Claudia Serrano in the USA

- Can you remember how your first experience on American English was once you were in the USA?

Before leaving, they told me it wouldn’t be easy to understand the language, but I thought they were just trying to scare me. Well, they weren’t. During the first days, I felt like I didn’t even know what language they were speaking. Here’s an example: it was the first class of my first day of high school and I was very nervous. The girl next to me said: Hi, my name is Kya. I don’t know why, I didn’t understand her the first time, so I asked: sorry? She repeated it again and again and again. It took me four times to understand her, and that was only a very short sentence, so imagine when I tried to understand my America Studies teacher talking about how Colon discovered America, it was almost impossible. After a couple weeks, I started getting used to it and after I couple months it wasn’t a problem to understand them.

Winter Carnival

- What do you do every day and how is a normal day in an American family?

On a school day, I used to get up at 7am, get ready, have breakfast and drive to school with my sister. School started at 8 and it was over at 14:45. After that, I usually had practice. Then I used to go home, do my homework, have dinner, watch TV or do something with the family and go to bed.

Weekends were completely different; we used to have a big breakfast and then do lots of different stuff like shopping, hiking, hanging out with some friends, going to the movies, etc. It is also very common to have sleepovers very often.

- How is your life at the High School?

High School in America is completely different from Spanish schools. In my case, I had 4 classes every day, which were called periods or blocks, an each period lasted for one hour and a half. We had a 10min break after first block and we had a 22min break at around 12 to have lunch. After school, many people played sports. Most popular sports are football, baseball and basketball. Each school has its own teams, so you play for your school, not for a private club. High school is more than just classes; there are clubs like the drama club or the math club. They also celebrate two dances at the high school, homecoming at the beginning of the school year and prom at the end of it.

In general, school is easier in America than in Spain; you don’t need to do much homework because you work a lot in class and exams don’t have as much importance as here. A part from that, you can choose your classes, so you can make your own schedule and take the classes that you like the most. There are also some fun classes like foods (cooking), music, art, drama, etc.