Ah. So each group of children has a team of teachers, not each child. Did the kids move from classroom to classroom, or did the teachers? In eighth grade we had a “block” teacher who taught English and social studies (and served as a homeroom teacher), and then separate teachers for math, science, music, art, shop (boys) and home ec (girls). Teachers stayed in their own rooms; kids moved around.
In my (limited, with that setup) experience, 8th grade is still just 8th grade.
Each teacher has their own room, and the kids move. But they don’t usually move far: All of the teachers who teach the same team will be close together.
When I was a kid in one school district (early 1970s) I went to a school that was K-6.*
Seventh and eighth graders went to the high school - but the seventh and eighth graders were virtually entirely segregated from the 9-12 crowd, through scheduling and location of classroom, and we were called “junior high” students. 7th grade was the introduction to specialized teachers (in K-6, we had one teacher per group of 25 or so students, who taught everything but gym, music or art (the music and art teachers came to us, we went to the gym)). For some reason I never understand, first period (in my case, science) was before “home room” (a brief period with a “home room teacher” who took attention, etc.). Our lunch period was very early (10:30?) presumably so we were done before the 9-12 grade crowd could menace us.
Then in the summer after 7th grade, we moved to a different school district. They had local K-4 school houses, and centralized “middle school” (5-8) and “high school” (9-12) schools, so I went from a K-6 school for K-6, 7th grade in a junior high, 8th grade in a middle school and 9th-12th grade in a high school. Lunch was 5th period in high school (and I think 8th grade) - but this school’s weirdness was that 5th period was double-length, and divided into 3 sections (5A, 5B and 5C) - if your class was in the A group, you ate early and went to your 5th period class for time periods B-C, if your class was in the C group, you ate late, after going to 5th period class for time period A-B, and no kidding, if you were in the B group, you went to 5th period for a half hour, left for lunch, and came back to 5th period for the “C” portion of 5th period.
*Until 5th grade there was no school lunch in my elementary school (by the way) - students walked back home for lunch (Mom was there, after all!) and then walked back to school. When school lunch became available, walking home was still allowed, so if you ate lunch (in the gym, of course), you had a long recess after that while the walkers walked home, ate and returned)
When a student is marked absent for the day, without prior notice from the parents, schools are required by law to put in effort to determine where they are. It’s a real hassle. By putting the official attendance for the day a little later, it lets them catch the students who are just a little late. Though of course, there’s a limit to how late they can push it: The same laws that require tracking down missing students also require daily attendance to be taken by some specific time.
I had primary school (1-4) middle school (4-8) and high school (9-12). The middle school combined the populations of two “feeder” primary schools. A number of years ago (and an even larger number of years after I graduated) my high school built a large new addition for a “freshman academy” to isolate the 9th graders from the other 3 years. (Apparently it was only the second one in the US.)
My daughter works in Chicago, where a lot of the schools are K-8. Several schools in DC, including one where I worked for 14 years, are PreK-8. When I was in school (1970-82) they were 1-6, 7-9, and 10-12. Ninth grade classes went on our high school transcript.
Makes sense. In that school most students walked to school and so could be a little late - in the other district, we took a bus, and so home room could be first
My middle school (6th - 8th grades, 1982-85) did this, but made it even more complicated. We had six classes, but there were five periods per day. So Day One we had ABCDE periods. Day Two we had FABCD. Then Day Three was EFABC. And so on. The fourth period of the day had the three lunches. We called them “first/second/third lunch,” and it was tied to whatever teacher was the fourth period. If Mrs. A Period had First Lunch, then on days A Period was the fourth of the day, her students had First Lunch.
Somehow, I never once had a teacher who took Second Lunch. I had the same teacher for “Core” in 7th and 8th grades, which was a two-period class combining English and Social Studies. AB in my case. This teacher had first lunch. The days we had DEFAB were the worst, because I had First Lunch after the third class, then the last two hours of the day in that damn Core class - my two least favorite subjects.
Third lunch was always the best. Lunch, then one more class, and home for the day!
'Course, this whole system made it so easy to cut fourth period. We’d just stay out for all three lunches.
I couldn’t find this clip when the thread started 8 years ago, but I found it now.
How many of y’all have a middle college to further complicate things? Both of my kids had 9th and 10th grades in high school, and 11th and 12th grades in middle college.
Looking at all of the differing answers here, it’s clear that it was phased in rather than being a sudden change. I recall that after my junior high school closed not long after I attended grades 7-9 in about '60-'62, the new school by the same name was called “middle school”.
True, though Serra High was 8–12 for a long time, I think until Farb became a middle school in the 80s.
I attended a Science Magnet school in Cleveland, from 6 - 12th grade. Externally, you went to the “Cleveland School of Science”, regardless of what grade you were in. Internally, 6-8th were considered middle school. There was a promotion ceremony at the end of your 8th grade year. 9-12th was considered high school. All grade levels were in the same 5-story building with no segregation between the different floors as far as grade levels were concerned. A 6th grader would have classes on the same floors as a 12th grader.
Wild.
In 8th grade, we also had something called “rotating activity” - every week one day and period were selected at random for “rotating activity” - instead of (say) history or math that day, you’d go to whatever room your club was meeting in (a variety of clubs were available - I was in “chess and backgammon” but the year after I was out of middle school, a “D&D” club was an option (which is pretty impressive for a rural school in the 1980s)). I think that this was a replacement for after hours activities, since the school system had enough trouble running late buses for the high school and didn’t want the added burden (and safety risks - late buses left kids some distance from their homes) of late buses for the middle schoolers
Was that in the old building downtown with the big sphere out front? I was there for 6th grade, in… um… 1988-1989.
I’ve seen schools with time set aside in the schedule for clubs etc., but I’ve never heard of it done randomly. In the school I teach at now, there are three half-hour “activity blocks” in the middle of the day, and one of them (depending on your year) is your lunchtime, and the other two are for clubs. In the high school I went to, every Wednesday, the regular class periods were shorter, to squeeze in an extra period for clubs.
My class was toward the end of the baby boom generation, and school space was TIGHT! Our Junior High, grades 7 and 8, was squeezed into a small building previously used by an insurance company; the art room still had their old vault. (I was in second grade when they expanded the elementary school, so we had our classes that year at the local Lutheran church.)
A few years after I graduated, the new high school opened, and they split grades 6-7-8 into a newly named Middle School at the old high school, at least until they built an addition to the new high school. Although the buildings are connected, they are Middle School 6-7-8 and High School 9-10-11-12.
A similar setup is close to where I live now, in a small town, where their High School is grades 7-12. It seems like it “just depends”.
That’s the one. Looks like we were schoolmates briefly!
My kid’s middle school had the team of teacher model. Three teachers for a class that move to three different rooms for each teacher. I think it was language, math, and social studies. There were three or four teacher teams. I thought it was a good model for kids “in the Middle” as my substitute teacher pamphlet explained. It gets them used to different teachers and passing time. A gentle step to the more fragmented high school. Side note: when I subbed I A; hated subbing in middle school. Holy cow those kids are a handful. B: I hated subbing in fifth grade in the Spring. I had some major emotional melt downs with fifth grade girls. We had to find one that was hiding behind an air conditioning unit in an emotional sobbing melt down. Poor kids that is a rough age.
I think kids in the middle should be together. It’s a tough time for them and younger and older kids are challenging to them when they are finding their way through puberty and identity issues.
Too late to edit: I meant 6, 7, and 8 as kids, “In the Middle.”
Montreal (and Quebec in general) always have to be different. Almost all schools are “elementary” (K-6) or “high school” (sometimes called “Academies” or other fancy names) (7-11). Quebec has a tuition-free two-year “junior college” (CEGEP) program after grade 11, followed by three years of university. So the year count is the same. Back in the 60s/70s, high school started in grade 8. Due to overflow in our high school - awaiting the completion of another new high school - we grade 8’s were housed in an elementary school. (Jewish holidays shut down any useful teaching to us Gentiles on those days due to lack of students.)
My father did go to a real “junior high” (grades 6,7,8, I think) in the 1930s (the building now houses an elementary school).