Comments on: Well, They Didn’t Use Tasers

By: Bryan

Bryan — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 05:13:44 +0000

Three out of four of my grandparents attended one-room schools. They have preserved the original one-room school that my older brother attended here for a year before the new school was built.

By: hipparchia

hipparchia — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 04:59:45 +0000

at the other end of the spectrum, they tore down the one-room country school house, 1st-8th grades, near our family farm only about 20 years or so ago.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 03:47:10 +0000

In New York the schools are tied to individual towns and villages, while in Florida they are tied to counties. Outside of the big cities in New York the progress has been from one school for everyone to the three schools based on grade levels.

When the suburbs sprouted, they usually ended up incorporating and forming their own school districts.

You didn’t bus unless it was absolutely necessary, because of the winter snow closures and the costs.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 01:04:45 +0000

Hipparchia, the move to mega high schools started in urban areas probably 100 years ago, then slowly migrated to rural areas. The last rural school district where I taught, they integrated three K-12 schools, a high school, an elementary school, and a middle school into one mega-complex where every student in the district whether 5 years old or 15 years old is on this vast campus (by the standards of rural schools of 40 years ago) because “we must be efficient!”. Meanwhile, the old neighborhood elementary schools that had maybe 200 students in the city that I grew up in were combined into mega-schools with 1,000+ students for the same reason. I was lucky to attend a high school that had roughly 400 students, that was few enough students that you could know the name of everybody in your class and a lot of people not in your class and the teachers could learn everybody’s name too. Then I transferred to a “small” urban high school that had 1600 students. Sigh.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:46:26 +0000

People probably don’t appreciate the fact that Oriskany Central School was one of the largest school districts in the state of New York, and the it was one of the few public high schools in the area. The building was a WPA construction project.

My parents were the first generation in the area who could attend a free public high school, as schools in the area only went through 8th grade in my grandparents generation.

By: hipparchia

hipparchia — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 23:17:50 +0000

i dunno if i quite agree with your timeline badtux. i went to one of those high schools, with a graduating class of 450 students. fortunately they didn’t have tasers back then, because while we weren’t quite in the same class with the grumpy forester’s early 70s radicals, we were close.

By: Bryan

Bryan — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 22:04:35 +0000

When a profession becomes a job, everyone loses.

They are making everything they can into a job, to be sure people “know their place” in the new world order.

By: Badtux

Badtux — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 21:19:05 +0000

It all changed when we moved to mega-high-schools because then the students became a product rather than a person. You have a high school with 2,000 or more students, graduating 400 kids at a time, and things like graduation become a cattle call where the cattle err students are mooved from one side of the stage to the other at a rapid pace rather than a celebration. But ve must haff efficiency, y’know, and those older little high schools just were too expensive yessiree. So our students become product to be processed in an “education factory”, rather than people. And since they’re just product, it’s okay to treat them like product rather than people.

And folks wonder why I don’t teach anymore…

— Badtux the (Former) Teacher Penguin

By: Bryan

Bryan — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 21:12:38 +0000

I graduated from the same high school as my Mother, and her brother and sister. I was in the biggest class ever, 52, and high school graduations were a village event. Everyone went to the graduation, because everyone was connected to someone who graduated.

There was nothing “choreographed” or coordinated about them, and they went on a lot longer than was absolutely necessary, but no one minded. This wasn’t a show, it was a celebration.

I realize that things were different back then, but this demand for order makes graduation a job, not something you want to remember.

By: Jack K., the Grumpy Forester

Jack K., the Grumpy Forester — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 17:26:00 +0000

…the paragraph at the end of that story is just as amazing: 5 Illinois students denied their diplomas until they performed 8 hours of public service because their families cheered at graduation. Being one of those late-’60’s/early-’70’s high school radicals, my first thought would be for the junior class to get together and devise a plan to just not even show up for next year’s graduation and let the school mail them their diplomas. Maybe that would help school officials get over themselves…