There seem to be some ages that many people have less than happy memories of - high school and middle school are the most common ones I hear. Whether it be because of social pressures, academic struggles, family problems, or whatever else, which of the K-12 school years was your least favorite? I’m interested to see whether there’s a bell curve of sorts in the responses, and, if there is, where it peaks. If you can’t pin down an exact year, general estimates work as well.
Probably 2nd. We’d just moved, all the other kids already knew each other, and my brother and I literally doubled the number of non-white kids in the entire school.
High school was hugely downhill for me. Junior year was probably my naidr. I was extremely depressed and stressed, and I was getting low grades largely because I didn’t turn in homework. Not that I didn’t do it, I didn’t turn it in. My junior year I only passed trig by 1 point because I had ripped up several tests right at the end of the class period and only turned in one assignment.
It was bad enough that they actually relaxed the requirements for the number of core classes I was required to take for senior year because of it (I ended up with a special medical classification or something), and restricted me from taking an extra course (so I couldn’t take 4th year German). There were so many meetings where all my teachers met with the principle, my school counselor, and my mom. Apparently most of them honestly felt I should be getting A’s based on the quality of the work I did turn in, and they really believed I’d been doing it because all of them had seen me destroy my homework at some point, but nobody knew what to do.
They even went so far as to put me in “writing center” which was essentially a “study hall” period for students who needed remedial writing help, but for me they simply spent the time trying to get me to back up my work in 100 places so I couldn’t “lose it”.
I had become extremely withdrawn by that point, to the point that I never hung out with friends during lunch anymore, I just walked around alone. When I talked to one of my high school friends recently, he honestly thought I had a different lunch hour than them, but we really did have the same lunch hour, I just wandered around alone.
7th grade. I had a bully. He went to the high school when I was in 8th grade.
Fourth. I had a teacher on sabbatical from hell. She hated kids, would deeply humiliate any of us given the slightest opportunity and even allowing for childhood perception was one of the nastiest people I’ve ever had to spend time with. Damaged me as a student in ways that took me until college to fully fix.
Hope hell’s hot enough for you, Mrs Spitz.
Toss-up between 5th and 8th grade. 5th moved from SF to a suburb of Detroit with my mother, parents officially divorced. Had at least one humiliating semi-public meltdown, I think the only one in my life ( not involving booze 
).
Went with 8th grade, which was another forced move, this time from Michigan living with my mother to living with my father back in CA. It was very unexpected ( unlike the first move ), very sudden - I wasn’t registered until the third day of class in CA and pretty much completely severed me from my former friends which was a lot more significant in 8th grade than it had been in 5th. A thoroughly shitty year. No meltdowns as I was a more resilient kid by then, but I think it altered the trajectory of my life more than the first shake-up.
Other than those episodes, my school years weren’t bad. Not particularly awesome, but not exceptionally sucky either.
Severe bullying brought me to a full-blown nervous breakdown in 8th grade. Worst period of my life.
I am a big subscriber to the “It Gets Better” movement. My college years were some of the best in my life. There wasn’t any bullying in college!
For me it was definitely fifth form as it was then known (now year 11), but it wasn’t because of anything happening at school. My father was very ill and spent most of the year in and out of hospitals. My elder brother had finished school and had moved out of home and my younger sister had started to board at her school, to get her away from the general air of chaos that reigned at home. I was left at home, aged 15, to support my mother, who wasn’t coping well. It was a difficult year but I certainly matured a lot over the twelve months. School actually became my solace: the structure of classes gave some regularity to my life, and the priests and teachers were very supportive and helpful throughout the period of my father’s illness.
It was second grade for me. Our teacher was literally picked up one day at the school and taken to a “rest home.” I think it’s probably fortunately I was very often sick that year as I was less affected than most of my classmates.
Same here, but I had three of the fucking little psychopaths. Gym class was my waking nightmare. Then the son of some friends of my parents heard about it and flattened one of them in the hallway. End of problem. Ruined my self confidence for the next five years, though, so I never asked a girl out, never tried out for a sports team, etc. Poor me, I know.
All of junior high (grades 7-9 where I was), but eight grade probably edges out. I was awkward adolescent, and bullying was rife.
7th.
The first year we had to take showers after gym class. That was bad for a lot of us.
Oh, and an antisemitic bully. The guy was 19, and in 8th grade.
I move back from New York to Israel (after leaving the country as an infant) in the middle of 1st grade. I didn’t speak a word of Hebrew, and I wasn’t happy with the move.
While I have plenty of memories of my American school, I can’t remember a single thing from 1st grade in Israel. By 2nd grade I picked up enough of the language to get by and even made some friends, but to this day, those last 4 months or so of 1st grade are like a hole in my mind.
What, no All of the Above or None of the Above?
Well, even if all of your schooldays were incredibly horrible/great, I figured there’s got to be a worst, even if it doesn’t really stand out.
The results are interesting, though - everything seems to rise to a craptastic crescendo in middle school, then lessen in high school.
Middle school (or junior high) kids are the most vicious, IME. It was the time my own kids had the most problems, as well. Perhaps it’s the onset of puberty that makes kids in that age group so mean and aggressive. By high school, most of them are transferring all of that to dating and sports and acne. For me, I just avoided most of them and hung out with a couple of friends. Nowadays, someone like I was gets a gun and wreaks havoc.
4th grade, because Mrs. Jancich was a real cunt.
Probably second grade. The teacher insisted on speed tests: 100 math problems in a minute. I was terrible at them until I figured out a trick (counting dots*).
Most of my K-12 experience was just fine, though.
*I’d tap out dots, sort of like dice. Thus 8 + 5 would be “eight (counting) nine-ten-eleven-twelve-thirteen” as I tapped the five spots you see on a die.
5th grade. Mrs. Snitzler (yeah, I’ll name her, she’s probably dead by now - she was probably a good 10-15 years older than my parents, who are 70 now) is the only teacher in my school history that I outright hated.
The least of her offenses was that she decided that we 10-year-olds should be “adults” now. And that meant no “diminutive” names or nicknames. So my friend Bobby became Bob, Corky became Gordon, Tommy became Tom, Susie became Susan, etc. And this wasn’t just for what she called them. We kids had better use the “adult” names too.
She instilled a hatred for mathematics in me. 5th grade was when we were supposed to learn how to do long division, but her method of “teaching” math left me completely clueless (I had never had trouble with math before 5th grade). Two years later I entered junior high school still not comprehending long division, and only learned it when a classmate took pity on me and sat down with me and explained it to me in a way I could understand.
Mrs. Snitzler believed in the use of peer pressure to correct “behavioral problems”. That is, if one student “acted out”, she’d make the entire class suffer for that one student’s actions. Of course, that meant that the “offender” would get his ass kicked by his classmates at the earliest opportunity. One of my “offenses” was absentmindedly drumming my fingers on my desk while Mrs. Snitzler was talking. I didn’t even realize I was doing it. Given that this was just before recess, she made the entire class sit there for the first half of recess, listening to me drumming my fingers (and she wouldn’t let me stop). I got a wedgie and underpants full of playground bark dust out of it. Way to go, Teach! Utilize bullying to create compliant students!
And those wigs. She wore a different wig every day. We never knew what she would look like from day to day. As an adult, living in a new town, my new town had a resident “crazy lady” whom everybody knew about. Looking back, I see that crazy lady’s crazy eyes in my 5th-grade teacher.
The only “good” think Mrs. Snitzler did was to read “The Hobbit” to us. And even there, I’d rather she had assigned it to us to read ourselves. I was reading several grade levels above my grade, and could have handled “The Hobbit”.
Close behind 5th grade were 6th and 7th. Our family television broke when I was in 5th grade, and my parents elected to neither repair nor replace it. So I went into 6th grade at a time when my peers were learning how to be “cool” from what they saw on TV, and I was completely out of the loop. 6th and 7th grade were hell for me.
Things improved in 8th grade, when I discovered that I was a pretty good runner. There was only one kid who could finish ahead of me when we had to run in gym class, and I joined the track team that year. I wasn’t a “star”, but I didn’t embarrass myself and ended up with quite a few of my school’s “star” athletes as friends.