Specialty classes like science and workshops you brought your bag and dumped it at the back of the room. Or more likely left it in your classroom in a pigeon hole.
The thing about the corridor lockers are they are so big.
While we generally don’t follow US school tropes, a formal dance & dinner - just for the matriculating class - is very much a thing in South African schools. The Matric Dance or Matric Ball. It owed more to the “formals” of Oxbridge than it did to US proms in origin, being initially a thing of private schools, but has very much veered to the latter model over time and the influence of US media (by the 80s already).
Guardian article:
One year at my small Southern college in the early 1990s they had a formal dance that by all indications was going to be a high school prom in college. I had zero interest in it, but years later it occurred to me how it might have seemed kind of exotic for some of the many international students we had, and wonder if many attended for the experience.
I had a locker, and there were rows of them, just like in the movies. Canberra, Year 7-10, 1970s.
If you didn’t have a locker as a kid in school, how else do they expect you to develop anxiety dreams about forgetting your locker combination that haunt you for the rest of your life?
Also, where do they stuff the nerds?
The middle school that I attended in the early 1970s was only built in 1967, but it was soon over capacity. By the time I got there, it had six portable classrooms. While the halls were lined with lockers, extra lockers were needed for all the extra students that the portables demanded.
So, the school took an unused room (or barely used, it looked like it might have been a little-used storeroom) and turned it into a room full of lockers, as you suggested. A great idea in theory, but a lousy one in practice.
Why? Because what happened in there couldn’t be seen by anybody who had no reason to be in there—no teachers or students in the hall, passing by, for example. That locker room became where the middle school bullies honed their craft, beating up smaller and weaker kids as they felt like it, with nobody in authority to stop them. Eventually, the kids who had lockers in there and regularly got beatings, stopped using their lockers, and just carried everything they needed in giant backpacks.
Maybe today, with CCTV cameras monitoring what goes on everywhere, and kids carrying smartphones to call for help and/or video the beatings, your idea might work. But your idea didn’t work at my school in 1972.
If you want, you, too, can gave your own school lockers. Line a hallway at home with them.
What stuff did you keep in the lockers? Books, sports gear?
Im country NSW 1980s.
Also Vance fan (not JD).
Trash cans?
Not funny. I was one of those nerds who got stuffed in a locker. It was only after I made enough noise to be heard did a janitor show up with a crowbar and a bolt cutter to get me out.
I thought the sarcasm was obvious but whatever…
The artwork i remember was inside the books. “But it was like that when I got it.” Fairly juvenile, like randomly drawing stylistic penises everywhere and swarms of aircraft dropping bombs on the subject of the illustration.
Most memorable was an excerpt in our grade school reader from Pinocchio, where a neighbour surprises Geppetto after the magic wood has knocked him down. he’s sitting there legs stretched out with a piece of wood between them, staring at his neighbour. Someone added the caption “you kick that wood and I’ll kill you”.
Our religion textbook was called “The Way, The Truth, and The Light” which someone had prefixed with “The Yankees and the Cardinals are” …
Alot of American high school traditions like Homecoming, Prom, and graduation ceremonies with academic dress were originally American college/university traditions.
I’ve seen a “graduation” from kindergarten with all the littles dressed in gowns and mortarboards. It’s the sort of cute that leaves you still smiling an hour later.
But viewed narrowly rationally, it’s a pointless misappropriation of a real college / university tradition.
My son had a “graduation” from preschool. With even littler caps and gowns. They sang a song called “We’re off to Kindergarten”.
Geez, that was ten years ago. How time flies.
I attended the kindergarten or preschool graduation for my brother’s children. I think for the “gowns” they wore one of their fathers’ white dress shirts.
I didn’t have a graduation ceremony from Kindergarten (thank Og). I did have one for high school. But I can understand that – even in my day, a lot of kids didn’t go off to college, and that was the only graduation ceremony they would ever get.
I also had a Grammar school graduation ceremony. Virtually everyone in my class went on to graduate high school as well, of course, But there must hve been people, even in my lifetime, that had that as their highest grade graduation. Scary thought. So I don’t begrudge the people getting elementary and high school graduations their ceremonies.
They were at my school (Texas).
You would have been a year behind me. We’re all familiar with the idea of someone pulling the fire alarm to get out of the big test. But back in my time and place, the really serious thing was to call in a bomb threat. Not only would the entire school be evacuated, but the fire department and police would have to go through the entire school, using master keys to open and check all the lockers, then inspect places like the boiler room and the science labs. That could easily keep us out of the building for two hours or more.
Funny, we only got bomb threats on nice days.