Parents: How have schools changed since you were in?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

I am not sure if it is because I attended a Catholic school or what, but I just cannot get use to seeing a carpeted hallway and class room.

Every school we toured has this and, yes, it does cut down on noise and accidents. Yes, it is probably lawyer-pushed, but I just cannot think that carpeted classrooms and hallways is cost effective.

Besides, what is the creepy janitor suppose to do with all his free time if he isn’t pushing a broom or the floor waxer?
I think that is the biggest change I’ve noticed since my days in school.

2

I work on a school bus that transports disabled children. There is such a higher visibility for them than there was 20 to 30 yrs ago.

One of the schools we pick up at is one I attended 30 yrs ago. There are kids everywhere, they come out the front doors, play in the front of the school instead of the side playground. Seems like supervision is lower than it was when I was there. We were NEVER allowed out front.

At the same school, the kindergarten and first grade had (has?) a separate playground. When I was there it had two large concrete barrels embedded in CONCRETE for the kids to play on:eek: Those are gone now as are the monkey bars.

Parents are far more encouraged to be a part of the students school experience. I had to sign a paper today saying I would see to it that Bear did his homework every night. This is a good thing!

Kids dont walk to school anymore … they are chauffered.I had a stay at home Mom and she still rarely came to pick me up. I cant concieve of being such a slave to my jr high student with a working pair of legs.

I am sure I’ll think of others when I get back to work next week.

3

I had lunch this week with a woman who recently retired from the Oakland (CA) public school system. When she started teaching in the '60s the students greeted her each morning with a sing-song, “Good morning, Miss York.” At the end of her career one of the morning greetings she often received was, “Yo, ho-bitch.”

Back in the day, our playyard was all cement with tetherball, basketball, volleyball, dodgeball and baseball (this one was grass) areas. Kids fell, bruised, bled, survived. No one sued.

There’s a UL floating around extolling the virtues of the olden days, where kids had total freedom, didn’t wear helmets or other protective gear, etc., and didn’t have the safety regulations that we have since implemented. It isn’t quite that simple or nostalgic; kids were injured and often suffered permanent damage. One of my little classmates had his testicles severed while fooling around on the monkey bars, another died when hit on his unprotected head by a baseball.

It appears that no matter what extremes a school employs to comply with health and injury concerns, a kid will find a way to injure him/herself.

4

Well we had grass in front of our high school and we spent lunch time out there. The difference is that we played mumbly peg. In case you don’t know, mumbly peg is played with a pocket knife.

5

Papers are now typed, from about 5th grade onwards. In fact, they’re word-processed. There used to be typing classes in high school – but today you learn it at home and at half the age.

Internet access is nearly universal in schools.

While in the 50’s kindergarten scenes of crying children were common because it was the first time they were separated from mother, today they’re rare because most kids have spent time in pre-school or day care already.

In the late sixties, college applications were done in the fall of the senior year – with acceptances in November-February. Today that’s called “early admission.”

Students used to go home for lunch, particularly in elementary schools. Not any more.

Dress codes are decidedly laxer at most schools. My sister had a uniform code at a public school (dark blue skits; midi blouses); in the late 60’s they were still banning blue jeans at some schools.

Most high-school students carry a cellphone (instead of wearing penny loafers with a dime in them for emergency calls).

6

IANAP, but in the New Orleans area EVERY school requires some sort of a uniform. Public, private, makes no difference. I think it’s a great idea.

And if my parents had ever heard of me calling a teacher “bitch” I shudder to think of my horrible fate…

7

Paddles.

I remember in 5th grade all the kids took home a note from the school that corporal punishment was used. The parents had to sign and return the sheet saying, yes, paddling could be used by the school, or no, it couldn’t. The child was taken out in the hall, another teacher was called as a witness, and the kid was given two licks with a wooden paddle.

Hardly anyone had bookbags.

We had monkeybars.

When fights broke out in the halls, the kids were suspended. Now they call the cops and press charges.

We had some papers that had to be turned in typed, but most of the time handwritten was fine.

My parents didn’t have to buy tissues or paper towels as school supplies.

8

There aren’t any blackboards in the schools around here, only whiteboards.

9

Not that I have any kids, but when I went to school, it was spelled out in our rules that any knives brought to school must have a blade of four inches or less. It was commonplace to bring swiss army knives to school, and nobody cared.

We went on field trips to prisons and into out-of-the-way caves and hiking through nearly-deserted canyons.

10

Well, my son starts school in a few weeks. They keep the doors locked and have an elaborate drop-off and pick-up system. We have to do a “dry run” before school begins.

I am not sure of all the details yet, but it appears that at pick-up time, he stays in the building. One of the teachers is out in the cul-de-sac with a two-way radio. As a parent pulls up, she’ll radio in that The Crankies are here, please send out Cranky Jr. She’s out there until every kid is picked up.

Let me tell you, no system like that existed when I was a kid.

11

I was talking to a high school girl on another board (it’s NOT like it sounds…) Apparantly driver’s Ed teaches you to drive with your hands at 4 and 8, as opposed to 10 and 2 that they taught us. Has to do with airbags ripping your arms off.

12

I was taught to read by learning the sounds of each letter of the alphabet and stringing the sounds together to read a word. My nieces and nephews are taught to read by recognizing the shape of words and using context clues to learn new words. (Or something like that.) I found this out when we were playing school on their blackboard at home. This seems very weird and wrong to me, but apparantly the new theory is that it works better than the old way. I suppose I shall have to defer to the experts.

13

Sigh. We’re so much safer now that the government mandated that the carmakers install a bomb in the dashboard…

14

When I was in school, (mid 80’s) the doors weren’t locked. We were allowed to stay in the building until 6:00 pm, or even later if we had a club activity going on. Our school had a gun club. We went to trap shooting contests against kids from other schools. It was not an issue to bring a rifle to school and leave it in your locker for a practice or shoot scheduled after school. Playgrounds had merry go rounds, monkey bars, and teeter totters.

Of course I can see and understand the reasons why most of these things have changed, and as a parent, I’d be none too happy if I found that kids were bringing guns to school now. It just seems a shame that kids aren’t allowed to hang out in the school library to work on a project after school anymore like we were able to.

15

Really? With some public schools adopting uniform requirements, I would have thought that’s the other way around. I was dismayed to find that my old middle school was now insisting on uniforms.

16

I laugh when I hear that uniforms eliminate signs of gangs and make everything equal from a social standpoint, with no designer clothes for the richest kids, etc.

In my sister’s day the way that you pinned your midi was an indication of which club you belonged to. Jewelry, shoes and other accessories made sure that there was a social pecking order too.

17

Please stop lawyer bashing, it’s very offensive.

18

It’s a bit bizarre for me, because both my primary (elementary) and high schools were brand new buildings when I attended in the 70s and early 80s, yet my son goes to a school which was opened in 1927. So I had the wall to wall carpeting, open plan design, bright colours, and large grassy playgrounds, and my son has the dark, echoing halls, asphalt playgrounds, etc of a traditional school.

All that aside, there have been quite a few changes. The uniforms have improved; we had tailored clothes which needed to be ironed, shirts which had to be tucked in properly, and the like. My son wears a comfortable polo shirt and shorts or track pants. We used to spend hours outside in the hot Aussie sun getting melanoma, and now the kids have to wear a hat (legionnaire’s cap for the boys, and soft broad-brimmed hat for the girls). There is a strict “no hat no play” policy, and if you leave your hat at home, you can expect to spend lunch hour in a designated covered area, or in the library.

Computers are absolutely everywhere. Each classroom has at least one very modern machine running XP. When I left high school, the Commodore was just making an appearance (taking over from the TRS-80s we had). Probably about eight computers for the entire school, and those were hidden away in the “Computer Room”.

There is no being thrown in the deep end for the Kindergarten kids either, like when I was that age. A couple of weeks before the end of the previous school year, the new kids and parents for the next year attend four one-hour induction sessions over the course of a couple of weeks. The kids will go and sit with the class of the teacher who will have them the next year, and the adults go to information sessions held by school officials.

A lot more kids are driven to school (my own is sometimes), but there are still quite a few who walk there alone. There aren’t many who take a school bus where I live, because it’s a heavily populated area, and the schools are close together. Journeys of less than a mile aren’t free.

The fear of litigation is everywhere now, and as a parent, I find myself having to sign consent forms for just about everything.

19

My kid is now going to a publice science and technology school…they have a Fossil dig, and a greenhouse with hyrdroponics and stuff. A math lab, whatever that is, and a science lab…all in elementary school. They get to go to nasa at the end of the year. All the teachers are trained to teach gifted studens. Maybe I wouldnt be so screwd now if we had things like that when I was a kid.

They do have to wear uniforms, which kind of irritates me, but I can live with it. I remember that one of the private schools Ilooked into(just in case I won the lottery) had a quote from JFK:

**
I emailed them asking them how the reconciled that quote with the very restrictive school uniform policy they had. I got a response back that basically said they had never thought about it that way.