Richard Feynman recounts his days of learning to lockpick during the manhattan project - those combination locks were acurate to +/-1 number, so a file cabinet dial with 30 numbers had 15 choices. Also, people tended to leave the combination lock on their last number after opening, so it was trivial to eventually work through 225 comibations. (50-50 that it was half that). He mentions learning to do it while in idle conversation with someone, so looking like he was just idly twiddling the dial for no reason. Eventually he had most of the combinations in the building noted down.
I’m in south Georgia, grew up in central Indiana. I went to the same school building grades 7-12. I had four lockers in that time. The first two years were tall lockers, shared by two students- one in 7 and 8, then another in 9 and 10. The last two years were one per student, and consisted of a tall skinny (6" wide) door with a book locker (about 12"wide by 6" tall) on top. The one thing the IN lockers had that made them better IMHO was the combination locks were built into the locker doors. There was no opening, removing, and replacing a padlock to take up time.
Agreed, but the kids don’t care it seems. It holds their Chromebook, and I guess that is enough.
Do you live in a warm weather area? I ask because, if our kids didn’t have lockers, they would have to drag their hats/coats/jackets/whatever around with them all day from classroom to classroom (departmentalized) and hand them on their chair. Wouldn’t work for us.
Just wanted to pop in and say I’m still using my high school locker (vintage 1965) Master 1500 combination padlock. It still works perfectly.
Just not as a secure lock:
Stranger
We in England [1970s] had lockers in the common spaces. ‘Lockers’ - but they didn’t lock, and you wouldnt keep anything you valued in them. Also don’t leave food in them, because of the mice. You’d regret it if you did.
BTW, when I was in college in the mid-1984s and we used backpacks to get around campus, it was more acceptable to carry the backpack over only one shoulder. I think you were seen as slightly dorky if you carried it over both, though that might have been more comfortable and perhaps better orthopedically.
Yeah, I know. I use it on the storage cabinet in my carport where I keep lawn chairs, empty large storage bins, a boogie board, a bike tire pump, that kind of stuff. If someone decided to break into the cabinet I doubt they’d bother to take anything.
Here is a pic of a hallway in my HS.
I ran track, and during the indoor season, we ran in the halls. (Our school was shaped like a squared off capital A. I think a mile was 6 laps around the central rectangle. Forget the shin splints you’d get from pounding those tile halls (I was a hurdler!). Since the “track” was a rectangle, when running at any speed you had to drift to the outside wall going into the turn, cut the inside corner closely, and end up at the outside wall again. LOT’S of fun when you cut a corner only to find some student standing/walking in the hall - possibly with their locker open!
(Yeah - swimming naked wasn’t the craziest thing about our HS!)
My middle school didn’t have lockers, and students were supposed to put their stuff inside their desks or some cubby holes in the back of the classrooms (leaving things vulnerable to being stolen easily). Then, they finally installed some in the summer between my 7th and 8th grade year. It was nice finally to get the lockers, but one problem was that they cut down on hallway width (both because of their physical presence and because of students standing outside of them). It became difficult to walk from class to class.
My high school had lockers. I still remember my combination: 2-38-4.
Both my kids are in grammar school; one in 3rd grade, one in 5th. One is in Catholic school, the other in public. Neither has a Chromebook or iPad they take home. They work on their homework the old-fashioned way: on paper with textbooks. I’ve seen the older one once use her own Chromebook to make a Power Point-style presentation. That’s it. They have smartboards and, from my understanding, most of their work is not done on a Chromebook. They have composition books they use for writing and taking notes. Their tests (except standardized ones) are all on paper. Their classrooms really didn’t look all that much different than the classroom I grew up with, to be honest. Just more computers lying about.
I too remember one of my HS locker combinations: 8-16-6. which locker number in which school is lost to time, but hey, my brain remembered something useless for decades.
In junior high/middle school (12-14 yrs old ish), we had lockers but couldn’t lock them. So it was really just for coats. I cannot get past schools not having lockers for just your coats and umbrellas, maybe snow boots.
In my first high school, we had a bank of lockers not lining the halls. I think that was the one that I know the combination for. There might have been lockers in the real halls, but I was new and it was the first year 9th graders were in the school at all (it was 10-12 previously, 15-18 ish) so they might have just shoved a bunch of us in a weird liminal space.
I moved the next year and all the new kids were given the shit lockers by the cafeteria and auditorium, nowhere near any of the real classes. So I had to carry 5 classes of stuff around all day every day. It was ridiculously heavy and clumsy until lunch where I could swap out for just my last two classes’ stuff.
Someone must have noticed all us transfer kids struggling and we got to have lockers with the rest of the kids my senior year. Two skinny vertical lockers, one for you and one for the person you hoped was never there because it was a tight fit. Then above your pair, two horizontal shelves. Vertical was for your coat, horizontal for your books. YMMV. Some people kept their drugs, for example. My idiot friends found an empty locker and filled the entire thing with empty cans.
You should leave a T-shirt that says,”I hacked this lock and all I got was this stupid shirt.”
Stranger
My mother had the job of creating schedules for all the students at the school (she was the counselor), back in the 50’s and 60’s. It usually took all summer.
Here, it’s the students who stay in the room and the teachers who rotate in and out for the lesson, mostly. If a class does different subjects in a period (say, 12 do Accounting while 8 do Geography), the smaller groups would go to wherever that subject was happening, but usually there’s only a 2 or 3-way split. But mostly, everyone in class is doing the same thing - Maths, English, Science, etc.
Kids hang out on benches in the playground. Pigeon holes for bags in the classroom.
Was it something like this?
It might be elsewhere - Woodwork and Home Ec were right on the edge away from other classes, for instance. But in general, yeah, ours were short hops. Much simpler for 1 teacher to move than 20 students.
In Australia we just carried our bag or port with us , but it didn’t have much in it. Just books and lunch. You leave the bag/port at the side of the classroom.
On the TV shows the lockers are huge and have everything in them…a home away from home.