Sunspace: That has to be wrong, because normal high school graduation in America occurs for people who have had their 18th birthday. That is one reason a number of ages of majority occur at 18: Your state-mandated education has ended and you are no longer under the thumb of truancy officers. Since the scale is consistent, you must have to move the US scale down a notch and everything looks like it will add up: We (apparently) have (totally optional) pre-school for 4-5-year-olds. (I suppose I could be wrong, but the senior year of HS has to end when you’re 18 if you haven’t skipped a grade.)
Yeah, I’m pretty sure you have to be 6 when you start first grade.
No, because I have 12th grade starting when you’re 16 and ending when you’re 17. Thus the 18th birthday takes place on the way out of, or after graduation from, 12th grade.
In my case, I skipped a grade (actually, got transferred from grade one to grade two in midyear), so I was a year younger than most people in my class after that. I turned 18 the summer after I graduated from grade 13, and was one of two 18-year-olds in my first-year class at university.
:: rereads chart ::
Okay, you are right. I have kindergarten starting for four-year-olds. I started when I was five.
Yes. They’re together morning and afternoon for registration, and in most cases they’ll stay together for some lessons as a mixed-ability group through to year 9. Also, the principle is that the form tutor and the form will get to know each other well, and can be a reliable first point-of-contact for each other when problems or concerns arise.
There’s the opportunity to apply for entry in year 7, as with regular high schools. However, 5-18 schools are a very small minority, which have come about as exceptions such as independent schools which have been converted to state-funded academies.
No, we don’t use them, and tertiary education consists of three and four year courses, with longer ones for medicine, veterinary, etc.
So, how about this from “The Changing of the Guard” ep of “Twilight Zone:”
The ghosts of *Professor Fowler’s former students greet him (starting at about 7:35) of this clip, and continuing into the next.
Some of them mention what “form” they were in. How does this translate, especially since this ep is set in the States?
*Played by 43-year-old Donald Pleasance. [And what about the forehead on that one guy?]
Mostly only the very old and traditional and (usually) religious East Coast prep schools in the US still use this system. Most use the regular 9th-12th grade system that the rest of the country uses, and maybe a PG year if they want.
I’m not sure whether your comment arises from Maryland practice or your temporo-spatial distance from high school, but it does not match my experience.
The last four years of school before college were known as 9th through 12th grades when I went through them in the late 1960s in Michigan, when my nieces and nephews went through them in Michigan in the last few years, and when my kids went through them over the last few years in Ohio.
The names given to those grades were borrowed from college, (just as rituals such as the Homecoming Dance and the Prom were borrowed from college before the colleges tended to drop them), but the grades are still numbered.
= = =
As to the naming of school divisions:
The original divisions appear to have been
Elementary School, grades K, 1 - 8
High School, grades 9 - 12.
(This pattern remains in parochial schools.)
Around the time of the great school district consolidation, (late 1940s), the schools were re-organized to
Elementary School, grades K, 1 - 6
Junior High, grades 7 - 9
High School, grades 10 - 12.
In the late 1970s, a trend began to shift those boundaries to be
Elementary School, grades K, 1 - 5
Middle School, grades 6 - 8
High School, grades 9 - 12.
How much of that was based on trying to divide the grades into manageable numbers for school buildings and how much it was based on attempts to organize kids along gradients of psychological development, I don’t know.
In addition, since these tend to be local decisions, they are not necessarily consistent even within every state, much less between or among all the states.
Sunspace, read my previous post carefully. I explained the correspondence of the years in my post. Kindergarten starts a year later in the U.S. The following is the real correspondence:
Age______U.S.____________Ontario, Canada_______England/Wales
4-5_____nothing____________kindergarten__________reception
5-6____kindergarten___________grade 1_____________year 1
6-7_____1st grade_____________grade 2_____________year 2
7-8 ____2nd grade_____________grade 3_____________year 3
8-9 ____3rd grade_____________grade 4_____________year 4
9-10____4th grade_____________grade 5_____________year 5
10-11___5th grade_____________grade 6_____________year 6
11-12___6th grade_____________grade 7________year 7 / lower third form
12-13___7th grade_____________grade 8________year 8 / upper third form
13-14___8th grade_____________grade 9________year 9 / fourth form
14-15___9th grade / freshman____grade 10_______year 10 / lower fifth form
15-16___10th grade / sophomore_grade 11________year 11 / upper fifth form
16-17___11th grade / junior_____grade 12________year 12 / lower sixth form
17-18___12th grade / senior_____grade 13________year 13 / upper sixth form
tomndebb writes:
> I’m not sure whether your comment arises from Maryland practice or your
> temporo-spatial distance from high school, but it does not match my experience.
I grew up in northwest Ohio. I graduated from high school in 1970. In my experience it was rare to use the terms “grade 9,” “grade 10,” “grade 11,” and “grade 12.” It was much more common to use the terms “freshman,” “sophomore,” “junior,” and “sophomore.”
tomndebb writes:
> Around the time of the great school district consolidation, (late 1940s), the
> schools were re-organized to
> Elementary School, grades K, 1 - 6
> Junior High, grades 7 - 9
> High School, grades 10 - 12.
When I graduated in 1970, it was like this for the buildings:
> Elementary School, grades K, 1 - 8
> High School, grades 9 - 12.
The 7th and 8th grades were sometimes referred to as Junior High School, but it wasn’t a separate building.
Incidentally, I went to a public high school, not a parochial one.
In New Zealand the system is a little different to Britain but based on it. We now use Year 1, Year 2 etc but when I was at school it went like this.
In New Zealand children start ON their 5th birthday (the day of their birthday, or the day after) so ages are not set in concrete.
Primary school
New Entrants- 5
Primer 1- 6
Primer 2- 7
Primer 3- 8
Standard 1- 9
Standard 2- 10
Intermediate school
Form 1- 11
Form 2- 12
High school/College (it’s just a ‘name of the school’ thing but is mostly referred to as College)
Form 3- 13
Form 4- 14
Form 5- 15 (major exam year and year that many left school, leaving age is now 16 hmmmm or is it 17? But in my day it was 15).
Form 6- 16 (in my day most kids left school at the end of this year).
Form 7 - 17 (In my day only seriously university orientated types did this year).
My son is in Year 13/Form 7, only a few kids of his Year left last year, now nearly everybody stays to finish Year 13, though we have no official graduation.
The system now labels everyone Year ? As I said before, everyone starts school at on their 5th birthday so now if you start after May you are Year 0, before May you are Year One.
Oh and our school year is four 10 week terms (starting in late Jan/early Feb) with 2 weeks holidays between each term and 6 weeks Christmas/Summer holidays.
To muddy the waters even further, when I was at secondary school in England in the 70s/80s, we didn’t use “form” (except for the sixth form) or, of course, the current Year 7, Year 8 etc. system.
Instead, and I think this was normal in state schools at the time, it was “first year” (equivalent to US 6th grade, current England & Wales Year 7), “second year” etc. And, because in my area we had middle schools between primary and secondary, there was no actual first year - the newbies at secondary school were the “second years”.
Derleth writes (in reply to my explanation of the terms “freshman,” “sophomore,” “junior,” and senior":
> Do the Brits use those terms? I don’t even know if British post-secondary
> education has the same focus on four-year programs, in fact.
No, the terms aren’t used for either high school or university in the U.K. You do realize, don’t you, that in England and Wales university programs are only three years long? Apparently in Scotland there are both three- and four-year programs. Nobody outside the U.S. uses those terms in the same way that they’re used in the U.S. Apparently in Australia and New Zealand the students in the last two years of high school are all referred to as “seniors,” but otherwise those terms are simply incomprehensible to non-Americans, which is why I referred to them as arbitrary.
So far as I know, these are ad hoc decisions based on allocation of resources and, as you say, local perceptions of age appropriateness (more the former, I think). They can vary from one year to the next depending on the sizes of the buildings and the incoming class sizes. I don’t think they even have to be consistent within a single school district.
The system in Hong Kong, which is based on the old system in England, is like this:
Kindergarten 3, 4, 5 (technically optional, but most people go nowadays)
Primary School
Primary 1 - 6
Primary 2 - 7
Primary 3 - 8
Primary 4 - 9
Primary 5 - 10
Primary 6 - 11
Secondary School
Form 1 - 12
Form 2 - 13
Form 3 - 14
Form 4 - 15
Form 5 - 16
There’s a big exam at the end of this (equivalent to the British O-level/GCSE). Those who are not going to university are done with school at this point.
Form 6/Lower 6 - 17
Form 7/Upper 6 - 18
There’s another big exam at this point (A-level).
Most university programmes are 3 - 4 years. School year runs from September to July, with major breaks around Christmas, Lunar New Year and Easter.
However, just to mix more mud into the already rather gloopy waters, new university students in the UK are called ‘freshers’, which I always assumed was a short form of the word ‘freshman’. The term only generally gets applied to 1st year students in the first few months however, and thereafter you’d just refer to 1st years, 2nd years, 3rd years etc.
I was lucky enough to be in the middle of my secondary education at the time of the change in the UK from referring to schools years as forms or ordinal years (eg. 1st form/year) to universal years (eg. Year 8), while I was in the 3rd form (Year 9), so feel qualified to chime in with the definitive guide to old and new schools years:
NEW - OLD - AGE GROUP
Primary School (divided into Infant and Junior years/schools)
Reception - Infant 1st year - 4-5
Year 1 - Infant 2nd year - 5-6
Year 2 - Infant 3rd year - 6-7
Year 3 - Junior 1st year - 7-8
Year 4 - Junior 2nd year - 8-9
Year 5 - Junior 3rd Year - 9-10
Year 6 - Junior 4th Year - 10-11
Secondary School
Year 7 - 1st year/form - 11-12
Year 8 - 2nd year/form - 12-13
Year 9 - 3rd year/form - 13-14
Year 10 - 4th year/form - 14-15
Year 11 - 5th year/form - 15-16
Sixth Form
Year 12 - Lower 6th - 16-17
Year 13 - Upper 6th - 17-18
OB
I’ve had the “pleasure” of going to school in the English & Welsh, Scottish and Ontario systems described above. To pick up some of the points about elementary and types of secondary schools, some districts in Ontario have both what is thought of as the conventional split between elementary (“public”) school and high school (K-8 and 9-12, respectively), and variations on the middle school/junior high school. When I went to school in the 70’s, I went to a public school that was K-6, and then a middle school for 7-8, and finally a high school for 9-13 (back when Ontario still had a fifth year of secondary school). My kids, on the other hand, went to an elementary school for K-6, then a junior high school for 7-9, and now a high school for 10-12.
And, while we don’t generally use the more American freshman/sophmore/junior/senior terminology, it does crop up from time to time. When I played football, for instance, we had three teams: varsity (any student), junior (third year) and senior (fourth or fifth year, the latter of which were very few football players). Until I made the connection with the U.S. college/high school terminology, I was confused by the fact that the junior football team was for older kids than the team I joined.
That’s interesting, Cerowyn. Was this in Ontario? The terms in the U.S. are “varsity” and “junior varsity.” The varsity team will be the best players, and the junior varsity team will be the not quite as good players. It depends on many things whether there’s a junior varsity team at all, including the state, the number of students in the high school, and the popularity of the sport.
In the US, the school systems varies from state to state and district to district. There’s not going to be a universal pattern.
In my schooling, in North central Ohio, the schools were:
Kindergarten, starting ages 5-6;
Elementary, grades 1-5;
Intermediate, grades 6-8;
High School, grades 9-12.
Colloquially, we used terms like “fifth grade”, “ninth grade”, “eleventh grade” for the grade level. Terms like “freshman”, “junior”, etc, were used for an individual person. Cohorts were called “Class of '90”, etc.