>Because you had a bad time, then the whole system is malicious right?
No. In university the expectations were drastically higher. If the goal of the school was to prepare me for university, then it failed at that for everyone. The mismatch can not be attributed to me.
>But they are a teacher now. Guess I’ll paint them with the same brush as all teachers.
We had one of these as well. Average teacher, learned basically nothing in her class.
Curricula are standardized. All students experienced almost the exact same disconnect. This is also not some secret, all Professors know this and some try their hardest to bridge the gap.
Then this is a failure of the system in Germany, and does not reflect the experience of many American kids. Some, yes, but not all. Primarily, it's the "smart" kids who didn't have to work for good high school grades who have a bad time in university, not the kids in the fat part of the curve who more likely matriculated having already developed strong study skills. In my experience, at least, the biggest difference between high school and college is that high school teachers teach and homework is for reinforcement, whereas college professors expect self-learning to be the core method of pedagogy and their role is to reinforce and contextualize the topics. Switching from one mode to the other can be rough, no matter how innately intelligent a student is.
Maybe aligned/frameworked/pooled but no full uniform testing or single curriculum across all the states in Germany, for example - so variations exist and some schools might prepare better than others.
> In university the expectations were drastically higher.
Well duh. I don't know where/what you studied, but I did physics and yeah, it was balls-fucking hard some times. I think the vast majority of freshman physics/maths/engineering students experience a similar feeling where there's a huge jump in challenge going from school-level to uni-level.
Whether this means there is a case for narrower, more focused "elite" schools in maths, or in say music, for high-performing students in those areas, is of course an interesting discussion :)
If the goal of the school was to prepare me for university
Well it's not. You studied a narrow subject at university, but during the ~12 years of schooling you studied many other subjects. The goal of schooling is to make you a complete citizen (in an ideal sense, I'm talking :)). Not sure how the system is where you live but where I come from the first 9 years have a fixed curriculum, and it's only during the last 3 years (high school) that you pick subjects in the areas relevant to your university aspirations (or you pick a vocational course).
Where did I say that the intentions were bad?
>Because you had a bad time, then the whole system is malicious right?
No. In university the expectations were drastically higher. If the goal of the school was to prepare me for university, then it failed at that for everyone. The mismatch can not be attributed to me.
>But they are a teacher now. Guess I’ll paint them with the same brush as all teachers.
We had one of these as well. Average teacher, learned basically nothing in her class.