I remember my 8th grade art class. One project was carving linoleum tiles to do rudimentary block printing. Today half the boys in the class would be behind bars. Third Reich motifs were very popular.
I went to Philadelphia Catholic schools. Grade 1 to 8 was elementary school and one teacher per classroom for all subjects.
High school, 9 to 12 you changed classes every period to a different teacher.
Public school system was similar back then, not sure now.
Things sure have changed. In the 7th grade we were required to bring a pocket knife to school for the 'arts & crafts' class. In the 6 th grade about every other boy had a knife in their pocket. Now even a butter knife will get you expelled.
I guess that my math may be off a year or so. However I think I was thinking of how old I was at the end of the year. Finished the 12 grade (end of school before college or entering the work force) when I was
Birthday is in April. School usually started about the 1st week of September. Now it starts about the middle of August or maybe sooner. The September starting in North Carolina was for several reasons. People working on or having family farms and no air condition.
I don't know how it is now, but 50 years ago the high school had 2 main devisions. One for those that plan on going to college and one for those that did not . The college prep course had the higher math like algebra and geometry, where the other courses just had what was called general math. I assume that many other courses were similar.
I never did. I grew up when you actually had to work to get stuff. My mother might still have my MSBOA medals.
Cindy Hamilton
30
When I started school in the late 60s when I was 5, I started in the summer term (ie after the Easter holiday) because my birthday is in March, so the summer term was the first one when I was 5 years old; slightly older children with birthdays between July and March started in the previous autumn term (after the long summer holiday) because they were already 5 by the time that term started. The school did not have enough classrooms to accommodate the Easter intake, so lessons were held in one corner of the school hall / dining room: the rest of the children could not have PE lessons in the summer (maybe we did sport outside on the playing field) because it would disrupt "The Class in the Hall" as it was described.
I'm not sure how typical my school was, but it was divided into two sections: an Infant School with a headmistress, for children aged 5 and 6 (two school years); and a Junior School, with a headmaster, for children aged 7, 8, 9, 10 (four years). The final year of the Junior School took the
11-plus exam at the end of their last year when they would all/most have had their 11th birthday. I wonder when the exact cutoff date was to determine which children were the youngest in one school year and which would be the oldest in the school year below.In my case, the two schools were joined together in a back-to-back layout, with their respective school halls sharing a common wall. Both halls had a door into the kitchen. I remember when I was in the infant school I'd occasionally see the school secretary come into the hall and disappear into the kitchen, and it puzzled me where she went. It was only when I got into the Junior School and saw the same woman doing the same thing that it dawned on me:
- there was one kitchen that was common to both schools (not two separate ones, as I previously thought)
- the secretary worked in both schools and used the route through the kitchen as a means of getting from one school to the other
I felt a bit of an idiot for not realising that before ;-)
I was being somewhat ironic. My achievements with the Michigan State Band and Orchestra Association were exceedingly modest, and I received mostly red (rather than blue) ribbons commensurate with my meager musical talent.
Cindy Hamilton
"I am eight I have a pocket nife I am good with it but you still should watch the kid to see if her or she talks about killing and stuff"
Kid isn't going to get a grammar or spelling merit badge anytime soon.
Mine had college entrance kids and the business/shop kids. For college entrance you took 2 years of Latin, 2 years of either German or French, and more STEM subjects. The business kids took Spanish and typing.
All in all Spanish and typing would have been a lot handier in my life...
Band medals? All I ever got was the Gertrude Markey Prize in biology, which was 50 1964 bucks. A girl who went on to become a surgeon really, really wanted the prize but I snatched it. That did not improve my chances of dating her at all...
Did you get to play 'Sleigh Ride' at the Christmas assembly? Being a blue ribbon whip cracker would be something to aspire to.
My early musical ambitions hit a snag. I said 'cornet', she heard 'clarinet' so I spent a year chewing on reeds before switching to a flute. I still have a silver flute but I mostly play an wooden Irish flute. I can handle six holes without all those damn levers and stuff and the keys of D and G are good enough.
I wrote my final grade 12 exam on my 17th birthday - - -
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When my 2 girls were in school ( 36 and 37 now) in French Immersion they had several teachers. Some subjects were in French, and some in English - plus music - so AT LEAST 3 teachers - and that was grades 1 to 6. Those taking "core french" had an english teacher and a french teacher - in the same classroom. The french teacher went from room to room teaching French to different classes.
Yes, it is frustrating that you get "forced" into doing certain combinations of subjects because you are deemed to be more or less clever.
At my school there were two classes in each year. The clever children (I was supposedly one of those!) had to do Latin and German; the less clever ones did Biology and Ancient History.
I wanted to do Biology and German, but that combination was "not allowed"; I pleaded my case that these were the subjects that were probably more useful to me, and lack of knowledge of Biology would preclude me from any career that needed it. The headmaster said I presented my case very convincingly to him - but not convincingly enough to make an exception to the rule.
I found Latin to be an exceptionally difficult language - mainly because I could never work out which words in a sentence were the nouns, the adjectives, the adverbs and the verbs. French and German were much easier to learn. I think the reason is that both these have "little words" (articles like "a" and "the", pronouns like "he", and a reasonably logical word order in which adjectives and adverbs usually go next to the noun or verb that they are qualifying, and the article and pronoun tend to say "the next word is a noun or a verb respectively". The capital letter on German nouns is a big giveaway too! Prepositions ("to", "from") are distinct words.
But Latin has none of those. Everything is communicated in word endings alone, and you need to remember a lot of permutations, some of which are reused between different parts of speech. That "Romani eunt domus" speech
So when I left that school (my dad changed jobs so we moved to another part of the country) I had to continue with Latin instead of Biology. The new school had no hangup about me doing Biology - Latin and Biology were timetabled at the same time, as true alternatives. But I'd missed too many years of grounding to be able to pick it up in the fourth form - ie only one school year before I'd have taken the O level exam in it. So I was stuck with Latin.
Latin would be very useful if it was taught as a derivation of English words - "Latin for genealogists", "Latin for historians reading old documents" etc. But Latin as a grammatical language is dire.
I'd like to have had the "choice" as to whether or not I did Biology at A level, and the choice as to whether I studied a subject at university that needed knowledge of it. I may well have chosen not to - but a choice would have been nice ;-)
Yep. Annual solo and small ensemble competitions.
Cindy Hamilton
Yes, we played Sleigh Ride, but IIRC one of the drummers used a slapstick for that effect. There was considerable envy among the trumpet players for the guy who got to play the "neigh" at the end.
Because it was the Dark Ages, we also played actual Christmas carols (and sang them when I was in the chorus).
Coincidentally, I played the flute, so I've got you beat by 11.
Cindy Hamilton
When I was 9, we had two different student teachers over the course of the year, as well as our regular teacher. I was never in a class after that that had student teachers, but the following year when I was 10 we did have a math teacher and a French teacher that came in and taught us in our normal classroom.
I didn't learn to read in school. When I was 3 I wanted my mother to read to me far more than she had time to. I then observed her reading and asked questions and more or less taught myself.
I was very unhappy later on when I started school and they tried to force me to participate as the other children learned to read. I didn't fit into their plans and was repeatedly scolded because I was bored and not paying attention to what they were teaching.
When I was 10, I went to the library and wanted to check out "1984" by George Orwell. The librarians didn't want to let me do that, and wound up calling my mother to tell her why I shouldn't read it. Her response was, "If he's old enough to want to read it, then let him read it."
She finally had to come in and check it out herself and then let me read it. To be honest, I didn't have the experience and reference points to understand some of it, but I asked some questions and got most of it.
I read a lot of books when I was young that I didn't fully understand at the time. It was only when I re-read them later that I understood some things. Of course, that's still true today. Sometimes I have to go back and re-read something to get the most out of it. :-)
Heh. I took Latin, French, Spanish, typing and shorthand in addition to algebra and geometry (both of which I sucked at). I agree about Spanish and typing, although French taught me almost everything I know about formal grammar; Latin provided the rest.
Latin is a decent background for Spanish. Spanish, at least the Mexican version, plays fast and loose with those 'little words' to. Personal pronouns are a lot of work.
The problem for those taking Spanish was they were taught Castilian Spanish which isn't what is spoken on the street. Some of the French kids had a similar problem. Northern NY and the other New England states have a significant number of people of French Canadien ancestry. Because of the British invasion of New France, Quebec French sort of went its own way in the 18th century. The teachers learned Parisian French in college and that is what they taught.
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