The B12 (XII) Forum, home of the 'Front Porch, y'all' at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

How could you do that with only one kidney (the other one presumably got stolen)?

This was several years before Slick and his band of state-worker miscreants stole it.

This was several years before Slick and his band of state-worker miscreants stole it.

Ya know, I take deep exception to this because....um...because...well, see, what you're not giving state workers credit for is.....what I mean is.....

Well, it's hard to explain.  Just let us know if the other one becomes available.  We won't compulsorily take it from you, but you are encouraged to donate it.  

6th grade is probably the weirdest one.  Some of the kids are already hitting puberty and are turning into young men and women.  Some of the kids still look and act like 3rd or 4th graders.  It's always been tough to place which is why it has bounced back and forth between elementary school, and middle school, over the decades, depending on where you live.

For about ten years, while I was a younger elementary school kid, they actually had "Sixth Grade Centers" for this reason.  They isolated 6th graders and didn't have them in either elementary school OR junior high/middle school.  It was logistically more complicated but I'm not sure it was such a bad idea.  For boys especially, being a 6th grader in middle school can be really tough.  My son had a miserable 6th grade year, just awful.

Anyway they'd done away with that by the time I hit 6th grade so I was still just in elementary school.  And then did two years of junior high for 7th and 8th.

Heck, I've heard of some middle schools that are 7-8-9, and high school is 10-11-12.  I don't think I've ever seen that in Texico but I've heard of it.

Well there you have it.  Absolutely no rhyme or reason or consistency, in schooling practices across Texico. 

This has been a fascinating discussion.  Small towns have their disadvantages, to be sure.  But I'm glad to have grown up where I did, and that I gave my kids the same environment to grow up in.  As traumatized as they feel by having gotten the shaft at times due to not being from the landed gentry class, it could have been a helluva lot worse.

They'll all likely have the means to send their kids to private schools, which will bring their own issues, but daily racial incidents shouldn't be on their horizon.

I've been in a larger city district (Baton Rouge), a rural-yet-populous school district (in GA), and a small-town school (in LA).  Like Fearless said, I guess all have their pros and cons.  

It would've been nice to have had a group of school friends I started kindergarten with and finally graduated with, but that was never a possibility in Baton Rouge anyway, due to the aforementioned re-arranging kids throughout the city all the time.  I still keep up a little bit with some folks I graduated with, but really, I only spent three years with them, and it's not the same relationship the rest of them have, who all went K-12 together.  

Isolating 6th graders seems like a good move, knowing absolutely nothing about the unintended consequences and assuming the money is there to do such a thing.  Just hypothetically, in a world where there's no drawbacks I don't know about, it seems to mitigate the weird age that is.  Like utee94 said, 6th grade can be rough, particularly for boys, and that was certainly my experience.  It wasn't hostile so much as it was just.....how boys are.  The testosterone is starting to change you, but it hasn't caught up to where the 7th and 8th graders are, and their hormones demand idiocy, which usually manifests in picking on the 6th graders.  

Conversely, I wouldn't want 6th graders in with K-5 either.  I remember being in 5th grade and clearly having the sense before school, on the playground, etc., that as I looked around at kindergarteners, 1st graders, etc.....it was getting dumber by the minute that I was in the same spaces as them.  Bullying was not nearly so much a thing in elementary school as it was in middle school (in my experience), but it did exist, and some 5th graders were already starting to treat the 3rd graders like punching bags.  6th grade would've only compounded that.  

Best to just stick them off by themselves, if you can.  Says the guy who has no data, no research, and knows nothing.  

High school levels back out again.  I recall some amount of upper classmen messing with freshmen, but barely anything in comparison to what goes on in middle school.  By then the boys have had a few years with their hormones to figure out to deal with them and still act like human beings, whereas middle school boys.......are just idiots.