So what are the lockers used for then?
The Klassische Lederschultasche is like what I had in primary school. In high school, we used the canvas bag I showed above - almost everyone used the same couple of styles, either with two shoulder straps as a backpack or one longer shoulder strap, messenger-style, and those was definitely associated with schoolkids.
I retired from teaching high school in 2016. We had lockers until about 2005, when they were removed. VERY few kids used lockers, preferring to walk around with 20-30 pound backpacks. (I called them “The Chiropractic Generation.”) Kids had backpacks long before that, of course, and back in the 90s, they still used (and often decorated) their lockers. Apparently someone figured out that if you didn’t have to go to your locker between classes, you could spend more time talking, getting snacks, etc. From that point, using a locker was considered lame.
Now the only lockers are in the gym locker rooms.
I think the writers of the TV shows and movies are basing their scripts off their own school experiences.
I do, yes. In southeastern Louisiana. There are very few days each winter that require more than two layers of clothing (say, a school polo and a fleece sweatshirt). Wool clothing is uncommon locally, and almost no teens would have wool cold-weather pieces. Few people around here own long-johns – any pants at all are sufficient, even on our coldest days.
There is the phenomenon, though, of some people (usually young) breaking out those lightweight “puffer” coats (don’t know the term of art) around here when the temperature gets below 60F. I thought puffer coats were legit cold-weather gear … but maybe they vary widely within the type.
How so? If I’m teaching a Biology lab, I’m supposed to load up everything and move to another classroom every section?
The real ones were generally about 2’ tall by about 14-16" square footprint and no interior shelf. Usuly stacked 2 or 3 rows high. So from ~ankle height to pretty challenging for a 12yo girl to reach the top of the upper ones.
Some places had double height ones, so ~5 feet tall. Which often had a shelf about a foot down from the top.
Special case, just like the other examples I gave. Most lessons were just teacher+blackboard+papers+AV equipment.
That was the standard model in all the schools I knew. Of course, we had real winters, so needed space for large jackets and wet boots, in addition to all our school stuff.
That was the style that we had, complete with the shelf near the top. I had the same locker for all four years of high school (#357), and it was still there, in the same spot, when I took a tour of the old high school last summer (just before they began tearing down the building). Alas, they had changed the combination on the lock!
Yeah, that’s very different in American (and Canadian) schools. A high school will typically have various different math, English, and science classes. At a basic level, it will typically have a low, regular, and high class for both math and English, and different science courses such as biology, chemistry, etc. A student could be taking any combination of those classes. As well as other electives. So it’s rare for two students to have exactly the same schedule.
My elementary schools, junior highs and high schools (three of each) all had full-height hall lockers. In addition to the above-mentioned outer garments, we also left our books and other things in them overnight, so we wouldn’t have to carry everything back and forth between home and the school every day. Can’t remember about junior high, but at the high schools we did have assigned gym lockers to keep our PE gear from one class til the next. Oh, and bags/backpacks were almost never seen – we carried everything in our hands.
We had prom, and the homecoming dance (formal, but not as much so as prom), and – since we had an Army JROTC brigade – we also had the formal military ball, to which guys wore their greens with white shirts and black bowties instead of the normal khaki shirts and long ties.
The assigned gym lockers were small – just large enough to hold shoes, t-shirt and shorts. There were also normal-sized lockers to keep our street clothes and books in whilst wearing said gym clothes. They weren’t assigned, but most guys used the same locker almost every day.
Ditto on the desks; I think we had the inkwells in fifth grade – that was the only grade school I only spent one year in. I think we hung our coats on hooks in the classroom in first and second grades, but we had hall lockers in third and fourth.
Four stops per day when I was in high school.
- Beginning of the day, to stow coats, &c, and pick up the books for the pre-lunch classes.
- Just before lunch, to drop books and possibly to grab lunch (if brought from home).
- After lunch, to pick up books for the afternoon classes.
- End of the day, to get stuff that we’d be taking home and to leave stuff we wouldn’t be taking home.
We just had two grades, but kids were already grouped into their classes by grade, more-or less - 10A would probably mostly do Higher Grade everything, and if Bob in 10A does Lower Grade Maths he’d go to 10B for that class, while Jimmy from 10 C who does Lower Grade everything but is a freaky maths genius would come to 10A for Maths.
And only languages and Maths had those grades. Stuff like Geography and Science and the like weren’t graded at my school. It worked out that there’d be an A, B, C and D class in each grade, grouped by major streams (science vs commerce vs practical) and everyone in those classes did the same one or possibly 2 subjects in any one period.
Oh, the humanity! 
Where else would you put up your Farrah Fawcett poster?
Lockers lining the hallways is certainly the norm in US schools, but I’ve often wondered why. It seems to me that it’d be more efficient to have all of the lockers in one big room, which would allow you to make the hallways correspondingly narrower. Of course, this isn’t something you could retrofit; the schools would have to be designed that way to begin with, the same way that they’re currently designed to have extra-wide hallways.
But then that room would become a circulation choke point, and it would be tough to make it convenient for multiple visits per day, especially in a sprawling building. Besides, the hallways need to be pretty wide for the overall building occupancy and egress reasons alone, so putting the lockers there too is killing two birds with one stone.
I grew up in the Chicago suburbs in the 1980s and 1990s, so we were in coats for most of the school year. My elementary school (K-5) was built in the 1910s and 1920s and most of the classrooms had a cloak room where you could hang up your backpack, coats, and keep your winter boots and gloves, or they’d go on the radiator if it was a particularly snowy day. Then you had your desk with the cubby underneath to keep all your books and crayons and such. There weren’t any of the lift-up desks of yore, just the ones with the laminate or Corian tops and a hole in the side you sit against. Starting in 4th grade some students would switch teachers for math and maybe one other class. We only had two classes/teachers per grade so it was just a simple swap if it happened. I think maybe half the students did this or less. So in that case we’d sit at someone else’s desk for that lesson and had to not mess with their stuff.
The hall outside the 5th grade classrooms did have standard-height lockers with a shelf at the top. That was viewed as something of an anomaly, but it may be because those classrooms didn’t have a cloak room, or there were too many windows and not enough wall space for cubbies, hooks, etc. In any case, we weren’t allowed to lock them, so we mostly just put our coats and such in there, but we still kept all our books and stuff in our desks. I saw some recent photos of the school from an historical report that was prepared prior to major remodeling. Even in the wing of the school with the cloak rooms, all the kids’ backpacks and coats are now hanging in the halls either in open cubbies or under a short row of cubbies. Very ugly, but much easier to inspect I guess. The classrooms are now mostly made up of small tables that seat 2 or 4 kids, rather than desks.
Middle school (6-8) was built in the 1950s and 1960s and had the typical locker-lined hallways. Again, they were the normal (5-foot or so) height with a shelf on top. We were assigned a locker near our homeroom and we had to provide our own combination lock. We also had small lockers for gym class and a larger one that we could use to hang up our street clothes and store books during gym, but those weren’t allowed to be used otherwise. Again, we had to provide our own combination lock. The school wasn’t so big that you couldn’t hit your locker several times a day, but with just four minutes between classes it could be a stretch if you needed to use the bathroom too.
I recall some classrooms, especially homeroom, had the elementary school style desks with the cubby underneath. Those teachers always stressed not to put anything in them because it would always be forgotten. From then on though we had the half-desks with at most a rack under the chair.
In high school (9-12), which was built anywhere between the 1910s and 1960s, but mostly from the 1950s, we got to choose our locker location. Freshman year was the only year we had homeroom, and I think they assigned us a locker near that, but otherwise it was up to us. We’d request which room we wanted a locker near, and they’d find something. We also had self-scheduling too, which was done in-person over the summer (at least for sophomore year and after). I think you had to make your locker area selection at the end of the process, and if you didn’t get the schedule you wanted (it was all done live), you’d have to do some mental gymnastics to figure out if your locker location would work with the altered schedule.
These were also full height, and I never had to share with someone else. They all had built-in combination locks, so you got the combo when you got your specific locker assignment. The school was built for 2,500 students, but we only had 1,500 at the time, so there were plenty of lockers to go around. Few if any lockers in the somewhat isolated language wing of the school were used. Still, we only had five minutes between classes, and it was actually not possible to get all the way across the two farthest corners of the building and down three floors in that amount of time. So I think I was only able to get to my locker about three times a day, once first thing, once sometime in the middle, usually before lunch, and once before leaving. I had way too many big heavy textbooks to lug around all day to every class (often required by the teacher to have on-hand), on top of the notebooks and packed lunch. It was barely possible to stuff all my books and such into my backpack if I had a lot of homework, so I relished the days I had a light load to lug home and back the next day.
For gym we had short lockers, but still bigger than the cubby-sized ones for middle school, so we had room room to hang up our street clothes without needing to switch. When we did swimming we could hang up our bathing suit inside the locker and it would be dry by the next day, just don’t leave your regular gym clothes wadded up on the bottom of the locker. We did have to provide our own combination lock for that. Athletes got the same lockers, but in a somewhat easier to reach part of the locker room that could be locked or unlocked separate from the regular gym class lockers.
Sophomore year my first-period class was on the first floor; second period I was on the third floor, on the other side of the school; and third period was in the same room where I’d been first period (same teacher, different class).
!!! We had seven one-hour periods every day, six for classes and one split between lunch and homeroom.
Ditto. And usually at rural schools, not in the cities.
How quaint. 
My graduating class was 870-odd people, so there were around 3400 students total in the school.
That’s how it was at my high school – didn’t matter how few or how many books we were carrying, that was how we did it.
8th grade, for us. There were a few classes that were taken at prescribed times – “World Civ I” (pre-Napoleonic western history) in 9th grade, US history in 11th, a semester of driver’s ed in 10th (or 11th if not 16 by 10th grade) – and there were other courses required for graduation (four years of PE, three of English, two of math, and two of science) which were fit into the student’s four years as needed. All boys were required to take three years of marching band or two of Army JROTC – I only knew of one guy who escaped that requirement, as a non-musically talented conscientious objector. Most people took a third year of math or science. And after that, everything was electives – shop, home ec, languages, drama, &c.
I still have my textbooks from all three years of German. “Turn in my books? Oh, gee, I must have lost them. How much do I have to pay for them?”
That’s the sort we had at all my jr-high and high schools. There would be two hooks a few inches below the shelf for hanging coats on.
So every student in the school would be crowding into that room at the same time?
Yeah – we were tiny. 75 guys in my graduating class. OTOH, my wife attended a large public high school in the western suburbs of Chicago, and had ~1200 in her class.
I had the full size (5’) lockers in junior high and high school (1985-1992). I also carried a backpack for two reasons. The first is that way, like some of the others mentioned, I could keep roughly half the day’s books on me at a time, so I’d only have to hit the locker in the morning, after lunch, and before going home.
The bigger reason though, is that for all of junior high (and previously in elementary 5-6) was that I didn’t qualify for a bus ride, and didn’t normally get a lift from my folks. The rules in Las Cruces NM said that if you lived less than a mile and a half from school no bus for you. So, yeah, taking home textbooks in arm would have been a pain (I just barely didn’t qualify).
I did in High school, but the closest stop was half a mile away, so I still needed a better carrying method to carry whatever I needed for homework/study considering those ancient tomes of yore.
Another aside, the school system in southern NM was damn poor, and our books were always ancient, often held together with duct tape, and expensive if you “lost” them. You were expected to put a “school safe” cover on all of them to protect them from more damage. I and most of my peers made disposable covers of paper grocery bags each semester, which would inevitably be covered with doodles. Some of my peers were quite artistic.
I was a geek, so mine often had quotes from books (mostly Lord of the Rings) or songs.
The thread sent me back remembering. I was in high school from 1967 to 1971. I do not remember what year this happened but there was a locker check. The staff went through everyone’s lockers over a weekend. They confiscated my half carton of Marlboros but missed the baggie full of marijuana laying flat under my stack of books.