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[TD1]

http://vimeo.com/38013872

HOLY
Argh
The end came as a....surprise that nearly made me hit the ceiling.

[IronTomato]

I find it easy to talk to girls, but being gay is probably a factor.

And then there's IronTomato, who finds it extremely easy to talk to anyone, but needing to do it pisses him off because he hates everyone.

Oh, and the first day of my 10th grade year comes in a few days. I'm sure this will be absolutely swell.

[Orange Wizard]

I still haven't figured out how these American "grades" work. How old is the average 10^th grader? I'm assuming it doesn't directly correlate to the NZ Year 10, which is populated primarily by fourteen year-olds. Unless IronTomato is fourteen, but I'll never know, because I can't be arsed to check.

Also, why is it starting in August? (September?) Why not at the start of the year, like sensible education systems?

[Furtuka]

American 10th grade is for 15-16 year olds, and is also known as High School Sophomore year

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Grade+6=Age. Birthdays and early starters throw it off, but most will follow that formula.

[penguinofhonor]

I was always Grade+5.

[Orange Wizard]

I was always Year+3, because I skipped a year and the default formula here is Year+4. First year of highschool is 11.

[ShadowHammer]

I find it easy to talk to girls, but being gay is probably a factor.

And then there's IronTomato, who finds it extremely easy to talk to anyone, but needing to do it pisses him off because he hates everyone.

Oh, and the first day of my 10th grade year comes in a few days. I'm sure this will be absolutely swell.

Same with me, except I'm not really sad about it.

I still haven't figured out how these American "grades" work. How old is the average 10^th grader? I'm assuming it doesn't directly correlate to the NZ Year 10, which is populated primarily by fourteen year-olds. Unless IronTomato is fourteen, but I'll never know, because I can't be arsed to check.

Also, why is it starting in August? (September?) Why not at the start of the year, like sensible education systems?

I'm in Canada, so it's grade + 5 (well, I was born late in the year, so it's currently +4 for me, but it is +5 for most people).
It is starting in September for exactly that reason: a sensible education system would start at the beginning of the year, and our system wants to make sure that nobody ever mistakes it for being sensible.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

The real reason it starts in August/September is because it marks the end of Summer farmwork, which was crucial in getting children to actually attend public school when farmers were a large portion of the population. Even now, there is still a problem of poorer children not going to school because they have to work for their family in some capacity.

There are Year-Round schools which do away with Summer vacation entirely in favor of evenly distributed vacation weeks, but this system has thus far proven terminally unpopular.

[Arcvasti]

I find it easy to talk to girls, but being gay is probably a factor.

And then there's IronTomato, who finds it extremely easy to talk to anyone, but needing to do it pisses him off because he hates everyone.

Oh, and the first day of my 10th grade year comes in a few days. I'm sure this will be absolutely swell.

Same with me, except I'm not really sad about it.

Same here. I have absolutely no idea what is going to hapen. The school board is either insane or so out of touch with what's actually hapening as to be functionally so. At least my school is getting renovations or something this year for actually being dilapidated enough to warrant a grant.

I still haven't figured out how these American "grades" work. How old is the average 10^th grader? I'm assuming it doesn't directly correlate to the NZ Year 10, which is populated primarily by fourteen year-olds. Unless IronTomato is fourteen, but I'll never know, because I can't be arsed to check.

Also, why is it starting in August? (September?) Why not at the start of the year, like sensible education systems?

I'm in Canada, so it's grade + 5 (well, I was born late in the year, so it's currently +4 for me, but it is +5 for most people).
It is starting in September for exactly that reason: a sensible education system would start at the beginning of the year, and our system wants to make sure that nobody ever mistakes it for being sensible.

It starts in September because September is the end of warm weather[Usually]. A cold Canadian is an industrious Canadian! And we want all that industry from frozen young ones to be channeled into EDUCATION!

[tuypo1]

The real reason it starts in August/September is because it marks the end of Summer farmwork, which was crucial in getting children to actually attend public school when farmers were a large portion of the population. Even now, there is still a problem of poorer children not going to school because they have to work for their family in some capacity.

There are Year-Round schools which do away with Summer vacation entirely in favor of evenly distributed vacation weeks, but this system has thus far proven terminally unpopular.

unpopular yes but it works better then a long arse single vacation

[Lord Shonus]

I still haven't figured out how these American "grades" work. How old is the average 10^th grader? I'm assuming it doesn't directly correlate to the NZ Year 10, which is populated primarily by fourteen year-olds. Unless IronTomato is fourteen, but I'll never know, because I can't be arsed to check.

Also, why is it starting in August? (September?) Why not at the start of the year, like sensible education systems?

The typical American begins 13 years of compulsory education (with caveats, many don't complete it and drop out in high school) at the age of five (sometimes six). The first year of schooling is called Kindergarten, and was formerly little more than a glorified day care for part of the day that taught a few extremely basic skills such as the alphabet and counting, hence why it doesn't have a number. Nowadays, the cirriculum is quite a bit more advanced (early childhood education in general is far more advanced than it was when I was a small boy, with Sesame Street and other preschool programs covering shockingly sophisticated subjects such as set theory, gravity, and verb tenses), and K students generally go the entire day.

As for starting at the end of summer, our school system is still locked in an agricultural paradigm, with students off school during the summer months (not even ten years ago, school didn't start until the second week of September, now many start in the third or second week of August) because that was a very busy time in old-timey farming (global warming has shifted the growing season a bit, so it no longer matches up), and nobody would have even considered sending kids to school when there was critical work to be done. Starting after the summer closure reduced the amount of forgetting.

[Orange Wizard]

Oooookay. In NZ "kindergarten" refers to a place where you send children younger than five for whatever reason. It's also known as "preschool" and it sometimes includes basic education in counting, speling, etc. School starts at age five (generally), which is year one, and continues to year thirteen. School is compulsory up to the age of sixteen, regardless of what years you have completed.

Summer in the southern hemisphere is in December to February, so school starting in February makes sense.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

We have preschools, but they're pretty much exclusively private institutions.

[Lord Shonus]

Not exactly. We do have Head Start, which is a semi-federal preschool.