The Great Canadian "What High School did you go to?" thread

[Antigonish]

Originally Posted by ConundrumNL

I went to Bishops College between 2001-04. The name (like a lot of schools in NL) is a holdover from the denominational school system, it was a public school during my time.

One interesting aspect, and another result of the old denominational school system, was it was right next to another high school, Booth Memorial. Students from both could go to the other for some special classes (Music for example). Both school also shared a band and choir.

Both closed in 2015. Bishops was converted to senior apartments. Booth was purchased and partial tore down, but not much activity since.

I'm always intrigued by the school system in Newfoundland. Because it was still a British Dominion of it's own until 1949 things developed differently there than down here in the Maritimes despite us being "cousins" of sorts. The Catholic vs Public system, boys vs girls schools, collegiate prep vs trades focused curriculums. In the Maritimes we didn't really have that and the only two areas that sort of did at one time was Halifax and Sydney.

Also, the rural nature of school boards in Nova Scotia lead to some weird delayed amalgamation. I was born in the late 1980s so my 'youthful generation' (~5-year cohorts) was the first in our area that started in the amalgamated school catchment areas in the 1990s. Before then things were still in flux, some rural communities still operated 2-room school houses until the early 1990s. The older siblings of my friends who are about 40 years old now can legitimately say they got their "schoolin'" in a 2-room school shack with a central wood furnace and old wooden desks like it was the early 1900s. My oldest brother went to a small 'town' school that was in operation since 1905 - literally an old brick 3 storey building with a huge brick smokestack chimney in the middle that looked like a turn of the century textile factory. They closed the school in 1991 and merged them all into consolidated schools either rural or suburban around that time.

Also in Antigonish they had a 'town' high school and a 'rural' high school that was separated. They constructed the main 'regional' high school in 1970 and merged the two. I think Dr. J. H. Gillis (my high school) and CEC in Truro were the first two 'mega' high schools that were part of those amalgamation projects at that time.

Originally Posted by MolsonExport

Small world indeed. After being born in Montreal, and after a few years spent in Montreal, Ville St. Laurent, then St. Lambert, then, Edmonton, I lived next door in Kirkland (less than a block away from Beaconsfield city limits, where I went to Elementary School [Allancroft] and High school [BHS, 1982-1987], (and thereafter John Abbott College in Sainte Anne-de-Bellevue [Francois Legault's hometown], then Concordia U), in the years from 1974-1994.

From what I remember my dad telling me about his time in your neck of the woods was the English vs French divide was actually more Catholic (and some Jews) vs Protestant. Since they were Scottish Catholics they actually knew more French kids than English both in Beaconsfield and L'Île-Perrot. Come to think of it, I think at least one of my aunts went to an all-girl Catholic school in L'Île-Perrot and did her school in French so perhaps that helped contribute to the social network mixing. Really interesting place during that time of Canadian/Quebec history.

Originally Posted by ssiguy

It's amazing how much we remember about our high school days and all the kids we hung around. I can still remember the names of all of my friends even though I haven't seen any of them in 40 years.

I went to Strathroy DCI at the old location until they tore it down. I'm gay and was sometimes teased but never harassed. This is because I was from a wealthy background, lived in a big house, in the richest part of the small town of {at the time about 8,000} and everyone knew who we were.

My older sister and brother were VERY popular and hence so was I and was part of the elite social group that everyone else wanted to be a part of. Everyone in the school knew who I was and was forever say hi to me in the halls as we were well off but never snobish. There wasn't a party for the upper class kids that wasn't being organized from our house and any party or get together automatically meant inviting either sister, my brother, or I depending on the age group. We were the Molly Ringwalds and Emillio Estevezs of the Breakfast Club.

What was a social climate of high school in the 1980s? If you are gay it must have been crazy sketchy you would think. I went to high school in the 2000s and the social climate really changed a lot from the 1990s. Nobody cared if you were gay, a jock, a musician, a theatre nerd, band geek, skater kid, emo, whatever. Everybody went to the same parties and social events and when people got in fights it was just to settle petty disputes or because some guy hit on your girlfriend and you had to lay down the law. I don't recall random jocks beating up gay kids or teasing nerds or anything. I just remember everybody of all social classes being funny as hell and a joy to be around.

[urbandreamer]

My apartment overlooks a school and I see the same dynamics playing out in the yard today as I did in public school and high school in the 1980s-90s: the jocks, the nerds, the rich kids, the poor, the bullies, and even a few I can relate to: social outcasts with no friends, hiding in a corner of the schoolyard ignored, or probably bullied indoors.

Antigonish, my private Christian elementary school was run out of an old SS two room public school built in 1905, so I can relate to your siblings experience. An addition was built with a few more classrooms after I left, back to a bigger 500 pop elementary school in 7th grade before attending an ~1200 student public high school. The "Worldly Kids" in contrast to the Mennonites were uncouth, loud relentless bullies. In retrospect, many were quite literally poor white trash.

[Antigonish]

Originally Posted by urbandreamer

My apartment overlooks a school and I see the same dynamics playing out in the yard today as I did in public school and high school in the 1980s-90s: the jocks, the nerds, the rich kids, the poor, the bullies, and even a few I can relate to: social outcasts with no friends, hiding in a corner of the schoolyard ignored, or probably bullied indoors.

Antigonish, my private Christian elementary school was run out of an old SS two room public school built in 1905, so I can relate to your siblings experience. An addition was built with a few more classrooms after I left, back to a bigger 500 pop elementary school in 7th grade before attending an ~1200 student public high school. The "Worldly Kids" in contrast to the Mennonites were uncouth, loud relentless bullies. In retrospect, many were quite literally poor white trash.

That's a shame it's still like that. In retrospect I think my generation was a very brief not-normal time period that seemed too good to be true. I went to high school post-9/11 (there were like... no brown kids at all at my HS of 1000+ at that time to see the racism first hand) but before the Great Recession started so "ambivalence" to most things seemed the norm. If a kid was out gay then the mentality was "hey, more p*ssy for me amirite bro?" and that was the extent of it, no need for any worse, just get along. Kids who were jocks or nerds or theatre/band kids all collectively drank and smoke so there was always common ground to just get along and not escalate and share social spaces outside of school. Maybe kids now are so demoralized that fighting and bullying are coming back in the worst way possible.

[urbandreamer]

Re: the Great Recession. There wasn't one in Canada, unless like me, you'd just lost your manufacturing job, offshored to China and India. The real big recession is happening today and no one's talking about it! It's all about the housing crisis, like jeez, in the USA of 2008,engineered by the wealthy to exploit poor renters. Then there's some wars and covid to distract us from what's going on.

I think of my friend's daughter, a relatively average student with few/no friends, who had behavioral problems and was never sent home from her westend Toronto schools. From hearing her talk, the teachers aren't allowed to discipline the trouble makers, often from poor and broken homes.

There's always the one or three teenagers no one knows or notices, aside from the mean, often poor bullies who themselves aren't popular. It's probably normal for normal socialized people to not see these hidden outcasts, kind of like the housed ignoring tent city dwellers.

[ssiguy]

Antigonish............in terms of being gay, ya is was harder but like so many things, it depended on your social standing.

Remember this was a high school in a town of 8,000 but a large enrollment of about 1400 due to getting 30 rural buses into the school. Unlike a city, there is no such thing as a rich school or a poor one but rather everyone going to the same one. This means that every socio-economic class of student was represented. If you were with the "in" crowd that meant you were at the top and hence nothing else really mattered.

Also, my older sister and brother were VERY popular and were part of their age "in" crowd and in a small town everyone knows your name. They had set the stage for me being popular and very well known in the school before I even got there.

Added to this is that our house was the one where all the parties were either taking place or administered from so if you wanted to be invited to the party, you don't shoot the hen that lays the golden egg. This mean much more back then than it does today as there were parties every week as opposed to today where schools are MUCH, MUCH, MUCH more conservative and quiet. You didn't have to study all the time, or at all for that matter, because a C would get into most universities and B would get you into any university in the country in any discipline you wanted.

This is that back in Ontario when we had Grade 13 and from Grade 9 you had to choose which stream you were going into as there was basic {for a Grade 12 diploma} and advanced for those going onto Grade 13. Grade 12 got you into college but you needed a Grade 13 to get into university. That mean all the kids from a working class background went to the basic stream while all the kids from wealthier backgrounds and classes went into the advanced stream so their kids could go into university. From Grade 9, your social standing very much depended on which stream you choose which almost always depended on what your parents did for a living.

[urbandreamer]

^Very similar to my smaller town HS. We had Basic (mostly down syndrome, or similar developmently impaired students),General (a lot of working class and especially dumber farm kids who ended up better off than many thanks to this huge construction boom), Advanced (Me: my Grade 13 average was a disappointing 90%, heavily into sciences, English and history, stupidly didn't take calculus or algebra), and Enriched for literal geniuses (of varying social classes.) All the Advanced students went on to graduate school except myself, because of poor health I got a bad university GPA. My profs were convinced I had something seriously wrong and I ignored them: only recently I discovered they were right.

In my small town (I was not a townie having grown up on a rural property), I can think of a few families that fit your profile: the children of doctors, factory owners, accounting firm owners, car dealerships, perhaps the grocery store owner, and maybe a few Mennonite or Dutch kids whose parents owned feed mills, farm implement dealers or 5000 acre farms. Come to think of it, the wealthiest kid, a factory owner's son, was gay. His best friend was the drug dealer, from a very low class background. Like a certain other dealer, he is now a politician ha.

I am perhaps the only person in town X history that still is unrecognized the few times I've returned. Being a nobody who nobody knows!

[ConundrumNL]

Originally Posted by Antigonish

I'm always intrigued by the school system in Newfoundland. Because it was still a British Dominion of it's own until 1949 things developed differently there than down here in the Maritimes despite us being "cousins" of sorts. The Catholic vs Public system, boys vs girls schools, collegiate prep vs trades focused curriculums. In the Maritimes we didn't really have that and the only two areas that sort of did at one time was Halifax and Sydney.

Not an expert on this by any account, but here's I what recall.

When I started school the religious-based system was still in place. The protestant schools (in St. John's, at least) had consolidated under one board and had largely become secular. The Catholics continued to operate their own schools, but had moved to lay people for teachers.

They held a referendum in 95. The people voted to abolish the system, and establish a government controlled system. I remember in the years that followed there was a considerable shuffling on students between schools, as they tried to move to a neighbourhood school model.

One interesting thing about this change, was while government took over operating the schools, the churches still owned the school land and buildings. This became a problem just recently, with the Catholic church having to sell off much of it's properties to pay SA victim settlements, so the province was forced to buy up a lot of the schools in short order.

[Acajack]

Originally Posted by Antigonish

What was a social climate of high school in the 1980s? If you are gay it must have been crazy sketchy you would think. I went to high school in the 2000s and the social climate really changed a lot from the 1990s. Nobody cared if you were gay, a jock, a musician, a theatre nerd, band geek, skater kid, emo, whatever. Everybody went to the same parties and social events and when people got in fights it was just to settle petty disputes or because some guy hit on your girlfriend and you had to lay down the law. I don't recall random jocks beating up gay kids or teasing nerds or anything. I just remember everybody of all social classes being funny as hell and a joy to be around.

I went to high school in the late 80s. Two different high schools and two junior high schools in a couple different provinces. Some English some French.

Homophobic slurs and jokes were rampant and used by even the nicest, respectable kids. Note that they could be levelled at anyone, not just at kids who were suspected of being gay.

In all of the schools I went to, no gay kids were truly out of the closet. Some were suspected or assumed to be gay, and later came out of the closet (generally in university) whereas others everyone thought were gay are still apparently straight 30 years later.

Also everywhere I went, there were (crypto) gay kids who were harassed and there were (crypto) gay kids who were not harassed. So being thought of as gay wasn't necessarily a guarantee of being treated horribly. The kids who were most viciously harassed weren't generally gay or from ethnic minorities* in fact. They were white kids who didn't fit in for some other reason.

(*We had some minorities but not nearly as many as today. My best friend in the high school I went to the longest was a visible minority. He endured some occasional racist comments from certain kids for sure but was never harassed as he was part of a larger gang of us. White kids from different regions could also be the target of nasty comments due to accents or other stuff.)

Almost no one got "beat up" (not the same as a fight) in the schools I went to. Well, except for me in one junior high.

[ssiguy]

So much of your experience in high school depended upon your social standing. Wealthy kids and especially those in the "in" crowd were very rarely picked on while the opposite was true of the poorer or more isolated kids. It's very much like the job market......it's not what you know but who you know.

In smaller more rural/small town schools, the socio-economic stratification is MUCH higher than in the cities because everyone had to go to the same school as opposed to going to different ones. The working class kids, especially from immigrant backgrounds like the Portuguese kids in Strathroy, were at a distinct disadvantage, and were NEVER part of the "in" crowd. Being Native wasn't an issue because, although SDCI served 2 Native reserves, the Natives never made it past Grade 8.

[urbandreamer]

The irony of my social standing: in high school both my parents were retired and farmers said we were city slickers while townies said we were bumpkins. Little did I know, and of course none of my classmates will ever know, but my mother's family were literally aristocrats in England.