9th graders are called freshmen
10th graders Sophomores.
12th grades are Seniors.
No name for 11th graders?
Or am I blocking my high school years?
They’re called Juniors.
Yes, they’re called Juniors.
That’s what you get for spending 11th grade in the Day-Glo van in the parking lot.
Except in Quebec, where they’re called Seniors (because it’s their final year in the Hell that is high school).
So what are 9th and 10th graders called? Does “Freshman” apply to 8th grade then?
Before they go on to glorified high school, er, CEGEP.
(I’m from Ontario. I’m allowed.)
Actually, high school classes in the U.S. probably had the monikers before they had the numeric designations. This was in accord with the use of the term “grade school” to mean elementary school; elementary schools had “grades” and the high schools had “classes”. I’ve read a book or two on the early history of public education, and HS teachers or administrators would speak of sending freshmen “back to the grades” if they weren’t ready for high school work.
In Ontario, at least when I was in high school, we never used the terms “freshmen”, “sophomores”, “juniors”, or “seniors”. I wonder whether this was partly because there were five grades in high school, not four, the last being optional for university preparation.
We were simply grade-nine, grade-ten, grade-eleven, grade-twelve, or grade-thirteen students. There was a formal usage of the term “home form”, but that was to indicate which class of a given grade level we belonged to. It was on paperwork but we never used it in casual conversation.
The Quebec scholastic system usually splits into K-6, then 7-11 (with some elementary schools having a grade 7 as well), and so the only grades given names are kindergarteners and seniors. Everyone else is just in Grade X, or the Xth grade.
to Scott, who obviously doesn’t know the amazing glory that is Cegep
Sunspace: It was like that for us in the mid-90s too, in the final days of the five-year program, except that OAC was never ‘grade thirteen’. People in OAC were ‘in OAC’, ‘taking OACs’, but not ever ‘in Grade 13’. People in Grade Nine were ‘niners’, if they were being stuffed into lockers and so on, but that’s really the only other term. We did have ‘home form’, but only in Grade Nine, when each form went to a preset selection of courses together. The forms were based on the only course we could choose: whether to specialize in music, art or drama. In Grade Ten and later we chose our own courses and there were no home forms.
AFAIK these terms are never used in Canadian universities either: it’s always ‘first year’, ‘second year’, ‘third year’. In Ontario, this could be because some students are in three-year programs. (In theory, the fifth year of high school was supposed to be the first year of university; like AP courses in the US, the courses are not really university-level, so people who want post-graduate degrees take four years of university.)
In British Columbia, I have never heard anybody use the term “Freshman” “Sophmore” etc.
They just say, “I’m in grade 10”.
I thought it was US thing you see on TV and movies.
MtM