(Stupid editing time limit!)
I also didn’t always have time to stop at my locker between each class.
It looks like engineer_comp_geek had the same lockers we did. They were a pain in the ass, weren’t they? I can’t tell you the many times I slammed my hand in those damned things! Some of the upper doors were crooked, and got stuck. Ugh!
I graduated in 1996, and our school was about, oh, maybe 20 something years old. It had been built in the late sixties, early seventies.
Our gym lockers were half-size, generally, and they had combo locks. The first year, I didn’t use mine because my lock was so fucked up. The next year, I just asked for a new locker.
I can’t remember junior high, but in high school we had them. They were half-height and had combo locks on them–you got yours assigned to you on the first day of high school and had it ever afterwards. Mine was on the top layer, right around the corner from the library. The slam of a locker is one of those sounds that takes you right back in memory.
A few years ago, the local high schools put grates over all the lockers on their campuses and no one uses them any more. Probably supposed to prevent drugs or something? I guess the kids just lug 40 pounds of books everywhere and keep their meth in their backpacks.
We had lockers in junior high and high school. Bookbags were not allowed in junior high so you went to your locker often, and that was when decorating your locker on the inside was a big deal. In high school, the building was huge and my locker was always somewhere crappy. Luckily I had a few close trustworthy friends and we all shared locker combinations so we could strategically place books in each others’ lockers that were by our classes. At least one semester of high school I didn’t really use my own locker. We were allowed bookbags then but no one likes to carry 4 big textbooks and notebooks. We only had full length lockers and had to supply our own locks. I still have bad dreams about being at school and forgetting my combination, although I never forgot it in real life. I used the same Master lock either the whole 6 years I had a locker or damn close. it had a green face. We also had gym lockers in high school but they were only ours during the hour we were in gym as there were not very many of them.
At a yearbook workshop before senior year held at an area Catholic high school one of my friends got into a locker as a joke. The lockers at this school were a little bigger than ours. Thinking their lockers were like ours (had a built-in lock but that lock disabled requiring a Master lock or similar) I shut the door. She got locked in. Their built-in locks were still functioning. We had to find a maintenance person to get her out. We recreated the scene for our yearbook staff page photo - me “shoving” her into a locker.
In junior high (late 70’s) we had them, bigger than a gym locker but too small to stuff anyone into, I would think. In high school (early 80’s) the hallways were lined with them but I never had one and I don’t know how they were assigned. For most classes you did not have to bring the textbook each day, so only the day you were issued them and the day you had to return them really put your bag to the test.
Yep, this is what was done to us, throughout our entire school district (four middle schools and two high schools).
I went to school in Downey, CA (a small suburb of L.A., with their own school district), and graduated in 1997. We had lockers all through middle school (6th to 8th grade), and halfway through high school.
They were stacked three high. (It really sucked if you were tall and had a bottom locker, or if you were short and had a top locker. The coveted lockers were always the ones in that middle row.)
They were removed during the summer between 10th and 11th grade. Naturally, many students were angry. And, of course, the rumors were abound as to why they were really removed.
The main reason, the one that seemed to hold the most water, was that the lockers provided a haven for the stashing of drugs and other paraphernalia. To us, this is was a very minor problem.
There were only a handful of students that were into that, and we didn’t think it warranted the removal of the lockers district wide. I haven’t read the linked article, so maybe it explains another, more sound, reason.
Anyway, from that point on, the district purchased two sets of textbooks. One set to always have inside the classroom, and another set to personally issue to the students to leave at home.
Junior high, there were half-sized lockers for the 7th and 8th graders, the 9th grade students got full-size ones. High school had half-sized lockers for everyone, but they were fairly useless for me, given that there were 3 floors of classes and I rarely wanted to go down to the first floor to my locker and then back up the stairs to class.
My high school in Pennsylvania had been built in three stages. If you had your home room in Old Main or the first extension, you got a full-height, standard-width locker something like the ones in this photo. If you were in the school band, you got an even larger locker down by the band room, but you were expected to keep your instrument in it. But if your instrument was very small, or too large to fit in the locker like my trombone, you hit the locker jackpot!
If your home room was in the newest part of the school, which was the largest, you got a two-part locker, which essentially squeezed storage for two kids into not much more than the space of one. Up top were two full-width spaces, maybe 15 inches high, for books; down below were two half-width cabinets for coats and such. The funny thing was that this extension had been built when the baby boomers started arriving, assuming that the school population would keep growing. It of course did not. All those small lockers crammed in, and whole banks of them stood empty… they could have used the Old Main-style lockers and still had more than enough for everyone!
My older son is now in junior high and his school (in a suburb of Oslo, Norway) has lockers like the ones in this photo. These are all together on the first floor of the school and are meant for coats, lunches, and backpacks, mostly. They also have smaller lockers, basically just cubbyholes with doors, for their books, closer to their classrooms.
ETA: We weren’t allowed to tape anything to the inside of our lockers, but since they all had steel doors, it was simple to put a little magnet on the back of whatever you wanted to hang there. Nearly everyone had some pictures or small posters, and quite a few girls had a small mirror to check their hair and make-up.
Found the photo too late to edit, but the two-part lockers I was talking about looked like this. The upper cabinet was opened by lifting a catch inside the lower part.
I’m British, and while we certainly didn’t have personal lockers, I also don’t remember lugging around an enormous amount of books every day. I think for many subjects we didn’t have personal textbooks, they were just handed out at the start of each lesson. Or maybe I only took the books that were relevant to that day’s lessons? But that sounds too organised for me.
Yep, those are exactly like the ones I had – except the top ones were vented as well.
I forgot that we also had lockers in the back of the rooms at St. Mary’s (parochial school) as well – well, we got them when I was in 8th grade. They were nicer and the girls got the top lockers, boys the bottom. We were allowed to put up pictures, but you had to use magnets.
We have them at my school for the fifth through eighth grades.
Here’s what goes through a fifth grader’s mind on the first day of school:
oh, my god, I’m finally getting a locker I can’t wait I can’t concentrate until I get my locker when are we getting our lockers I know just how I’ll decorate it I can’t wait to get me locker oh gimme gimme gimme oh i can’t think until I get my locker.
Here’s what goes through the same kid’s mind on day two, and until the end of 8th grade:
This sucks. I’m going to leave all my stuff in the hallway.
We had lockers back from 97 to 03, but I never had enough time to get to them. Not because they were far away, but because I could never get to mine before someone else had theirs open.
I wound up just leaving all my books in my bookbag in the choir library. I went back there often enough that I could get most of my books. I also carried only one binder for all my classes, just using different dividers. And I didn’t grab my book if I knew we weren’t going to use it much. Of course, I often read off a friend’s.
Finally, I can’t imagine not having my books available all day, like some of you. I mean, how else am I supposed to get my homework done before school is over so I had time for a social life and sleep? You work while the teacher is overexplaining something for the fifth time. And you get good at listening while you are working.
