Banty wrote:

In article , Ericka Kammerer says...

from the classroom anyway. I guess I was assuming that
neighborhood friends and friends from other activities
would be unaffected by this odd school division, but
apparently it extended beyond school?

??

Perhaps you're thinking of a program where the kids are together in a class even
for lunch and PE and recess and everything else?


I hadn't realized before your last post that you
were talking about jr. high. I was thinking in terms
of elementary school. In my son's elementary school,
they have lunch as a class. I think they sometimes mix
two classes together in PE, but there's not a lot of
time for socializing there. As I said in another post,
there's also only limited interaction at recess.


By junior high, those between-class periods and - especially - who sits with who
during lunch, and PE which mixes classes (at least did for the program I was
in), and in recess in earlier grades the kids see each other. And often
gravitate to their neighborhood friends. It doesn't have to extend beyond
school.


I don't know what it will be like for my kids
when they get to jr. high, but I was in the same program
my older son is now in this school district when I was
in jr. high (egads...can it really be 25 years ago!?).
We did mingle at lunch, but there was almost no between
class time (barely enough to get from class to class if
you hustled). I moved into the area for 7th grade and
was put into this center-based program. Unlike kids not
in the program, I was with the same group of kids for all
my core academics and was then mainstreamed for PE and band
(and maybe one or two other classes over two years--I forget
which, precisely). Anyway, because I had a good four classes
with the same group of people, I knew them best and gravitated
toward them to find friends. To be honest, I didn't really
know most of the kids in the neighborhood, perhaps because
we'd just moved in and I was very busy with other activities
and I wasn't much of a social butterfly anyway. So I *did*
have most of my friends within the program, but I think that
was much more because those were the people I spent the most
time with, not because there was any sense that it was "wrong"
to be interacting with others. I guess I find the sense of
segregation you experienced very odd, but not the fact that
kids would primarily socialize within the group they spend
the most time with, which in my experience would be the
classroom group. I'm sure others are perhaps more shaped
by neighborhood friendships or friendships from church/scouts/
whatever, but I think the classroom is a biggie for a *lot*
of kids. It certainly was for me (though as a military brat
I often didn't have many neighborhood friends) and for my
kids (even though they *do* have many neighborhood friends).


Absolutely. I wonder where that segregation came
from? I would expect some small degree of us-vs-them with
any segregated program, but it seems like it was really
excessive where you were.

I don't think it was excessive so much that the social expectations were much
apparent to those of us who came from unsegregated classes from another state
because it was so different where we came from.
Kids who had been in the NH system all along pretty much knew each other already
and not the other kids and it had developed over time. We were like a new tribe
coming in, and being told that certain members of our tribe were suddenly very
uncool. Our unique situation made the segregatation that much more starkly
clear.


Yes, I can see that, and also that it could be
something very invisible unless a unique situation like
yours came along to cast some light on it. Still, I
think if the same thing had happened in the system I was
in for jr. high you might have found little *time* to
interact with the kids not on the program at school, but
I would be surprised if you would have found any sense
that interacting with kids outside the program was uncool.
Could be wrong, of course, but it would surprise me. I
would have been somewhat less surprised if there was
some animosity in the other direction, though.

(Funny using this word 'segregation' concering this situation, although
it fits. In 1967, with a large group of kids suddenly coming in to a New
Hampshire school district from Texas, they assumed we'd be trying to maintain a
different kind of segregation! That was another piece of weirdness I can tell
you about another time.)


I can only imagine... ;-)

Best wishes,
Ericka