My son’s high school was built in 2019-20 and opened to students for the 2020-21 school year. There are no student lockers anywhere on premises aside from lockers for the athletic teams in/near the gymnasium.
He also doesn’t have any textbooks as my generation understands them. A lot is done with various online written sources, and I don’t even mean a single online one-stop-shop textbook. I mean that teachers draw materials from dozen of websites and upload them to Google Classroom, Edmentum, etc. for their students to use. He does sometimes have physical soft-cover novels to read, but nowhere near as many as we had in the 1980s.
My daughter graduated high school in 2021 and only had a handful of physical textbooks over those years.
Also, depending on country, it may shock people how large some of those American textbook really were. Like several hundred pages of nearly A4 sized paper with thick hardcovers. And between all classes, maybe 5 or 6 of those. It was a workout just lugging those around.
The textbook business and corresponding lobbying is huge.
In the 60s, I would have been laughed out of junior high or high school if I had carried a backpack. We carried only the few books and notebooks we needed for a couple classes. Further, guys carried the books at their side with one edge on the hip. Women carried them clutched to their front. I remember this very distinctly because several guys I knew got teased for “carrying books like a girl.”
I see. It was the opposite for us: We’d keep our school stuff, including books, at home and only bring those each morning that we’d need during that day. And we’d carry those around the schoolhouse in a bag (of the sort described by @EinsteinsHund).
But I think this scheme worked only thanks to some fundamental difference between German and American schools: For the most part, the entire class would stay together as a group across subjects, and stay in the same physical room. And when, say English lesson was over, the English teacher would leave the room, the students would stay, and, say, the maths teacher would come in. So the teacher would come to the students, rather than the other way around, minimising the need for students to haul stuff around the building. Things would only be the other way around (the teacher staying in a dedicated room and different classes coming to that room one after another) for dedicated subjects such as chemistry that required special lab equipment. The students-move-around-and-the-teacher-stays principle would only become the general default in the last two years of high school when students were given greater freedom in selecting the courses they wanted to attend rather than getting a pre-defined curriculum imposed on the entire class.
This. But a lot depended on where your locker was, relative to your classrooms, the cafeteria, etc. I remember being able to stop by my locker a few times each day - not between each class, but often enough so I wouldn’t be carrying more than three books at a time.
My son, who’s in his senior year in high school, has no textbooks and rarely wears a jacket over his sweatshirt. If the school has lockers, I doubt he ever uses his.
Most people use the word ‘backpack’ to refer to what we would have called a knapsack. Language evolves, and I’d say that’s been pretty much the standard usage in the U.S. for decades now.
I had to share my locker at first with a football player. The locker was inadequate. Besides both our collections of school books, he kept his uniform in there, and I kept my trumpet in its case. In winter we put out very heavy coats in there. I suppose some people put boots in there, but my books were on the bottom of the locker, and would’ve been covered with water and slush if either of us tried to put used winter boots in there.
It was bad enough that my lockermate Herb had a “secret friend” – a designated person who put occasional decorations or treats in the locker. This person was invariably female. I found the little gifts annoying, but after my books got covered with cake and icing I thought it was time to move out. Fortunately there were some empty lockers, and I appropriated one of these. Herb was happy to have me and my trumpet move out, too.
I assume from your handle you are in California. In my Philadelphia HS, it was forbidden to bring outer coats and, especially galoshes, to the classroom. This was especially enforced for last period. When I started 9th grade, I was issued two padlocks and had to return them at the end of 12th. One for the regular locker and the other for the gym. At the beginning of each term, you were assigned a regular locker near your homeroom. For gym, you just grabbed any vacant locker.
Hijack: I still remember, 70 years later the two combinations: 7-43-36 and 9-41-36 and I quickly discovered that they would both open on 8-42-36 and stopped paying attention to which was which.
I don’t - because that’s basically exactly what I did. My textbooks lived at home, and I had homework requiring them nearly every day. The only book that regularly came to school with me was the book I was reading for English - and it was a regular book, not a textbook.
But this is a difference - in the school systems I know of , the totally pre-defined curriculum ended by 6th or 7th grade. By that point, students would be taking different languages so that would would result in at least one subject where the class couldn’t be kept together. And by the first year in the actual high school , a student might be in an honors English class, but a regular track history class and a slightly slower than usual math class in addition to students taking different language, gym, music and art classes.
When the Firebug (now a HS senior) was in elementary school, they were still using smartboards.
You mention triangular desks. Not sure how I’d deal with a triangular desk, no matter what I had with me. Notebook, Chromebook, whatever: most of our stuff is rectangular. Seems like you’d have to be extra careful not to knock stuff over the edge.
In junior high school, one of my classmates was known for having wealthy parents. How wealthy? They bought her two copies of all her textbooks: one for home, and one for school.
Our school was combined grade school and high school. In grade school, we had one teacher and an assigned desk where you could lift the top and keep books etc inside. (Or some models, the top was fixed but you could reach into a space under to desktop.) For specialty subjects (i.e. French) the teacher came to our classroom. Come to think of it, I don’t remember changing for gym in grade school, we did basic stuff - murder ball or baseball outside - in our street clothes. It was never very demanding/sweaty.
In high school, you were never in the same room two periods in a row, so everyone got lockers for their stuff. You used a combination lock bought from the school store, so they had (I presume) the combination on file.
(The top-lift desks were really old with a bent steel pipe frame that had a swivel seat on a post. By high school, kids were big enough to lean back on the seat and raise the whole front of the desk in the air. The strain would eventually cause the T weld between the post and the desk frame to fail, and someone sitting down at a desk and having the whole chair piece break off and fall over was a common funny joke. Eventually the high school desks were replaced with those more modern one-piece half-desks with no lifting lid and no storage under the desk, but a wire frame bookbag holder under the seat.)
Most of the lockers I remember in different schools were full-sized, hence the Hollywood bully trope of stuffing the small kid in his locker.
I never thought about it at the time, but making up a schedule for a couple of hundred students and dozens of teachers - by hand in the days before PC’s - must have been an interesting exercise. the first week always involved some students getting their schedule re-done.
In university, you were on your own. The class chedules were listed, and it was up to you to pick the classes and which particulay class schedule worked for the courses you wanted to take.