The lockers in the hallways of my school were “full sized”, but that wasn’t all that big. You couldn’t hang a coat hanger in them – it wasn’t wide or deep enough. The hanger would contact the wall on both sides and be forced to hang at an angle. No way you could satisfactorily shove a nerd in there and still be able to close the door. Good thing – I was a nerd.
We had half-size lockers in the gym changing room. I had seen the interior of the girls’ changing room one day after the school year was over. They lockers all looked as if it was still 1961. The locker doors closed nicely, still looked freshly painted, and their locking mechanisms worked smoothly.
Not so the boy’s locker room. Most of the doors were broken in one way or another, and the mechanisms did NOT work smoothly, if at all. There were all sorts of markings and discolorations. Somebody had evidently stuck a lit cherry bomb in one, then closed the door, producing a very interesting color effect on the door. One whole row of lockers had been ripped off the foundation, and sat there askew on the cinder block base. There were sneaker footprints going up one wall as high as hands could reach.
I’m still not sure who was responsible. “High spirited” football players, maybe (our home team used the Boys’ locker. The opposing team used the Girls’ locker, and it’s notable how neat and clean it still was.)
Didn’t read the entire thread (wow, big for one day). I went to high school in NY in the late '60s and we didn’t have lockers, possibly because there were 3500 people or so in the school. School went from 8 am to 5 pm with senior and junior classes starting early and sophomores starting late. So no way there was room for lockers. I had an attache case for my books, not all that many. And I think we put coats on the back of our chairs, since I don’t remember traffic jams where 30 kids got coats at the same time.
Exception was gym lockers - those we had. But they weren’t big enough to store much besides smelly T-shirts.
I owned a backpack in high school, left over from Boy Scouts, but I’d never bring it to school or put books in it.
A bit older than you but from Australia as well - backpacks were just starting to appear in schools in the mid 70s. Before that almost everyone had a school bag that looked like a smallish brown suitcase. Compressed cardboard - as strong as it sounds - whose main duties were to be sat on at the bus stop and be a weapon swung by the handle.
Once parents got sick of buying new suitcases because yours had collapsed for some unknown reason that was absolutely not your fault you could get a plastic one.
I’ve never directly experienced that exact trope at a school I went to. I’ve been at school in NYS that had lockers in the hallways for middle- and high- schoolers, but I was not in that age range yet. I’ve seen a few other schools in NYS that did have lockers, but it was at schools my relatives went or used to go to.
In Florida, my lockers were always covered, yet open to the air. One place they were indeed in corridors (albeit breezeways), the other time they were in central “pods” that looked like large industrial toolsheds but open on 2 sides instead of 1, and with lots of lockers instead of equipment.
You’d get wet if it rained, but you’d also get wet moving between classes or during lunch if it rained since we ate outdoors. I don’t remember getting drenched on directly, although I’m sure that happened. What I do remember about outdoor lunch is that the water made puddles in the lunch area. This is probably what led to the custom at our school to sit on top of the picnic tables with our lunches to our sides, with our feet on the benches of the table. To do otherwise would sometimes make your shoes muddy.
I’ll bet that most of the places that are removing lockers are somewhere sunnier and less snowy than the snow belt. Walking to school meant heavy gloves or mittens, a huge coat that you were supposed to grow into, maybe a hat if the coat wasn’t hooded, a scarf, and boots or rubbers, all of which weighed a ton in those days. No ultralight North Face parkas like I have now. And no backpacks for everyday. Those were for scout weekends only.
If we had to carry all our winter stuff around all day, the amount of lost and misplaced winter stuff would create piles higher than the snow piles plows created in the teacher’s parking lot.
This is high school, BTW. In elementary school we were in the same room all day so we had closet space to hang up our coats safely. My high school housed more than 3000 students so we had miles of corridors with full-height lockers on both sides.
I skipped to the end of the thread, so this may have been covered. Still, the idea that kids would carry around everything they own plus books plus all the other stuff all day seems wild to me.
Yeah, we in SA had exactly those in the first couple grades of primary school, then from Std 2 on, we used briefcase-like leather(ette) satchels. High scool, we switched to the canvas bag I linked earlier.
Grew up in Wisconsin and went to 2 high schools in the late 80s/early 90s. My hometown, we had lockers, we had a different locker assigned each year. The school actually consisted of two buildings, one originally built as a junior high in the early 60s and a open-concept 70s-built senior high school building (originally meant for the just the junior/senior year kids in the tail end of the baby boom) - separated by a parking lot we had to cross between periods. The originally junior high school building had the typical lockers built into the walls in the corridors, mostly just around the upper floor of the 2 story part of the building if memory serves. In the open concept high school, the main part of the building was a square with a very wide corridor open to the two story height of the building. The lockers were constructed in the “median” of the hallway, making for a freeway style traffic divide. (Fun fact, about five years after my class graduated the city finally sprung for linked the two buildings together physically and in the last year the high school became a middle school with the construction of another from scratch high school.)
Senior year my family moved and I ended up in a small town school (like a quarter of a size of my hometown) and it had the standard lockers built into the walls. The main difference was people had the same locker for the whole 4 years, and all assigned alphabetically - was pretty random - it was only my junior year when I ended up next to a cousin of mine who shared the same last name as me. Yeah, there were some epic lockers that had been curated for 4 years in the senior class I joined. I got assigned into a empty locker amongst the kids whose last names started with A’s and B’s even though I’m a M.
I used to roll my own. I well remember “health class,” which took place just before lunch, and during the teacher’s boring lecture on STDs, I’d be rolling a couple of smokes to have during lunch. “Health class,” and I’m rolling smokes. Kind of ironic.
Weston Creek High School in Canberra for me. No memories of lockers at all but a vivid memory of a huge pile of knapsacks in front of the library door before classes and on breaks.
As another diversion, something I was going to comment on earlier.
Going back to the university to teach, all of the lecture theatres have been extensively remodelled, lots of tech, much nicer generally. But in the lecture theatres where mathematics is taught, I was most pleased to find lovely new and very spiffy blackboards. It seems that prising the chalk out of the cold dead hands of the average mathematician was a bridge too far. Chalk and talk still rules.
(I had expected the OHS weenies to complain that chalk dust was a health hazard or some such idiocy. I know there was a move to try to get them to use whiteboards, but it just isn’t the same.)
My 9th grade Algebra teacher used a overhead projector. She had laminate sheets already prepared for the lecture. She worked problems on blank sheets.
The teacher was older and it was easier to sit at the overhead projector. I didn’t mind because she had probably taught Algebra for 30 years. She was very,very good.
I imagine standing at a blackboard writing with chalk gets tiring for older teachers.
This thread surprised me. I had assumed student lockers, or storage cubicles would always be part of a school.
I always decorated my locker with a small poster taped inside the door. Hung up my jacket. My mom made sure I kept a zipper bag in the locker with extra pencils, pens, and white out.
Not necessarily an idiocy. My father was a college professor who used chalk until he developed an allergy to it. It’s been decades, so I don’t know what the exact problem was, but Googling, some people get contact dermatitis from the metals in the chalk or asthma symptoms due to chalk dust.
