Or is it like in the United States, where each school subject is with a different group of students?
E.g. with one group of people you have math, and with another group of people you have science.
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In Poland, most subjects are taught with the same group of people (usually between 20 and 30 people born in the same year). The only exceptions, in the case of my school, were Physical Education (divided between boys and girls) and foreign language teaching (divided the class into two groups in terms of proficiency).
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In Germany, until grade 9 or 10 (depending if there are 12 or 13 years total), most subjects are taught within the whole class with common exceptions being some languages (e.g. when students can choose between french and latin before 7th grade), catholic/protestant religion and sometimes sports (might be separated by sex in some age group).
For the last three years (“Oberstufe”), there are no more classes and subjects are taught in varying groups.
When I was at school, ages 5 to 12 – everything was with the same class. Ages 12 to 14, most subjects were with the same class, subjects that required special equipment were done with a different, smaller class and physical education and games were done in single-sex classes. For ages 14 to 18, every subject was done with a different class as from that point on you got to choose which subjects you wished to study.
In primary school (ages 4-5/11-12) yes. The first two or three years of secondary school depending on your level (so first year being aged 12/13) generally as well. After that you start to hone in a little bit in the case of the more theoretical levels or a lot in the case of practical levels on what kind of field you want to study in once you graduate. For the theoretical levels you might choose to go more towards the life sciences side for example as opposed to economics. And for the practical levels you might choose to go towards for example construction, healthcare or hospitality.
So at that stage a lot of your classmates will be following different subjects from you because they chose a different focus area. You’ll generally still have all the mandatory classes like Dutch, English, PE, civics together but the other lessons will most of the time consist of either a mix of kids from different classes or a smaller group of people from your own class. You might be taking biology, chemistry, physics, the more algebra-focused math and German for example. And one of your classmates might be taking biology, chemistry, economics, the more statistics-focused math and French.
Class size is usually 25-30 kids but may go lower in smaller schools
>In Poland, most subjects are taught with the same group of people (usually between 20 and 30 people born in the same year). The only exceptions, in the case of my school, were Physical Education (divided between boys and girls) and foreign language teaching (divided the class into two groups in terms of proficiency).
That’s my experience as well, but in primary and middle schools.
In high school, however, we had PE together with another class, because we were biol-chem – girls from the two classes were separate (because there were lots of them), but us boys from the two classes were together, and there were only 10 of us I think? So yeah… It would be a tremendous waste of time and resources to make separate groups of boys, where one group is 6 people and the other is 4 people.
In case of foreign languages, we were also joined together, because we could choose the second foreign language, while English was normally done within the class. So let’s say the classes 1A and 1B have the second foreign language together, and at the same time some have German from scratch, some have German continued, some have French from scratch, and some have Italian from scratch. Like with those PE classes – it was more logical to do joined groups than tiny groups within one class.
IT was also divided into two groups in every school level (primary, middle, high) and thankfully it lasted only one year in high school, I didn’t like it in then, because my teacher was really weird.
In Austria for the most part all students are taught as one class – so the people you have your 1st day of school with are most likely those who will acompany you in your finals. The only exception happens around the age of 13, when in most schools you have to pick a 2nd language – there you attend a group that has also students from other classes in them that selected this language. But that is only the case for 2-4 hours a week.
Oh and after elementary school almost all schools have 2 seperate groups when it comes to sports. In my entire school career I never even heard of male and female students being taught sports together – they also do different things: Male students are more likely to play ball-sports (football, baseball, basketball, …) while female students do things like gymnastics. But all of them have to run at some point…
>Or is it like in the United States, where each school subject is with a different group of students?
>E.g. with one group of people you have math, and with another group of people you have science.
How the fuck would that work any other way with elective subjects.
Mostly yes. The exception are usually the language classes where it’s further divided. Some schools run more advanced classes gathered from the all groups from the same grade, but it’s the exception not the rule.
There’s little to no choice in the curriculum until you enroll college/university. At some point in life, most people will start focusing on the important subjects by ignoring subjects they don’t need.
In most schools, PE is mixed as well, but I think that might differ based on the available facilities of the school.