I think your characterization of Americans, though, is quite offensive. Speaking specifically of your experiences, as unfortunate as they sound, is one thing and that can certainly provide an interesting view of things. You make the suggestion, though, that all Americans fit this mold, that the stereotype is correct. That’s where you venture into the offensive. You’re also incorrect in that suggestion.

As for a source on American high schools, nearly everything you’ll find is written from some vantage point or another so you’ll get a skewed version of the truth. You really need to get inside the system and see it for yourself. There have been a few documentaries about American public education that you might want to watch, most recently Waiting for Superman on one side and Race to Nowhere on the other. I’d suggest getting sources that promote the two ends of extremity and finding the middle ground. That’s likely more accurate than any single source. Take a look at the Common Core standards and keep your eyes trained on the testing measures of those standards. That should give you at least an idea of the direction public education is headed in America. There is, of course, discussion about whether or not that direction is the correct one, but I’ll leave that for a later date!

*…it has its merit…*
*…I had the chance…*

And high schools almost always transformed into hight schools. Embarrassing.

I read what you wrote right after that, out of curiosity, but in that state of mind, I couldn’t quite distinguish what YOU wanted to say and what HE said with your words. I should have taken a day or two to cool off and read it with fresh eyes. I apologize, because my words came through a lot harsher than what I’d usually say.

Now that I managed to look at it objectively and forget for a moment that it’s an American idea, I see that the it has it’s merit, though teachers here prefer to give a mixed feedback of positive and negative comments. You see, it’s customary to give a short verbal comment on the work when the teacher hands the papers out which usually focuses on the personal development of the student. It’s face to face, which might be a bit more personal. Alas, our classes usually consist of 30 students, and a teacher usually doesn’t teach in more than four or five classes, so that might be a factor in it.

I should have taken the culture difference into consideration as well, because we know close to nothing about American hight schools, and it’s a widespread stereotype here that American public high schools produce stupid, uneducated people. No offence meant, but my experience with the twenty or so American exchange students I’ve the chance to know fit into this prejudice. They were rather well-off in financial terms, all of them came from private hight schools and each and every one of them was painfully lacking in almost every subject.

I mean, I’m more science orientated and struggled with history, but to put WWI and WWII (Modern History) and the Hundred Years’ War (Medieval History) into the same century is a worrying sign of ignorance. And that’s only one example.

I’m not sure if they were only separated cases of “I have money, I don’t need brains” or a more widespread phenomena, but I’d like to read or hear about American Hight Schools, if you could suggest a reliable source. The sources I know are heavily biased in favour of the European system.

Thank you in advance, and I sincerely apologize for the harsh words once again.

Anna, this is not a joke. And I am an English teacher. I don’t feel comfortable using shame to teach. That anyone was a laughing stock suggests to me a classroom climate that I do not want to engender.

I do think that the different systems, though, have us looking at this issue from distinctly different angles. You should keep that in mind going forward because anything called an “elite” high school will be a departure from the average American comprehensive high school.

I have written negative feedback in the past, lots of it. I’ve spent as much as 10 minutes per paper commenting (multiply that by 165 and then 5 or 6 times a year and you have a sense of how much of my time I give over to this feat)… and it’s never fixed the problems. I have never, ever had a student realize what a subject-verb error is because I commented on it or had them correct their paragraphs or circled every transgression of the rule on their paper, in red or any other color. The next paper is full of the same problems and all that time I spent commenting did nothing, at least in the short term. I’m just not seeing a return on investment for all of my indications of where the papers have gone wrong. So if it’s not working and few of my colleagues see it working on a regular basis, why are we still doing it?

You seem to think I’m giving a comment about what I like even when I do not like something. I assure you that’s not the case. I do set standards and I do stick to them. The grade on the paper doesn’t change just because I only leave positive feedback. If the grammar is horrible, the grade reflects that. If the sentence variety is that of a sixth grader, the rubric score points that out. My comments, however, focus on the things they should do again in future writing. I let the rubric and any discussion we have indicate what they need to avoid.