I would be very interested to hear some specifics.
Wow. Some of these moves were quite extreme. It makes my moving story tame by comparison.
I moved in the middle of 3rd grade. I had to change school districts. Curriculum was still about the same. I remember at my old school we were only about half way through learning cursive letters. At the new school, they had already completed cursive and had moved on, so I had to catch up there. Everything else seemed pretty easy to adjust to. The exception to this was making new friends. It was tough. I had a very well established set of friends at my old school and I was just transplanted to a different school where I knew nobody. I eventually made new friends, but it took about 2 years to really get that friend group established.
The funny thing is that I count this as a traumatic experience in my life, but looking back with my adult mindset, it really wasn’t that bad.
Military brat. I moved after K (Germany), 2nd (Michigan), 6th (Maryland), 7th(Alaska), and 8th(also Alaska, different school district) grades. I would have moved again after 11th but I got an exemption because we were still near enough for me to ride in with my Dad on his way to work.
I think the 2nd grade and 7th were the hardest. 2nd because I just felt totally lost in the new system and cried all the time for my old home. Which of course made me a social outcast. And 7th because I’d got attached to the best friends I had in Maryland and wasn’t willing to try to make new friends.
8th, though, was the best move. I loved my high school.
I don’t remember any of the moves being academically difficult, but I was usually ahead of my classes and pretty bored with academics anyway.
I do think my life long habit of dropping any old friends when I move away/they move away was a result of those 2nd and 7th grade moves. I just developed the habit in self defense.
Between the ages of 2-13, my family moved quite a few times so I changed schools quite a few times. Oddly, the biggest problem I had in terms of different curriculum came in the 8th grade when I shifted over to a different junior high that was a few miles away (albeit in a different school district). At the first school, I took Earth Science and did well enough to be at the top of class when I moved in late November. Unfortunately, at the new junior high they put me in a Physical Science course that was already past the halfway point when I joined. I immediately began floundering as I tried to catch up on what had been taught and couldn’t figure out why I was suddenly doing so poorly. In retrospect, it’s a miracle I ended up with a “D” as my final grade.
Oh, the move to California was the only “big” move, but overall from K-12 I attended six different schools, so I was already used to discontinuity.
I once complained to my dad about it. His dad was military and he said he went to thirteen schools in the same span.
Dad was Air Force in the Viet Nam era, so we moved a lot. With school changes from elementary to junior high, and junior high to high, I went to 14 different schools.
One event I remember very clearly we going to a new school where they had all learned cursive, and I was still in the ‘5 lines of the same letter’ stage. The didn’t have remedial cursive class, nor were cursive waivers available. I remember sitting at my desk, looking up at the letter forms above the chalkboard, counting from the letter I knew to the letter I needed, tracing it in the air a time or two, then writing it on the page.
Another problem was transferring to a school after schedules were set. I wanted wood shop, but the only things open were drama and Latin. I won ‘Stage Hand of the Year’, so I had that going for me, which was nice. There were several classes I’d rather have taken, but they were full.
Going to schools near bases wasn’t too difficult socially, because must of us were transplants, but when dad was overseas unaccompanied and I was in ‘civilian’ schools, it was a bit rougher. Not ‘end of the world’ rough, but everybody else had all grown up together, and it was clear that I was a tolerated outsider.
Another military brat, with a plethora of schools. Curricula were about the same for me - no great leaps forward or back. Socially, well…I don’t remember my school days fondly, let’s just leave it at that.
My next oldest sister sorta-kinda had some curriculum problems. We’d moved from a moderate-sized city to a wealthier, smaller town. Her new high school tried to put her into remedial classes because she came from a “black school*”.
She was already on the National Merit scholar list.
I’ve rarely seen my parents so angry - especially my mom, as she almost never got angry. Little Big Sister got swapped around in a big hurry, I’ll tell you.
*I don’t recall if they actually said it that baldly, but that was the gist of it. This was in Central Illinois, late seventies.
Re: Montreal to L.A.:
In Montreal I could go anywhere in the city I wanted without a car, with ease. I loved the Metro.
The school day was based on a six-day system, which is a little hard to describe for people who have never heard of it. But basically it meant that the class schedule rotated throughout the week so that if you had math at 10 am one day, it might be at 2pm the next day.
In 10th grade I was a junior because in Quebec high school ends at 11th grade. After that you go to CEGEP, which is kind of a junior college. So I was taking junior level science courses.
In L.A. I pretty much needed a car to go anywhere. Which meant that I couldn’t go anywhere most of the time. I felt very restricted. I learned how to use the bus system, but it was a poor substitute.
The school schedule was so different from Montreal’s that every time I asked a question they looked at me like I had two heads. Like when I discovered the school year was divided into semesters, and we could choose different class schedules for each semester. Montreal didn’t work that way. You chose one schedule that lasted the whole year. On the other hand, in L.A. your schedule was the same every day of the week. So these kinds of things that everyone thought was obvious, I had to tease out.
On my first day I was assigned to a counselor (who was actually very helpful) and she put me in a set of classes that she hoped matched up with my Montreal schooling. Well, on that first day the chemistry teacher actually kicked me out of his class, saying no 10th grader should be in it. I was devastated and confused.
I switched schools when we moved between my freshman and sophomore years. I went from a small, religious, private school with a focus on the classical education model to a traditional public high school. However, the change mostly worked in my favor.
I was a mostly B’s/few A’s student at my private school because the grade scale was 93%+ A; 85-92 B, 77-84 C, 70-76 D; below 70% was failing. When I got to the public school, I was considered a mostly A’s/few B’s student and placed in all the advanced classes.
The other advantage was that I was a very strong writer because the classical model focuses on writing. Also, logic and analytical skills were much stronger than most of my peers.
The problems? Even though I had decent social skills and made friends easily, there was so much I didn’t know about pop culture, music, fashion, etc. I felt stupid a lot, when people would talk about music or whatever, and I had no idea.
I moved from a Los Angeles suburb to San Jose between second and third grades. 350 miles, but still in California. I don’t recall having any problems with the curriculum.
What I remember thinking was strange was the school in San Jose had no hallways. All entrances were on the outside of the buildings. All of the classrooms, the library, the cafeteria, the office, everything. My middle school and high school were the same way. I still think it’s weird.
In theory, yes. Smaller classes, more teacher attention, non-State mandated curriculum.
On the other hand, my brother teaches at a private Christian school, and he said some of his students were there because they basically were kicked out of public school and their parents attitude was, “We’re paying you teach them, they’re your problem.”
14 schools in 12 years of pre-college education. Yes, it sucks.
I never changed schools, but lived near a large military base and at least half of the kids rotated out over the years. There were twin brothers who I was good friends with in first grade but left near the end of the school year and returned sometime during fourth grade. They disappeared over summer vacation, but were back again three years later in Junior High. That was not unusual for the army brats.
My impression was that most kids didn’t have a hard time adjusting, but that might have been helped because they had a lot of company at my school. Because I was a little know-it-all I was frequently one of the kids who “volunteered” to help a new kid catch up on some specific issue that they hadn’t covered in their previous school.
At my initial school, both the teachers and students accepted the way I was: A very smart, very weird kid.
At my new school, the teachers didn’t like my smarts and the students didn’t like my weird. I spent the years from age 8 (when we moved) to 16 (when I dropped out) extremely miserable.
Not my personal experience but my daughter (5th grade) just moved from a public school to a charter school and the differences are stark. Poor thing’s struggling with having to actually DO things. The public school was more focused on keeping the peace and just getting kids to do the bare minimum. This new school is actually giving her homework (which she’s never had), assigning projects (never before), having expectations of her like remembering deadlines, planning out big projects, basically being self sufficient. She’s behind on most things except math, but that’s more so because she loves the subject and always excelled at it. It’s actually hard on her because she was so used to being able to just skate by with minimal effort, that she’s getting overwhelmed with what should be normal for children her age.
I only moved once - in the middle of 4th grade (early 80s) - from a semi-urban public school in Oklahoma to a rural public school in New York state. My sister (6th grade) and I took about 6 weeks off school while my mom figured out where we would officially live. She didn’t want to enroll us and then make us change schools again right away.
The new school did placement tests on us, and my sister and I were way ahead of our classes in most subjects (the exception was science), even with the time off. There was talk of moving each of us to the next grade but my mom said no because she thought it would be difficult socially for us to be with older kids. So we were both a bit bored for a while. Kept discovering things for a few years that we were ahead of. E.g. we’d both had some experience diagramming sentences, which our new school didn’t introduce 'til early high school.
Conversely, I had a friend in 5th grade who had spent the previous year at a religious-based private school who was really far behind when she returned to public school.
The biggest adjustment for me, though, was cultural. Things had different names, people had different accents, the rhythm of the day was very different, so I spent some time feeling very “other” and out of step. The new school had dedicated facilities for art and music and gym classes and had an ACTUAL LIBRARY instead of everything being done inside your classroom. Also, there weren’t separate girls and boys playgrounds and girls could play on the slides, swings, etc and had access to toys other than jump ropes. Loved that part.
Only moved once in third grade. I went from one Catholic school to another about 70 miles away. Neither school had a gifted program when I went, but apparently in my first school, the penguins (catholic nuns), recognized that I was advanced in english and math and gave me extra problems to do in math and let me read books that were for an older age group. After starting at the new school, I quickly became bored in math and had to argue, beg and plead to read something other than “picture books”. I eventually adjusted to the math and the teachers started letting me read the books that I wanted to read, so it all ended well for me.
I switched schools more than a few times. Academically, there was never much of an issue. I was an “A” student and never recall any of the switches kicking me out of the academically minded tract, either by being ahead or behind in the new school.
However, there were certainly some cultural differences. 4th grade in deep south suburban private school --> 5th grade California rural sticks public school. The CA folks could not get over my accent. I was like a zoo specimen. Kids coming up to me all the time asking me to say certain words, just to hear my pronunciation. But that faded quickly enough and I got with the “Valley” program. Worked out fine for the 3 years I was there.
But the real issue for me was that my family decided to move after my junior year of high school. My best friend’s family offered to let me stay with them to complete my HS where I had been going (and had friends, and was active in sports, and church, etc.), but my folks dragged me along with them to the new place. Went from small private school (about 90 people in my junior class) to a public school with hundreds (hundreds) of other seniors. I didn’t know anyone, and, out of spite, decided that making friends for 1 goddamn year was useless, so I became quite antisocial. For me, “antisocial” meant reading by myself (hanging out at the bookstore or library) and not playing sports (not dropping out, drugs, crime, etc.). To this day “high school class reunion” means nothing to me.
I had the opposite problem when I moved to a school in a different state after the 7th grade. I previously went to a junior in California where the grade scale was 100% to 90% A; 80% to 89% B; 70% to 79% C; and, 65% to 69% D. Below 65% was failing. My grades were in the A and B range so I probably let myself coast a bit. However, when I moved to Washington state, the grade school was close to what you had in private school so I saw some of my A’s slip to B’s and B’s slip to C’s. :eek: It took more than a year for me to fully adjust to the difference.
I moved a few times. I don’t remember the curriculum being a problem, but it would be different in different places. I know a lot more American history, and a lot less Australian history than the average Australian. In my US school, we did a lot on parts of speech, which was not in the Australian curriculum for a while (I think they have recently added it back). That has been really useful in studying linguistics and foreign languages. When I moved to the Netherlands, they put me back a year, so that I would have a chance to learn the language, without struggling with the academics.
I think the social issues are a much bigger deal when moving.