Wow.
Our high school cig smokers were the loser pariahs who went outside and furtively “hid” in an area where none of the few windows of our building had line of sight to them.
The MJ smokers were slightly more discreet, but not much.
Suburban SoCal area - Class of 76.
It’s all part of Hollywood Provincialism.
Mostly Mormon population at my high school so not that many smokers.
Of course, when I did smoke grass (a little, not that much) it was at a friend’s home. The rest of the MJ smoking Mormons would have done the same.
The home of a gentile friend, I assume?
I was in high school from '87 -'91. We had lockers. No one stopped by a locker after each class. There wouldn’t have been time. You’d stop by your locker in the a.m and pack your backpack for the first half of the day, then switch out your books after lunch for the second half.
Don’t the raincoats just go on hooks?
Which makes me remember…coats, bags and hats all went on hooks in the classroom, or just outside.
For example: Back to School with Snughooks | Keeping Students Safe
Why not just follow this approach?
When I was in high school (graduated in 1989) in Texas, we all had lockers straight out of the movies. Bring your own lock if you wanted*. Students in the band got assigned lockers in the hallway right outside the band hall, which due to the layout of the school meant you could only practically visit it at lunchtime during the day - so I had a “morning” and an “afternoon” load in my bag that I’d tote from class to class.
My daughter (class of 2026) attends a high school in California that’s… pretty old (my mother-in-law went there in the same buildings). The hallways are lined with lockers, but they’re completely unused. Each has an integral lock, and the school stopped assigning them years ago - so they are purely decorative.
* - I never bothered with a lock. One day I came to my locker to find it secured with an unknown lock. I went to the school office, described the situation, and was surprised when the vice principal handed me a giant pair of bolt cutters, said “Bring these back when you’re done,” and sent me on my way to deal with the matter. In hindsight, that doesn’t sound like a very big deal - but at the moment it felt like an unexpected amount of trust.
Were they playing craps at the same time? Our daily crap game took place in the boys’ bathroom. It floated between the first, second, and third floors. I made a few dollars that way. Smoke be damned, I wanted some action.
Isn’t Texas a warmer part of the world?
Why the need for lockers in the corridors?
In elementary school, sure. We’re talking about high school settings where there isn’t “the classroom,” and students need somewhere to stash anything they won’t be carrying with them throughout the day as they go from room to room.
As above - massive loads of books and/or gear.
The post mentioned band - if you had a saxophone or trombone or other instrument that was a bit larger but not so large you kept in the bandhall, there was a fair chance you stuffed it in a locker instead of lugging it around everywhere.
And many schools had a bad habit of giving students too many books to carry all of them around all day. So, having a morning load and an afternoon load was not uncommon, at least if you were studious at all. If you didn’t care, you might return textbooks at the end of the year completely unused. But otherwise, carting around a stack of books weighing in excess of 20 kg (American textbooks are ridiculously large and heavy compared to most foreign textbooks I’ve seen) is unpleasant and unrealistic. That problem got extreme enough that parents and schools tried to literally lighten the loads the children had to deal with, which was also, I think, mentioned in earlier posts.
Also as above, there was often insufficient time to stop by lockers between classes, so it was generally first thing in the morning, before/after lunch, and at the end of the day.
ETA: Oh, and while Texas weather is generally milder than most of the country, freezes are not unknown in the winter and so the need for coats and such still exists part of the year.
Why was/is that? Do American textbooks cover several school years? Because we got a new textbook for each class every year, so they weren’t very big or heavy and carrying five books all day in your backpack plus notebooks and pencil case wasn’t a problem. The only exception was the world atlas for geography (Diercke Weltatlas), but you had to bring it only once or twice a week.
I certainly have no solid answer.
A single text would generally only cover a single subject for a single year and for high school (bigger books by then) would be 2-5 kg. They would be returned at the end of the year and used for several years. Carrying more than a couple of those around gets literally burdensome.
Perhaps now in the digital age things are different but back then, a textbook generally had a very thick hardcover and used thick paper. I’ve noticed international editions of several of my university texts had soft covers and used thinner paper.
The textbook industry is a major one here, though, and there is a lot of competition to be selected as “the” textbook recommended by a state or school district. And districts may have been looking to save money by getting durable books that did not need frequent replacement. Probably the correct answer is the usual mix of good intentions and perverse incentives that lead to sub-optimal “solutions”.
Yikes! I doubt any of my school textbooks ever exceeded 500 g. Finally I begin to understand the need for lockers.
To expand a little on that, even back when I went to school (and I entered first grade 50 years ago), there were always discussions about students, especially for primary school, having to carry too much of a load and that this was bad for their anatomical development. To deploy textbooks that weighed >2 kg would have caused an outrage and heavy resistance from parents.
Some of us had less limited experiences than others (which had some positives but also a lot of negatives). I was an Army “brat” and went to schools in Texas, Germany, California, Texas (again), Tennessee, and Illinois. I went to 13 different schools from K-12. Then my son went to school here in Connecticut.
In any event, once I got past grade school and started switching classes, I found that every school had lockers in the corridors.
There were no (or at least very few) lockers in college/university, but you also weren’t trapped in the same building all day.
This is certainly true, and it undercuts my argument of having a lot of different experiences growing up, because it necessarily was all around the same time period (mid ‘70s to mid ‘80s).
I’m pretty sure my son’s high school (which was built in the ‘90s) had lockers, but I have no idea what they are doing these days. However, I am dating a school architect, so maybe I will ask her.
This is a textbook I used in an early college class, not high school, but it is the only one I remember by title and author, so…
https://www.amazon.com/Invertebrates-Richard-C-Brusca/dp/0878930981
I had (still have) that 1st edition. As you can see, it had 922 páginas and was 2x9x11.5 pulgatas. Some high school texts were similar.
That’s crazy! And not even a general biology book, but especially for invertebrates. Why the volume? I mean, it’s impossible to work through 922 pages in a one year class, isn’t it?
ETA: for contrast, this was my 5th grade (my first year of English) textbook for English. I doubt it had more than 200 pages.
When it comes to details, I guess it is better to have it and not need it than to need it and not have it.
An American answering a question by a German using a few Spanish words. Good one however it happened! 