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

In My Humble Opinion
41

My experience may not be typical, but it speaks to a couple of the questions posters have brought up.

We moved from Massachusetts to Missisippi between 1st and 2nd grades. I don’t remember any real problems with educational issues, but the social ones - oh, my…

This was the mid 60’s and the school I went to had just been desegregated the year before. To say there were stilll some major adjustments going on would be an understatement. And as “the Yank”, I was more than a little bit suspect. It was very much three years of a “Stranger in a strange land” experience for me.

We moved from Mississippi to Great Britain after the 4th grade, then back to the U.S. when I became a sophomore in High School.

Going to England, due to the deal my Dad got from his employer, I was enrolled in good schools, what we in the States would call Prep schools, but were called Public Schools in England.

Going in, I found the English schools to be much more demanding. I was put in with my age cohort, who had already been studying French and Latin for a couple of years. While I worked hard to catch up, I never did, especially in Latin. Eventually, I was allowed to quit Latin and substitute some extra mathematics. But I took French all five years, never getting good grades, but learning a lot.

I also studied History and Geography from an English perspective, which is not the same as a U.S. perspective. To this day, I know more about William the Conqueror and his descendants than I do some periods in U.S. History.

After a couple of years, at a new school, I started studying all the sciences - Biology, Chemistry and Physics. So I had three years of each of these.

When we came back to the States, my HS guidance counselor looked at my transcript and decided my 3 years each of the sciences was equivalent to the 1 year of General Science that most HS Freshmen had taken. He further decided that since I didn’t get good grades in French, I wouldn’t get any credit for that.

Result - in French, I took three years, and got straight A’s without ever cracking a book. This infuriated my teacher, since she knew I was not applying myself. She repeatedly told me I was a bad example for my fellow students. I just told her “I already know this stuff. What do you want me to do, learn it again?”

In the sciences, I mostly coasted also, although there was some new material in physics, and I did get into an AP Biology class my senior year which covered some material new to me.

The down side to this was that, going into college, while I had the requisite knowledge, my study habits had atrophied, resulting in my having to develop them all over again.

42

I went from a parochial school for grade school to a public high school, and Manda Jo is correct - what’s best depends upon the student. I’m sure my parochial school was fine for the average student - but there were neither honors classes nor remedial classes, both of which existed in the public schools. Not only were the honors classes in my public high school more demanding than grade school had ever been , I was at a disadvantage compared to my peers who had been in accelerated classes in public school. They were able to fit in more math classes for example, because they had taken algebra in 8th grade while I didn’t take it until 9th.

43

Dad was a field engineer, so we moved often: between K and 1, between 2 and 3, between 4 and 5, middle of 7 and middle of 10. We had a “home base” so it was the same district in 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, and 12.
It was the best thing in the world for me socially. I was already reading at a 2nd grade level when I started K at 4yo, but I was socially very immature. Starting over with new friends every couple of years meant that other kids couldn’t torment me for the stupid thing I did years ago. Even being in the same district again and again, that wasn’t an issue.
Academically, there were a few hiccups, but mostly 7 and 10. In 7, I missed percents in 7th grade math and the Federalist Papers in 7th grade US history. After that, it was expected that I knew those things and I had to catch up on my own. The weirdest was high school. English: 1st district, "Julius Caesar 9th grade, “Macbeth” 10th. 2nd district, “Romeo and Juliet” in 9th and Julius Caesar 10th. So I got “Julius Caesar” twice. Geometry in 10th grade in both, the the 1st did constructions 1st quarter, and the 2nd district did constructions at the end of the year. I was far ahead of the instruction when I moved into the 2nd district, so I didn’t lose anything when I got to do constructions twice.

44

Another military brat here (Army). I attended 13 different schools between kindergarten and 12th grade. I attended schools in Texas (in Galveston and Houston), Germany, California, Texas again (San Antonio), Tennessee, and Illinois (in a suburb north of Chicago).

Overall, it sucked. I was the new kid just about every year. By the time I made some friends in a given place, we were moving again. One of my worst years was moving from California to San Antonio over the Christmas holidays in the middle of 7th grade. I went from a public high school in the Bay Area to a military-run school in San Antonio that had a vice-principal who was proud of the paddle mounted on the wall in his office. :dubious:

The only good thing about this move was not having to finish my science project in Calfornia. One funny thing that happened was having to pick up an elective in the middle of the year in San Antonio. After going through a few of the options, my mom finally settled on “Reading,” remarking, “This should work. You like reading.” (True enough; I was a voracious reader.) Of course it was a remedial reading class. :smack: This was also the time that I was into Dungeons & Dragons, and the teacher did **not **like me reading D&D manuals – and I didn’t like to being told what to read. Anyway, one day the teacher assigned me to read the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I started the book in class, and finished it by the end of the day. The teacher yelled at me the next day for not reading my assigned book, and didn’t believe me when I said I’d already finished it. Eventually she prohibited me from reading D&D books in class completely, so I started reading these color-coded stories, which Google tells me was the SRA Reading Lab. I ended up reading every single story in the series. :smiley:

Another bad thing that happened due to these moves was the fact that the math curriculum in Tennessee had no provision for taking Algebra in 8th grade, which is generally necessary to be able to take calculus in high school. When I moved to Illinois, I was essentially a year behind, and didn’t get calculus until I got to college. For an engineering student, this was a disaster, since most of my classmates had already taken calculus, and the class was graded on a curve. The bottom line was that I felt like I was ahead of my classmates in math up through algebra, but fell behind thereafter and never really caught up.

45

I was in the middle of second grade when we moved across town. My first teacher was young, pretty, and fun. My second teacher was in her early forties, prematurely gray, and grouchy.

The second one gave me a put down I’ve never forgotten. I was at my desk reading and, for the first time, figured out a new word for myself. It was “hiccup”…I could see “cup” and sounded out the other letters, when the lightbulb appeared over my head and it made sense! I was so excited I went up to the teacher’s desk to show her. She told me to go sit back down, we weren’t up to that part of the book yet. I was crushed.

About fifteen years ago I met a woman at a learning camp orientation who was the daughter of the first second grade teacher. We had been her second, and as it turns out her last class, as she was diagnosed with MS. She lived with it for some years and then had to go to a care home. Her husband had been a teacher at the high school I attended, although I didn’t have him and didn’t associate his name with that of his wife. When she died, after going through years of pain and other illnesses, I took a card to the funeral home, writing a note about how I remembered her dressing up for Halloween as a football player, and running into the room. I heard from her husband that the card had been put out in a memorabilia display. He brought me a copy of the funeral program, and a huge and gorgeous vase of flowers that had been sent. To say I was touched doesn’t begin to deacribe how I felt.