Taking your one textbook from your desk in your homeroom (where you have 75% of your classes) to the class next door for one period, is quicker than stopping by a locker each period, I’d think.
I wonder why there is a split between the US and the rest of the world when it comes to school lockers. Any ideas?
My Jr High wasn’t a middle school, either - that was a completely different school (in the '90s). I actually transferred my junior year of high school from a district that had 3 elementaries that fed into 2 intermediate schools that fed into 1 middle school then a jr high and a single HS. My final district had 1 high school that housed grades 7-12. So as a senior, I walked the halls with 7th graders.
In grade school the desks had inkwells carved into the wood tops. My father told me a prank in his day was to dip a girl’s ponytail in the inkwell if she was sitting at the desk in front. Seeing as how there was no ink our wells we wouldn’t have gotten in much trouble for doing that and it’s value as a prank was non-existent.
My high school did have hallways filled with rows and rows of lockers, just like TV and the movies. These days I think kids rely on backpacks much more- my two kids did. But back when I went to school I don’t remember anybody using backpacks-- maybe they were considered extremely uncool or something. So the locker was used to strategically store the books and whatever you weren’t immediately using, and we just carried the book or two we currently needed. Now kids have backpacks full of all the books, laptops, snacks, gaming devices, and cellphones they need in an entire day.
That’s not how schools work where I am. “Home room” was a period of 10 minutes where a teacher takes roll call for the day and announcements are made. Those 10 minutes are your only time in the day in that room unless you happen to take that teacher’s class for a period. After that 10 minute period, you switch from classroom to classroom every hour, with a different person using the desk you sat in in home room each hour.
It would be - but it’s not terribly common for high school students in the US to have 75% of their classes in one classroom and for the other 25% to be in the room next door. If I had 7 classes, they were most likely in 7 different classrooms scattered all through the building and most likely none of them would be in the room where I went for homeroom for 15 minutes. People i knew with lockers didn’t go there after each class . That was their first stop in the morning, last stop before going home and maybe once in the middle of the day.
When they built a new high school in my town about 10 years ago, it had lockers. Though my kids never used them , which I found insane.
My freshman year was 1991, and I would have had to carry the following books if I didn’t have a locker: English Lit, German, Science, Algebra, and History plus whatever supplies I had. While it was possible for me to have carried all those books all the time, they’d take up a lot of space in the classroom just sitting on the floor next to my desk.
I haven’t heard anything about it in a while, but a few decades back I did hear it argued that it was bad for the health of youngsters to carry around so much weight during the day. I think it was something to do with developing bodies and not carrying the weight in a safe manner. I know I used to keep my books in a gym bag so all the weight was just hanging off one arm at a time. Imagine a poor 110 pound kid having to walk around with 30 pounds of supplies and not carrying them properly every time he goes from one class to another.
Australia, grade 7, early 80s, no lockers and everyone had the same yellowish canvas backpack for all their books.
Colorado, mid 80s, both Jr High and Highschool had full length lockers on every available wall space as did high school in northern Alberta in the late 80s.
My daughter’s school had a very limited number of lockers that were half size and were only available to the higher grades This was the 2010s in New Brunswick.
But it often wasn’t next door. Some years, I had to go from one side of the school to the other between classes. Often changing floors as well. Our school had a weird quirk where there were actually two different second floors, that didn’t connect, so some people had to go down a floor, cross most of the school, and then go up a floor between classes.
Luckily we were a “semester” school, so only had four classes per day, so you could carry books for two classes in the morning, and switch at lunch for the two afternoon classes.
Back in the early seventies, backpacks were manufactured for camping & hiking. Most of them had rigid frames.
I was in junior high from 1982-1985, in California. There were no hallways, let alone lockers. We were expected to lug all of our books around with us all day. I decided backpacks were for dweebs, so I left my books at home at carried a couple of Pee-Chees by hand.
In high school there were lockers, but again, the school was open-air had no hallways. There were covered areas that contained rows of lockers, which were about 1/4 the size of those seen on TV. I remember one year, once I had determined the locker below mine wasn’t being used, I brought some tools to school and ripped the floor out of mine, and put another lock on the one below, doubling the size of my locker.
Huh, I would have thought that school backpacks would have been around for a lot longer than that, but apparently soft-sided nylon bags did evolve from rigid-framed backpacks and did not get adopted as school book bags until the early 80s or so.
I had lockers in middle and high school (grades 6-12). We were very much not allowed to carry backpacks or bookbags with us between classes. Even on gym days. In high school the principal even tried to ban girls from carrying purses, but had to quickly back down because of the backlash from female students, faculty, and mothers.
Related to the lockers, there was (is?) another fundamental difference between US and German schools: without our own lockers, we German kids used to carry all our stuff, books, notebooks, pencil case and food in a special backpack that only students used, called a Ranzen or Tornister, either made from leather or plastic. I couldn’t find an equivalent in English, this seems to be an exclusive German thing, so here’s the German wiki with pics:
In my school days, kids used this from first grade to about 8th, after when we felt it wasn’t cool anymore and switched to handbags with single shoulder straps. Having no kids and not living near any school, I’m not sure what the kids use today, but I still sometimes see children with Ranzen/Tornister on their back.
ETA: I also remember from American shows that many students carried a stack of books bound together with a strap. Is this also for real?
FYI, here is a gift link to the recent New York Times obituary for Murray McCory, founder of JanSport and inventor of the school backpack. He invented it in the mid-1970s.
FYI, I didn’t have until college and mine was an Eastpak brand.
In the late 60s I used a rock climbers’ backpack for junior high and high school - a small frameless pack with a triangular shape (so arms and shoulders could reach around unobstructed). It wasn’t very efficient for school since only a few of the many books I had to carry would fit at the bottom of the pack, but I also had a locker and did a lot of transfering over the course of a day. Carrying books, a saxophone and a bassoon on the two mile walk to school was a chore. (Uphill both ways, natch).
Both lockers and backpacks were absolutely a thing in my high school, though this was 40+ years ago, so I can’t vouch for how ubiquitous they are now.
Was for real. My Dad did, but his school career was immediately before & during WWII.
I’ve only ever seen them in shows set in at latest the 1950s.