Woah, that's so interesting to me. In my school district (each district has a different government but if there are any state rules regarding this, then they all follow it in their own way), everyone starts school in August and ends in May and then we get a break at the end of each quarter. So we get a 3-day break in mid-October, a week break at the end of November for Thanksgiving, a 2.5-week break in December for the holidays, a week-break in March, and then a 2.5-month-long summer break that signifies the end of the previous school year.
Well...not as much as they did but you can still be considered for scholarships and colleges can change their mind about your admission status if you completely tank your senior year (also my grandparents are paying me for good grades lmao). And you have to take your finals which for seniors, means staying longer than you have to. That's where senioritis comes in when you're just so ready to be done with school that you stop trying and it's super common for us. My dad was the same way. Once he got accepted into his dream college, he pretty much stopped trying lol. My parents are less strict with my grades than they were in previous years (junior year is arguably the most important year for grades as this is typically the GPA you use to apply to colleges and for scholarships. And the good thing is if you tanked in 2020 [freshman year for me] then you can be excused by colleges since everyone knows what happened that year and a lot of people fell victim to bad grades that year)
Oh really? I think we need that. My grandma had to take swimming lessons in high school to pass but they haven't had that in schools for generations. I also heard that we used to driving tests for underclassmen high schoolers in school which I think sort of sucks because driving courses can be so expensive. I remember writing an argumentative essay for English II where we could choose our topics lmao