If “writing lines” is merely a pointless punishment, no wonder your friend is still extra traumatised!
I meant that the dip pen was the writing implement used to teach beginning schoolchildren, all of them, how to write, until the 1970s or so (depends where), in, e.g., France; it was not supposed to be a punishment, although I am sure in many instances it seemed that way to the kids or actually was!
A friend of mine (American) kept using dip pens well past elementary school. What made him finally give them up, he said, was the price of ink having increased by an order of magnitude. [Which, if you think about it, proves he must have been doing a lot of writing by hand. Have you tried going through a litre of ink??]
I not only had lockers, I still dream about them sometimes. Mostly I dream I lost the key or combination so I can’t put my stuff in them anymore despite the fact I’m in high school again.
Well, he is from Chicago, and he would have gone to elementary school during the war. But I do not personally know that his specific school had kids use dip pens instead of pencils. I only know for sure that he was using them much later on. Some American schools at that time absolutely taught students how to write via dip pens and the school had inkwells and huge bottles of ink, though; it was not some European eccentricity.
I know from experience that some high schoolers do weird, eccentric, or obsolete things just because they can. Several of my students still use cursive, despite never being taught in school, just because it’s pretty, and I had one student who preferred to write in Elder Futhark runes (which I didn’t mind, because his handwriting with modern Latin letters was so bad that the runes were actually easier to read).
A student choosing to use dip pens just because is perfectly consistent with that sort of thing.
One thing that’s considered more important in the U.S. than elsewhere is high school sports. It’s not just more important for the students playing in the sports. Going to see the games is considered important. It’s the way for the students and the people who live in that school district to be a united community. Similarly, college sports are more important in the U.S. and not just for those playing the sports It’s considered to be a way for all the students of the college to be a united community.
Thirty-something years ago when I came to the US and people told me this, I was skeptical. I mean in Pakistan we have school sports rivalries, particularly in cricket (and historically field hockey) that I considered pretty intense. Granted only among the “top” schools (i.e. private schools).
But nothing prepared me for the HS football culture in the South. And now the hockey and lacrosse fever in the Northeast.
I remember driving into Maine 30+ years ago and seeing a sign at the border “Welcome to Maine, home of the 1993 NCAA Div I Hockey Champions” and wondering why would anyone care?
I think a certain amount of that is very location specific. HS sports aren’t a big thing in NYC except possibly to the athletes and their families but I suspect that’s because they wouldn’t serve the function of uniting the community - if there are 20 high school age kids on the block, they may be attending 20 different high schools
In my high school, the two and a half towns (and the farms around them) where the students lived where each had a population of less than 400 people. Many of the students lived on farms in the area. Over the last century though, the farms had become larger on average because it took a larger area to run a profitable farm. So in various cases, one farmer had bought out the farm next to his because that farmer had died or retired. The most popular high school sport was football (i.e., American football as it is known outside the U.S.). If you mentioned sports like rugby or cricket to people living in the school district, they would only vaguely know anything about them.
If you had done so well in high school football that you got a scholarship to play on a state university’s football team, they would have been very happy. If you had then done so well as a college football player that you got an offer to play for a professional football team, they would have been overjoyed. If you had played for the team for many years before retirement and become rich, they would have had a huge celebration every time you came back to the community. (No one ever did play for a professional football team though.)
If you had somehow, some way gotten a scholarship to a top, elite university based on your academic record in our high school, they would have said to you, “Why would you want to go to college with a bunch of snobs? Just go to a state university. Like most of us who go to such colleges, you’ll probably just barely make it through without failing out. Then you could come back to our high school and teach here.”
Isn’t that relatively recent? My understanding is that the big 4000-student NYC high schools have been broken up, and charter schools and other streams founded, in the last 30 years?
Nope - as far back as when I went to high school in the 80s there were probably over 500 high schools in NYC . Even when the 4000 student high schools existed, there were also Catholic, Jewish,Lutheran and independent private high schools.
If it included the name of the school, I bet the state putting that boast on the sign made the kids’ year. That by itself makes it worth doing. Without the name of the school, though… Yeah, meh.
It might even have been the school that put up the sign (with the permission of the state, or of whomever owned the land next to the road in that spot). Or might even have been the landowner, who was just proud of the school (maybe an alumn).
It was the official welcome to Maine sign. It’s still there, the messaging changes. Last time I saw it (last summer) it just had the governor’s name under the big Welcome to Maine lettering.
There is at least one school in the U.K. where students store their belongings in lockers during the day. It’s Queen’s Gate School in London. The exact address is 131-133 Queen’s Gate, South Kensington, London, SW7 5LE. I learned of this while reading the Wikipedia entry for Anya Taylor-Joy. She grew up in Argentina and then in the U.K. And, to be even more confusing, she was born in the U.S., but it was while her parents were briefly there on vacation.