British Student .ca

People at university talk a lot about their experiencees at school. It’s hard to be part of conversations when I don’t know what school level they’re talking about. In simple UK school year – 1 = Canadian/USA grade. When I noted down the school names for years/grades, it turned out to be even more confusing. So I made a table and added it to my conversion page for everyone to understand. This is also helpful as I’m so old I forget how old kids are when they say their school year or the other way around.

6th form is when you do your A-levels. I did three (double ICT and Business) but it seems you need at least 5 to get into university now. 6th Form (also called College) is frequently part of your Secondary School but it’s smaller as you don’t have to go to school after 16. In my borough(area) none of the state schools had 6th forms and there was one college of about 5,000 students. Some of my peers went to a private 6th form college or to 6th forms of schools in neighbouring boroughs. It’s common to switch school then, but it’s still free untill your 19+.

In the last two years of Secondary School you choose some subjects (e.g. which language to do, which creative art, etc.) but you have a full timetable still and mandatory classes like Science, English, Maths. The classes you pick have coursework and big end of year exams that form your GCSE grade, required for getting into the 6th form college of your choice.

Junior and Nursery School are often combined as one school to be a Primary School (maybe with seperate playgrounds). My schools were only a block and half away (with my house half way beetween). Here all your subject lessons are with the same teacher and class. Except in Junior School, English and Maths lessons have the year (3 classes) rearranged to be grouped by ability. Most of my memories of Junior and Nursery School took place in the playground anyway.

Let me know if you think I’ve got anything wrong, especially on the Canadian side. I’m not including the very few messed up English towns that go by a US-style system, or Scotland which becomes out of sync by GCSE(Secondary) & A-level(6th Form) levels.

Happy Thanksgiving Weekend to you! Just to confuse you Canadian thanksgiving is a different date to America, it’s the 2nd Monday in October which is a public holiday. Thanksgiving is totally foreign to me so I had little idea what would take place. The 3 day weekend prompted most people to go home or to relatives, making my residence very quiet. Those that were left managed to make just as much noise on Friday/Saturday and drink lots to keep the can collection growing.

On Sunday morning I went to church. It was announced that someone couldn’t make it at the last moment so I don’t know if that spurred a change of plan or if the service was different due to thanksgiving. It started with worship and the lead pastor on guitar. Then we had communion together which is a weekly occurance in the Canadian churches I’ve been to (it’s not so frequent in the UK) by dipping the bread in the wine (rather than taking a sip of wine after eating the bread). Usually next would be a sermon but instead a few large rolls of paper had been pinned to the walls with the writing “I’m thankful to God for…“. We could write or draw our responses (the children had made some interesting drawings throughout the service). There was some more worship and then the service finished.

On Sunday evening my building, Haida House, had a semi-formal dinner in the ground floor study lounge. I dug out the one collared shirt I brought here and went down. It was an enjoyable time, actually sitting down and talking to the people I live with. A resonable turn out of roughly 25 (including some from our neighbours Salish House) from the 180 or so who should be living there. After the dinner everybody was to tired to have much of a party, well after a rest the party started up just after midnight.

Side-tracking as I do, along one of the main campus roads sits a large white cain (6ft tall) painted with a red E on all three sides, to quote wikipedia “exists not because it was installed in accordance with UBC’s planning and building process, but because the engineering students simply put it there.“. It is commonly the target of repainting by other faculty’s students to have their letter and colour. On Thanksgiving Sunday night the Haida pranksters were out and painted it fully in our colour of the night, then super glued on coloured featers and a beak to turn the cairn into a turkey.

I made full use of the Monday off and slept in to 1:30pm. In the evening (5pm because they eat so early here) I walked over to Acadia Park, the family houses on the other side of campus. A couple even newer to Point Grey Communtiy Church had invited me to dinner with them and their extended family. In so long I haven’t been in a family house where you can take a second helping without swiping your dinner card, and kids run around fighting and tickling each other.

It’s been a busy weekend and I’m sure to have missed out some blog-worthy stories, but now I need another sleep until my 12:30pm class Tuesday class.