The Foreign Service Journal, December 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2015 73 country’s school system. Sometimes these difficulties may be social in nature. I personally know families whose children come back for high school or college extremely excited to be “home,” only to discover that they don’t easily fit in with the other kids who have grown up in the United States. Other difficulties may arise in sports, for example. Such was the case for one young student who had been on the starting soccer team at her overseas school, but on returning to the United States found she had missed the entire preseason and was, thus, ineligible to play soccer that year. A child’s reaction sometimes depends on the length of time he or she has been overseas. At other times, it depends on how much integration the child has had while on home leave. In addition, parents need to keep careful school records when they transfer their children to new schools. It is helpful to keep lists of textbooks and syllabi to enable new school officials to evaluate how to award credits and appropriately place students into their new classes. As an example, math and U.S. history credits—often necessary graduation requirements for Foreign Service students—can be particularly difficult to transfer. Some institutions do not even offer U.S. history. Fortunately, there are numerous excellent online U.S. history programs that are available for students overseas. As for math, some international schools follow an integrated math curriculum, which lumps together an array of math subjects within one year. In other words, a term of geometry and a term of algebra might be combined into Math 9, while at another school the entire year of 9th grade math may