was never that serious. I knew people that attended the other high school in my hometown. 

Schools can be different in other provinces. They may share the same traditions as schools in America, but where I grew up and attended school, high school was nothing like what we see on TV and in movies. Some places in Canada have middle school and junior high, but it's something I never experienced. 

Canadian Colleges and Universities may have something similar like sororities and fraternities and other things like what they do in the states, but I’ve never seen or heard anything regarding Animal House type environments/situations.

Compared to when and where my parents went to school, my experience and education was different than theirs. They went to multiple schools growing up whereas I only went to two schools and remained in the same school district.