weird things about my school

hiii ok so i go to a charter/alt school. basically i've only ever been at this school since its k-12 and i've barely found out how different it is from other schools so im going to list some of the stuff.

1. there's no test except state testing. i knew other schools did test but i always thought very few tests until my friend moved schools and told me she has one like every week.

2. we only have 3 classes. so we have math/science it's the same class, humanities which is just history and english, and each grade gets a different class my grade has makers which is like woodshop and art. so i only get 3 grades on my report card which doesnt get sent to the parents unless your failing.

3. no PE. i thankfully don't have pe but every other year we have a pe test at the end of year. instead we a block of school that was supposed to be like an activity class, we call it xblock. xblock is a class every teacher chooses a fun thing to teach us and we have 4 quarters of this and you get to pick which one you want. right now im in braclet making, so for 45mins i just talk with my friends and make bracelets.

4. we do presentations instead of finals. when have 3 different main presentations SLCs ( student lead conferences) instead of parents teacher conferences where your teacher tells your parents how your doing you have to tell your parents, this presentation is just you your parents and teachers. you do slcs every year since 1st grade. Then we have POLs (presentation of learning) once you start middle school you these which you have to talk for 10mins about what you learned in the school year so far. you present this infront of 3 other students your parents, their parents, and your teachers. you can in fact fail these and you will have to remake your presentation and present infort of 2 classes. then you have TPOL (translational presentation of learning) this is your end of year presentation where you have to convince your teachers that you deserve to move up grades. this is almost a pol but more stressful.

5. your with the same group of kids for every class. when you which class you don't which class mates. teacher actually name your class group, like im north side. there 4 different sides, and they make a bigger group called a team which is two of the sides together. we have teams because we share the same teachers theres 4 main teachers but debating on your team you only see 2. 

6. advisory Olympics. your advisory is like a team so pic a cool name and make a banner. you then complete against other advisorys and we have a big end of year competition where you have a full day at the park playing games to win. if you win you get a pizza party and trophy. this sounds fun but trust it's actually so lame. 

7. my school is project based. were a hands on school so instead of doing work sheets and taking notes we do projects. one year for science we were learning about newtons laws and physics so we created hovercraft's and learned the physics of how they work. you have 3 projects every year for each class.

8. exhibitions. to present these projects we host big events and everyone's parents come and you show off your projects. our biggest festival is festival del sol, which is when high school, middle and elementary all exhibit on the same day and we have food tucks.

9. we don't have a principal. we have a dean and a dean of students which kind of act as our principal. if you have trouble with a classmate you talk to the dean of students and she also talks about grades. our dean is who you talk to if your in big trouble. 

10. MUN and trade wars. these are two things that are forced to be you project in 7th and 8th grade. you may uave heard of mun its ussally a club in other schools. basically you pretend to be the united nations. you pick a country and committee for example i was Afghanistan, un women. and what you do is every country in that committee has to research and write an essay we than have two days of dabate where each committee is put in a class room to slove a problem. these debates are ran by chairs, chairs are student leaders. you have to sign up and give a reason on why you should be a chair and hopefully get picked. you have to forfeit 2 of xblock qauters to research and make documents that the other students have to do. the second i first mentioned was trade wars. this is similar to mun it actually something my school created. this teaches us about how countries have wars. you get put into groups of 4 and are given a country. then we have two days where they put different countries together in a class and you play a game, you have to role a dice to get resources to build up your nation. if you want you can attack other countries sometimes it doesn't go well if they have wall built. whichever one wins gets resources from the other country.

ok so yeah that's all the weird stuff at my school that i thought was normal. also im only in 8th grade and i know theres a lot of different stuff at the high school.