Packing up your whole life, learning a new language, school system, country and culture is a challenge and it takes so much courage. Spending one year in a new place adds for so many new opportunities and hardships. Exchange students get to learn a lot from us and we get to learn a lot from them. It’s a special experience.
When exchange students come to America, they need somewhere to live, so oftentimes, they’ll find a family to stay with. Current DHS student, Nora Miller, is going to be housing an exchange student next semester and these were her thoughts about it, “I think it’ll just be fun because I get to show her all the stuff in Durango like skiing, snowboarding, all the winter stuff. I think the school does a good job because there’s a lot of bilingual students and teachers so I think that’s a good effect on exchange students because that makes it easier for them to have this experience.”
We have exchange students from multiple countries across the nations. Exchange students add new perspectives and knowledge to DHS’s daily life. Education is a lot different here than in any other country. Exchange student from Argentina, Emma Moens, said this about the differences of education, “We stay in the same classroom the whole year with the same people, and in highschool we are with the same group the whole year in the same classroom, depending on the school. The grading system is different too, we have 1 to 10, like 1/10, 10/10.” Gaining new knowledge about a completely different grading system might be a challenge for the students themselves and even teachers.
Exchange students don’t just affect the students, they also affect teachers. Teaching an exchange student is just as new for the teacher as it is for the student. DHS Teacher, Morgan Kraska teaches several exchange students and these were her ideas about it, “It’s a lot of different things, you have a student who’s learning a new language, which can make communicating challenging…making sure that your being able to meet their needs as a student, that’s hard as a teacher sometimes because you also have a large group of students… you’re trying to navigate a lot of things at once and when there’s a communication barrier I don’t know if I feel I’m always able to address it as timely as I would like to be able to…”. They walk away with an abundance of new knowledge and we get to stay with an abundance of new knowledge.
Exchange students bring so many new things to the table and it’s such a cool thing that we get to experience that here at DHS. Think of a way that you could impact an exchange student’s experience here at DHS and see how they could impact you.
