Grade School, Middle School, High School

[Treize]

I went to a private grade/middle school, so it was a little bit different than the public schools, but it was mostly the same.

First of all there is a K4 and K5 program at the school I went to. Almost all of the students who continued into grade school went to K4 and K5/kindergarten. For these school was only half a day. There was a morning and afternoon program. I also think you could choose between having this everyday or just three days a week. Now it is different, though. There are only choices for everyday all day (7:50-2:50) or everyday for half a day in the afternoon. For this we just had one teacher and an aid. It was more like babysitting for working parents to be honest. We also only had cubbies, since we were only there for a couple of hours and didn't need to bring anything besides coats, etc.

For grade school (grades 1-5) we had one main teacher in one main classroom. There were about 40 students so we were broken up into two groups with a teacher for each group. Here with this teacher we would learn the core subjects like math, reading, etc. However it was different for social studies and science. One of the two teachers would teach either social studies or science. We would then have to switch classrooms with the other group of 20 students for social studies and science. Then we would have different teachers for non-core subjects. For example a teacher would come to our classroom and teach us foreign languages twice a week. When I went to school we learned either German or Spanish one semester, and then the other the other semester. Now Chinese is also taught too. We would also have to go to a different classroom to learn art, learn music, go to the library, and go to gym. In grades 1-4 we had one locker and a desk to put all of our supplies, coats, and stuff. In fifth grade we had two lockers and a desk.

In middle school (grades 6-8) we had a different teacher for every subject. I went to a small school, though, so we had pretty much the same teachers each year. It was kind of strange, though, because teachers would teach seemingly unrelated classes from one year to the next. For example one teacher would teach English one year and then math the next. We would also then pick one foreign language to take every other day for the next three years. We had one locker and a homeroom each year. We would go to these homerooms in the beginning and end of each day to listen to announcements. There were usually seven classes each day, but there were no electives or anything.

For high school (grades 9-12) it was completely different from middle school. The grade size increased 20-30 times from what it was at my other school, so there were a lot more options. We all had to take required core classes, but then there were numerous electives. There were art, music, band, business, humanities, etc. You could also have study halls or "off hours" where you just went to the cafeteria or the library. It was nice that you got to pick whatever classes that you wanted to go to. There were countless options of what you could do. The scheduling is kind of strange at the high school, though. There are bells that tell students when their class ends. But several times during the day, there are bells that would ring during class that would excuse some classes, but not all of them. It made things confusing knowing when the classes actually ended, and it was annoying for the bells just to go off during the middle of class everyday. We also had lockers every year. In 12th grade we had to share lockers with another student. Two students were assigned to each locker, but students usually switched lockers, so some lockers ended up having three students, while others ended up only having one.

I don't see how you could not have lockers every year. Does it never get cold or snow where you all live? I know that especially in grade school we had to bring a coat, gloves, a hat, boots, snow pants, a sweatshirt, etc. to school for almost half of the year. You couldn't possibly keep this on throughout school, could you?

This is another thing I'm curious about, did anyone HAVE to shower after sports? I never showered in at school, middle or high school. None of ours were used, well not for any of the girls at least from what I could tell.

We had to shower in middle school, but then at the high school it was never enforced. It was optional, so the vast majority of the students chose not too. It was pretty awkward when the female gym teacher came into the boys locker room to make sure that all the boys showered after gym in middle school, though...