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Comment by drawkbox | Hacker News Reader

I think that having a move from elementary to middle school (junior high) is going to prepare a student better for high school because they have already made one leap. That change of environment is a mental exercise that requires kids to refocus.

Moving to junior high is a big step and even as a kid you prepare and start over in a new environment, just like you would do in high school and again in college, then in jobs and so forth. Changing environments I believe is important for preparing kids, dealing with change, mental state/clearing the slate of the last school. Also kids get to be the big kids on campus at 6th grade, again at 8th or 9th then again at 12th grade, they also get to experience being the lower grade at a school a few times. These experiences I think just make people prepare/focus better. Change is good when it comes to environments of learning.

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> These experiences I think just make people prepare/focus better. Change is good when it comes to environments of learning.

Is this change in environment actually beneficial though? One could argue that the social stress of such a change is detrimental to the students, as it forces them to focus more on the social aspects of their environment than the academic aspects. One could further argue that maintaining a consistent (necessarily smaller?) K-12 school environment is more beneficial as it strengthens the students' social cohesion, allowing deeper, longer-lasting relationships to form among the students themselves, and between the students and faculty/staff.

Our middle and high schools had nearly identical recruitment areas, so socially the transition was irrelevant. Almost exactly one quarter of my middle school class came from my elementary school. Everyone I went to Kindergarten with, graduated as a senior with me 13 years later, minus obvious attrition due to moving, etc. From observation of other posts this is apparently highly unusual. Perhaps you all draw lots and are randomly assigned to any school in the district? This is kinda interesting.

I live in the same city in 2014 as we lived in the 80s when I was going to school, and the district still does things the same way... assuming I don't move, my kids will graduate high school with the kids from their Kindergarten class. So if its a fad, its long lived.

I would propose the transition can't be any more "awful" than moving to a new school. My parents never moved during my entire K-12 experience, which is apparently also an outlier. I am told that other kids have survived moving to a new school one or twice; going thru the experience with 250 of their closest friends can't be nearly as bad.

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