People that moved during their childhood. Did it cause problems at the new school?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I attended grades 1-3 in Massachusetts. Moved to Arkansas in the 4th grade.

There was a big difference in the approach to education. Reading and grammar had been emphasized in the early grades in Massachusetts.

I got to Arkansas and was hopelessly behind in math. The schools here taught kids the multiplication tables and long division in the third grade.

I would have learned that in the 4th grade in Massachusetts.

They initially were going to make me repeat the third grade. I was in the third grade class for a week. The teacher recognized that I was ahead of the other kids.

School counselor gave me a bunch of skills tests to evaluate me. My reading level was 7th grade. I was ahead in history, general science, and grammar.

So, they reconsidered and put me back in the 4th grade. I had a tough school year. They assigned an after school tutor to help me with math. I eventually caught up and did well in school.

I would have been fine if we had moved a couple years later. I think the two educational systems would have sync up.

I’m curious if this continues to be a problem?

Did you move during early childhood and find the schools much different?

2

This might be outside the age category you have in mind. I moved when I completed what was called junior high school (8th grade). We relocated about 60 miles and I went to a high school district in a different county. By that time fitting in with my new peers was more effort than the academics. Curriculum-wise, nothing caught me off guard.

3

I’ve had friends tell me their rural junior high schools didn’t have science labs. They took biology and chemistry in high school.

I took Algebra & biology in 9th grade (junior high) and took chemistry & trigonometry in the 10th grade. I could have taken physics & calculus (college prep courses) my senior year, but took business classes instead.

Thinking back, my hometown had a very good school system. I was lucky.

4

I moved between several private boarding schools in the UK, which was only a problem for Latin (because one of the schools in the middle didn’t teach it and I missed two years), and for English, where a lot of the reading assignments were repeated and others missed (e.g., I did Julius Caesar three years in a row at one point). Then I moved to a public high school in the US, which was basically okay because I was about three years ahead of everyone, except that it was boring.

5

I’ve heard for a long time that kids in private schools get a better education.

It would be interesting to hear from people that transferred from private education to public school.

Was it much easier in the public school? Less demanding?

update I didn’t see Really Not All That Bright’s post until after I had posted.

It confirms what I’ve heard before.

6

We moved when I was between 9th and 10th grade, it was pretty traumatic for me because I was used to my group of friends and classmates. New school was good but also a lot different.

7

I moved in second grade. I don’t remember any huge changes at that time - although they added Spanish.

I moved in fifth grade to a school with an entirely different curriculum and educational philosophy. Dropped Spanish, but it was a school that in third grade moved to a very open school, self motivated and self paced curriculum. I moved a second time in fifth grade to a school with a third educational philosophy and curriculum - more open than the traditional classroom I started in, but far less self paced.

I moved again in sixth grade and the school was a year behind where I had been in Math and it took until high school for the rest of the class to catch up to where I had been in English. Very traditional classroom. I graduated from that district and hated every minute of it.

8

Dad was a in the US Army so we moved around a bit. The classes followed classes a US sort of curriculum.

9

We moved ten times during my primary school. I went fro US school to UK system, back to US, then various schools around the country. Went to four different high schools. Various class sizes from Freshmen of 100 to Detroit public schools over 800 then to 500 in Wisconsin. Difficult to be the “new” kid every year. Builds character…blelch.

10

I moved a lot–went to school in Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabama, New Mexico, and Texas–and the issue was less that I would be academically behind or ahead, and more just that I wouldn’t understand how they did things, and no one explained because fish don’t explain about water. The social stuff was also a nightmare, and their was a feedback cycle there: I didn’t understand how the school worked, so I’d do “weird” things, which made it harder to make friends, which meant I had no one to help me figure things out.

As far as private/public, it’s really impossible and foolish to generalize. There are a lot of crappy private schools out there–even some pretty expensive ones. There are also some extraordinarily good ones. Having been in advanced academics for 20 years in a large urban district, I’ve dealt with kids from a really wide range, and if you had me list best schools in the area, it’d be a mix of private and public all the way down. Furthermore, what’s “best” isn’t always what’s best for a particular student. School culture matters, too.

11

Our family moved from Valdosta GA to Los Alamos NM between my 7th and 8th grade years.

The biggest difference was not the curriculum but in the different approach of the two schools to discipline. Valdosta Junior High School was operated with strict discipline. Between class periods, while en route from one classroom to the next, students were to walk single file on the right of the hallway with absolutely zero talking. Get caught talking in the hallways and you would be instructed to put your hands against the wall and bend over, and would be paddled on the spot. With heavy wooden paddles that fucking hurt. Any student caught in the hallways during a class period was assumed to have been put out in the hallway by their teacher and would be paddled with no questions asked, the only exception being if the student held a hall pass in hand.

Cumbres Junior High School of Los Alamos was not exactly a bastion of student rights, but more of a hands-off “kids are kids, they misbehave” approach prevailed there, along with a corresponding attitude that nothing we did mattered anyway. Including learning. The class periods were very short, with the day divided into 9 periods of only about 40 minutes each, and life both within the classroom and in the hallways was more like a zoo than the rigid institution I’d just come from.

(I was a social misfit and had been the beneficiary of the rigid discipline in Valdosta; it kept the bullies off of me. In Los Alamos I was terrorized and had no protection and no sympathy. Over time I questioned and then discarded my love of authoritarian regimes but I was very much a little Major Frank Burns at the time)

Academically, Los Alamos was very much more advanced in math and physics but surprisingly behind Valdosta in biology and history and only roughly equal in English grammar. The Georgia school used out-of-date textbooks but other than that it was a quality education, although I found it very didactic and mechanical – very much the “children are an empty vessel into which you pour knowledge” and very much NOT “children will be naturally curious and will seek their own understanding”.

12

We moved several times also. Socially, it was hard.
Academically, I only remember one issue, I think it happened in seventh grade? Anyway, the new school put me in a remedial reading class. Now, if there’s anything on earth I can do well, it’s read. I’d been kicking ass at it since I was four. In this class, we were expected to read comic books and answer questions about them. I decided to not do that at all, so I got a zero in my reading class. :rolleyes:

13

I went from a class of say 30ish to like 450ish and from farm to suburb. Yeah – there were shocks and it took adjusting. Not so much in content or approach but more in the equipment and all. My former school was small and getting smaller and everything was dated and as cheap as possible; almost 1920s and 30s. The new school was 1950s and everything inside was latest-and-greatest to the 60s.

14

Marine Corp. Brat. We moved alot. I never had too much problem. Some of my sibs had problems. With varying degrees of seriousness. My own experience was pretty okay.

15

I moved from Montreal to Los Angeles in the middle of 10th grade. The culture shock was out of this world.

16

Fifth grade (10 years old), I finished up elementary with the same roughly 100 people I’d been with since 1st grade in Ft. Worth, TX. Everyone else was going to a junior high school in Ft. Worth. That meant different teachers for each subject, a locker, each student’s schedule different. (In elementary, we switched teachers as a whole class for art, pe, and music. Math and reading the three classes were split into levels based on ability). I was really looking forward to that relatively grown up almost like high school experience. Instead we moved to North Carolina where 6th grade was in an intermediate school which pretty much operated like my elementary school.

In March, we moved back to Texas where I enrolled in a junior high with the schedules and lockers and I was sooo happy. For two weeks. Then my parents decided not to buy a house in the larger town where we’d been staying after the move, but a tiny podunk town 10 miles south where there were about 70 6th graders in the whole freaking town. It was like baby school again. Stayed there til I graduated. Didn’t get that high school experience til, well, high school.

Academically, I had one hiccup: in Ft. Worth, 5th graders were supposed to know the four basic parts of speech: noun, verb, adverb, and adjective. When I got to NC, they were already diagramming sentences and you were expected to know and identify pronouns, conjunctions, prepositions, etc. I was LOST. I failed a test on it miserably. When I took it home for my mom to sign, she quizzed me and was satisfied that I knew HOW to put together a correct sentence, I just didn’t know the terms. I wasn’t off the hook, but I wasn’t grounded for weeks and weeks. Then she saw the bonus questions: What does adverbs do? What does adjectives do? I still remember that shit storm at school.

Surprisingly, my little rural high school with it’s ten classrooms and few electives gave us a pretty good education. When we compared notes later, those of us who went off to college (admittedly few of us) found we kept up with the big school kids who had pre-calculus and Latin offered in high school.

17

I went to four different elementary schools. The most difficult move was the summer before fifth grade, when we moved from Massachusetts to New Hampshire. Like the OP who was also from MA, I discovered that I was far behind in math too. Somehow in MA we hadn’t gotten to decimals yet and my new classmates clearly had, so I was ¯_(ツ)_/¯ at the beginning of the year.

I wasn’t allowed to start in gifted education until the following year because of needing to catch up in math (it was never my strong suit, but by sixth grade I’d apparently caught up “enough.”) I heard this directly from my teacher at the parent-teacher conference that fall.

Socially it was strange. One of my clearest memories of the first day of school that year was wondering why all the kids in my class were also white, then going to lunch/recess and discovering almost all of the kids were white. I was from Lawrence, and was shocked to discover that there were almost no black, Hispanic, or Asian kids like there had been in my classes since Kindergarten. It was also my third school and third house in three years, so I didn’t make friends (other than the neighbors) quickly because I was worried that we’d soon move yet again.

18

I moved from Oregon to California in the middle of my Junior year of high school. Same grade-level academics were close enough that I never really noticed anything odd.

I had previously skipped over biology and went straight to chemistry as a Sophomore. California required it, so I did have to cover that over the next summer. I also had to get another credit of PE and a catch-all course that Freshmen normally took. Add make up classes for a couple failed semesters of Junior English and History, I was in classes with underclassmen a LOT.

19

Twice. The first time was halfway through my kindergarten year. I was sad that I was going to have to leave my girlfriend, but excited that I would be neighbors with my friend (moved to a neighborhood where existing family also had houses, so I had neighborhood friends already).

Although it was to a different school, it was within the same district, so the curriculum was pretty much the same. Count, ABC, nap time, show-and-tell.

The second time really sucked. I had just finished my first year of high school in the ninth grade, and we moved about 60 miles to a different school district, where I had to (again) have a first year of high school in the 10th grade! It was a 10-11-12 high school. Although I made the most of it, it was a crappy school with a crappy curriculum that was somehow highly regarded at the time. Whereas I was in college placement and advanced placement at my first high school, this school had some stupid philosophy called “outcome based education” and the mission statement “all kids can learn,” which meant, practically, there was no such things as CP/AP, and I was in classes with dumb people who held up everyone else.

I would have had to take a bunch of silly classes over again, too, but they did recognize my class credits from the first school. It meant, mostly, that I was in classes one year ahead of everyone else (but still mixed in with stupid people). A consequence of this, though, was that there weren’t any classes available to me in my senior year, because I’d maxed out of everything progressive as a junior. The result was I took both French and Spanish in my senior year, jazz band and symphonic band, advanced journalism (for the second time), swimming (which was nice, because it was first period), Pascal programming, and some other stupid fillers just to get the graduation credits I needed. I had those after first semester, but they wouldn’t let me graduate until June, and at the time, I couldn’t get into community college (or any college) without the diploma.

I made good friends, and three years of Journalism was awesome, but overall, what a piece of shit concept, what a piece of shit curriculum, and what a piece of shit school. Thinking back, I’d like to Pit East Detroit School District and East Detroit High School (note: not at all affiliated with the City of Detroit), but The Pit didn’t even exist then.

20

We moved between my 7th and 8th grades, specifically because of the difference in schools. I loved my new school, and really flourished there.