K8 memories
From k-8 I went to a little local charter school with less than fifty students per grade. Charter schools are critized as concept (idk much about that and I don't know how valid the criticism is), but my individual school was good. We ranked higher than the state average for all testing. (Were in nc though, so thats not that impressive).
We called all the teachers by their first names. Like my favorite teacher was Anthony, the 7th and 8th grade history teacher. I thught for some time that all schools were like that, and that calling teachers by titles and surnames only happened in the past. I read a lot of old books, and they always did that, so I just made the assumption.
We didn't have short "units", we had ~expeditions~. Which is a pretentious name. But they would last for a whole trimester. (We also had trimesters, not semesters), and be covered in all classes. For instance, in sixth grade, we studied coffee. The production, selling, history, etc of coffee, and history of South America and other related things. And we had our own coffee business. I know so much about coffee lol.
We went on camping trips every year. In eighth grade, we went on an outward bound backpacking excursion. It really was kind of a rite of passage, including seperation from the group and those other things that anthropologists talk about with rites of passage. We alept in tarp tents, collected and purified our own water, made our own dinners, bush-pushed (whacked through places with no trails using a machete) and navigated without adult help. It was pretty cool. More kids should do something like that, I think.