Photo by Annabelle Elmaleh
By Emma Martignoni
Opinions Contributor
Traipsing across Paris with one of my best friends felt like my childhood dream come true: living the life of Hilary Duff in “The Lizzie McGuire Movie”—luckily, without Ms. Ungermeyer.
If you participate in an exchange trip you most likely will not end up meeting a dreamy singer and become famous, but based on the unadulterated joy I felt during and after my time in Paris, you will feel as though you did.
Without exaggeration, even though every student exchange trip experiences are different, most students come home with life-changing memories.
Thankfully, Newton South offers multiple exchange programs for students to immerse themselves in a new culture and transition their language skills from the classroom to the real world.
The French exchange program will leave this Saturday and the Newton-Beijing Jingshan Exchange Program began last week. The students who participated in it last year are excited for the new group to live in China for four months.
“I found it incredibly interesting to see, first hand, the history and culture of a country with such a rich background,” said Grace Honig, a junior at Newton South who participated in the exchange last year. She added that it was “eye-opening in terms of seeing America from the perspective of the Chinese.”
By being in China for multiple months and attending their school, Honig was able to fully immerse herself in a completely different culture. With friends from Newton South and North along her side, the shared experience allowed her to build friendships and feel comfortable to take risks.
Additionally, similar to myself, the program greatly impacted the way Honig views South now in terms of their approach to education.
“At South, teachers are often pleased with an outside-the-box answer, but that’s usually not the reaction you’d get in China,” said Honig.
Through the lens of education, Honig is able now to appreciate how her school encourages each student to foster their own potential and grow. Additionally, the appreciation of her own life extends further than the classroom norms of Newton South.
“Beijing, being such a busy place with anything you wanted to do just a subway ride away, there wasn’t really any community feel,” said Honig “[I’ve] come to appreciate the community and diversity we have here in Newton much more.”
Even though Honig stated she loved the experience of living in Beijing, the cultural differences allowed herself to appreciate aspects of her own life that she never even considered. Different from the constant complaining and pessimistic outlooks, exchange trips push students to acknowledge the beauty of their everyday lives.
Exchange trips allow students to step outside of your own culture and be fully immersed in a new one, but even more than that, it offers a rare gem of an experience: seeing the real-life manifestation and use of the subjects taught at school.
To learn that 20-page history readings and the constant exams on the past conditional tense, actually matter and shape perspectives of the world is monumental.
That feeling of empowerment has made me uniquely grateful for my education, changing my perspective on this community and the world.
“[It] has completely changed the way I view the world and has gifted me with life experience far beyond that of an average 16-year-old. The four months that I spent living in Beijing were the best in my life so far,” said Honig.
