Andrea Scalvini, an Italian exchange student who lives in North Port, is one of the nine exchange students in Long Island. I interviewed him to know how an exchange student lives here and to know what differences he noticed between the American and the Italian cultures and habits. He said to me that the school is one of the things here that is very different.
“First of all”he started, “in Italy we have 13th grade and different types of high school and at the end of the middle school we decide what we want to study for the next 5 years”. In Italy he’s studying in a scientific high school so one of the other differences that he noticed is that here you can decide to do only one science class per year, instead in Italy he used to study physics and chemistry together.
“One of the coolest differences is that here you have pretty much the same schedule everyday and you have lockers!”, in fact in Italy we have the same schedule every week but not everyday because we take thirteen subjects and we don’t have lockers. “The schedule is different also in timing,” he explained. “In Italy we have 6 period, every period last 55 minutes excepting for two periods that last an hour. In the half of the schedule we have a break of 20 minutes when we can eat something because during the lessons most of teacher doesn’t permit to eat. So yes, we don’t have lunch at school. We came back home and than we have lunch, and a lot of high school have lessons even on Saturday morning.”
Speaking of meals he also added, “My host family thinks that I have breakfast in a weird way because I don’t eat as much as they do. That’s the way I do it, I mean, our most important meal is lunch so we don’t have a big breakfast but a big lunch and a small dinner. You here have a huge breakfast, a very small lunch and a big dinner.” He also found it interesting that here the diet is full of proteins instead of carbohydrates like in Italy.
“Fun fact: everyone here asks me question, unfortunately they asked me also weird questions like if in Italy we speak Italian or if we have cars! And also everyone think that spaghetti with meatballs and chicken parmigiana are two real Italian dishes when they’re not.” The strange fact is that in Italy we study other cultures and it’s strange thinking that other countries don’t do that, and he says that receiving all this questions about his country helped him to know more about both cultures.
“A very nice cool thing is the spirit of the school, I loved the spirit week and Pep Rally, we don’t have this kind of things in Italy.” He’s right, in my own experience I can attest to this – we don’t have school sports teams. For us the school is just focused on studying and if you want to practice a sport you have to find an organization out of the school, so celebrations of schools team, like Pep Rally, doesn’t exist in Italy.
This also changes the way you obtain a scholarship for the university. “If you want a scholarship you need to be focused in school and have beautiful grades, usually 8 or higher, that means to have A or a higher grade in all the classes.” Here is very different, in fact you need to be good in a sport to be noticed by colleges and obtain a scholarship. Italian university are not as expensive as American colleges because we don’t have dorms in our university. If you’re studying in another region you need to rent a house with other students.
“Playing soccer and watching football games also makes me notice that we don’t sing our national anthem before every game like you do here, and we actually don’t listen to someone singing it but we sing it altogether. ” This is a very interesting thing because we sing the national anthem only if national teams are playing and not normal teams.
“Other two things that you have that I’m excited to be a part of are the prom and the graduation”. An Italian girl dream is to go to the prom because we don’t have anything like this and we think it’s like a fairy tale. We also like the graduation because we don’t celebrate our graduation after the senior year we’re just happy because we just finished our huge high school exam called “maturità” so we don’t have a big celebration like you do.
A really big difference is the relationship between teachers and students. He said “I find very helpful the american close relationship between teachers and students but also strange because we have a really strict vision and behavior to have with our teachers.”
The last question of the interview was “Do you find the american high school easier ?” He said “Yes, definitively and also funnier and I would make the same decision (to become an exchange student) million times again if I could.”