That’s very similar to what happened at my school, but the year before me. At the end of my 7th grade in a three-year high and both the 9th graders and 8th graders went to high school, which became four years.
Apparently, there were some kids who were angry at not getting a shot at being the top dogs for a year, and the new 10th graders were happy to not be the bottom class in high school.
We were called an intermediate school at the time. I just googled and it’s now called middle school.
I was maybe halfway through freshman year in college before I stopped thinking of myself as a sophomore, because “sophomore” had previously been used to designate the youngest class in a school, the 10th grade of high school.
That’s how I understand it as well; back in the 1980s, we had middle school as you describe, and my children’s current school district does that junior high plan.
That’s how it is/was set up in my area (NE MN). I went to a junior high (graduated HS in 79). I think that changed sometime in the 80s. There are no schools called junior highs anymore around here.
Long Island 1980s-1990s.
Elementary School was K-6
Junior High was 7-8
High School was 9-12
Though the junior high has since then been renamed “Town Middle School” we all called it “Junior High” when I attended.
MPSIMS: My jr. high school (7-9) closed in 1985. The last time I went to San Diego (2003?) it was a Christian center. Now it’s a 9-12 high school that opened in 2018.
I’m finding this really entertaining and enlightening. I grew up in Ontario, and most of the children’s lit I consumed was American. As far as I could tell from Judy Blume and whatnot, elementary school (or “grammar school” which I found hilarious…all they taught was reading and writing?) was up to grade 6, you had three years of “junior high” and then four of high school.
Though the numbers didn’t seem to add up after a while. When I got to uni, all my American friends seemed to be a year younger, like they’d had one less year of secondary school. But I still gathered that American high school was four years, and they didn’t count grades, just did the “freshman-sophomore-junior-senior” thing.
As for me, the system I grew up with typically had elementary schools that included everyone from pre-K (4 years old) to grade 8 (13 years old), though some stopped at grade 6 and you had to transfer to get your final two years. Then high school was grades 9-13, though while I was in school they introduced OACs (Ontario Academic Credits) which took the place of grade 13; you had to get a certain number of OACs to graduate with a status that allowed you to apply for university in the province. I graduated high school in 1991; since then, Ontario streamlined high school down to four years, which seemed to do nothing but leave an entire cohort of teenagers unequipped for university. But I’m sure they consulted somebody.
The term pre-dates both Canada and the US and originally really was to teach reading and writing…in Latin. Church schools, you know?
That gradually expanded to the trivium (grammar, rhetoric, logic) then mathematics/astronomy and evolved into the modern era, though the term stuck around, at least in the UK and US if not in Canada.
My JH was 7-8. Even as a teacher I wondered why there was a separate facility for just 2 or 3 grades. The theory, guess, is that children are ready for specialist teachers before they are ready to socialize with near-adults.
School districts change back and forth - but I’ve never heard of an American school system where students go to elementary school up to grade six, then junior high for three years and then high school for four. Systems with junior high for grades 7-9 send those kids to high school for grades 10-12. The reason the Americans seemed to be a year younger with one less year of school than you is because they were - American schools generally only go to grade twelve no matter how the grades are divided between schools.
This 2005 article from Time describes a trend of moving away from junior high (7th, 8th, and sometimes 9th grades) to middle schools (6th-8th) occurring about 25 years prior (so, around 1980).
How did middle schools, which were ushered in with such fanfare 25 years ago, fall into such disrepute? The answer, many educators say, has less to do with the philosophy behind the middle school movement and more to do with how it was executed. Coming after a period of youth unrest, when juvenile crime and drug use were rising, middle school proponents argued that old-fashioned junior highs, which usually served Grades 7 and 8 and sometimes 9, were not meeting kids’ social and developmental needs. Instead, they were providing a watered-down version of high school, literally a junior high. Reformers proposed that schools for this age group needed to educate “the whole child,” addressing social and emotional issues as well as building academic skills. Sixth grade became the usual entry point for new middle schools, both because of crowding at grammar schools and because puberty was occurring earlier.
Among the key tenets of the middle school movement are these: fostering a close relationship between teacher and child so that every student has an adult advocate, having teachers work across disciplines in teams (example: students read Johnny Tremain in English while studying the Revolutionary War in social studies), creating small learning communities within larger schools and stressing learning by doing. “Young adolescents learn through discovery and getting involved,” explains Sue Swaim, executive director of the Ohio-based National Middle School Association. “They’re not meant to be lectured to the whole day.”
Some critics contend that the whole movement was soft in the head. It “had as its ideological antecedent the notion that academics should take a back seat to self-exploration, socialization and working in groups,” writes Cheri Pierson Yecke, a former education commissioner in Minnesota, in a forthcoming report for the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation titled Mayhem in the Middle: How Middle Schools Failed America and How to Make Them Work. “A disproportionate regard for student self-esteem and identity development,” Yecke argues, yielded a “precipitous decline” in academic achievement.
The larger context of the article is talking about the problems with middle school and suggesting a K-8 model might be better.
In my opinion, switching back and forth between middle school/jr high is just an example of schools constantly looking for new ways to spend money reflecting changing educational theory. Just an excuse to increase budgets and claim they are doing something new and significant.
Generally true, though it seems like, in the large majority of U.S. school districts, “freshman-sophomore-junior-senior” maps directly to grades 9, 10, 11, and 12, even if the grade “numbers” aren’t typically used.
My impression is that:
grades 6-8 (or, less commonly, 5-8) is generally middle school.
grades 7-8 is usually a junior high school, but is sometimes a middle school
grades 7-9 is almost always a junior high school
There seem to be as many grade systems as dialects in the U.S. Ah well, it’s a spectrum.
Also, I don’t know how common this is south of the border, but in Canada one would typically say “Grade four” (or whichever) whereas in the States I more commonly see “Fourth grade.” The first BNL album had a song called “Grade Nine” on it and I always wondered how that traveled.
The Brit system is crazier. I had to have my U.K. friends break it down for me. I was especially stuck on terms like “sixth former” because I was always asking myself “they’re a former what?”
Sometimes - but sometimes it’s also a matter of demographics. Now that we have added pre-K and 3 K to the previously K-6 schools , we need to move 6th grade to the former junior high school and 9th grade to the high school. Or the high schools are over crowded and the middle schools have space, so we move 9th grade to the former middle school.
In my school it was a function of cost and space. We started with K-6, 7-9, 9-12 during a huge time of growth that began to overwhelm the schools. Building a new high school was the cheapest alternative. It alleviated the high school’s overcrowding by splitting the current students and adding grade 9. It eliminated the Jr High overcrowding by moving 9th to the the high school. It could be further from the students where there was available cheaper land. Then they built a new middle school and brought up grade 6. Again, it alleviated the middle school overcrowding by splitting the students and by bringing up a grade it helped with elementary overcrowding. 20+ elementary schools, 3 middle school and 2 high schools were helped by building two buildings.
Also parents get pissed when you start moving elementary school boundaries and breaking up kids friendships. They don’t care as much at the middle school high school level.
I think that depends on usage - I wouldn’t have said my kid was in grade 4 or that I was attending the grade 8 class play. Those would have been “fourth grade” or “eighth grade”. But when you are talking about a group of grades , it’s more likely to be “parent teacher conferences for Grades 4-8 are Tuesday” or “Grades 4 and 7 have statewide tests next week”
My parents were in the Los Angeles School District in the forties and fifties and that was the division used then.
That reminds me. My dad used to complain about splitting grades 7-9 out of high school. His opinion was that in a proper high school, the older students kept the younger ones in line. Whereas if you had un-suppressed 7-9 graders, they got full of themselves and got used to acting up. I think the word scrubs was used.
Dad complained about a lot of things.
I attended middle school in rural Iowa in the early 1980s and it ran from grades 5-8. There were about 120-130 kids in each grade. Everyone was assigned to a home-room, and took all of our core classes with students from the same home-room, although we shuffled between different classrooms and had different teachers for each subject. I do recall that there was some effort made to coordinate lesson plans between subjects so, for example, we might read a book in English that took place during the Civil War at the same time that we studied the Civil War in American History… What I remember is that it felt like there was a sharp divide between the lower grades (5th/6th) and upper grades (7th/8th.) Partially that was due to the physical layout of the building (which had two separate wings,) but also because starting in grade 7 we stopped getting morning and afternoon recess, started taking limited electives, and had more opportunities for extracurricular activities (such as athletics.)