Sixth grade - not so much the teacher (Mr. W - who did both cool and cruel things in class) and bully girls - Emily (head bitch) Melinda, Jaren, & Kari. There were several jerkish boys as well - but the girls just tore in to me on a regular basis.
You couldn’t pay me to go through seventh grade again. My stepfather was abusive. We had just moved to town, so no friends. I acquired one bully on the school bus, another in class.
I tried to think of one good thing about that year, and all I came up with was reading William Sleator’s House of Stairs. It was dark and reminded me of certain nightmares, but it positively sparkled in comparison to my real life.
I think the main problem with 7th grade is having to spend the day amongst a bunch of 7th graders.
“puberty”
“nuff said”
:eek:
I disliked them all, but in 11th grade I was forced to stay in an Algebra II class I was flunking. Strangely, an all-state football player in the same class was able to drop it (I don’t hold it against him; he wasn’t the brightest guy in the world but he was pretty likable and gave his life in the line of duty as a police officer). Otherwise, my first 16 years of school were easy academically but boring and mostly miserable after I got old enough to be interested in girls.
First grade. New country. Funny accent. No friends. Didn’t understand baseball, or hockey, or football.
Let me quote from some of my short fiction. This is an exchange between a 15-year-old girl and her older brother, who is a police officer:
"I know. You're the responsible one. I'm the tough one. I'm gonna be a cop
too, you know." Pam winked at Richard, mischievously.
"Oh no you're not!" Richard exclaimed with mock indignation in his voice.
“You’re going to go to college and learn to be a teacher so you can come back
home and teach math to junior high school students!”
"Not on your life!" Pam protested with a laugh. "I'm not *that* tough!"
7th grade. New school. Clique of girls. Bleah.
Ninth grade was when my life went straight to hell. I’m still working on recovering from the trauma of that god-awful fucked-up time.* I didn’t go to middle school—my elementary school went up to 8th grade and high school began with 9th. Tenth grade was second worst, 11th grade was third worst, and 12th grade was fourth worst as far as high school goes. In elementary school, I guess 3rd and 8th were the worst there.
*Don’t want to talk about it here either.
Anyhow, I survived.
5th through 8th - hard to choose. 3rd and 4th sucked socially too, but at least I was getting good grades. Even that fell through starting in 5th. And had to deal with multiple bullies in both schools I was in during that period. This was way before anybody considered bullying to be something the school needed to even think about.
The junior high part of that was in a private school where jackets and ties were required wear. It’s where I learned that thugs in coat and tie are still thugs - an important life lesson.
The school system is different in Belgium:
[ol]
[li]Kindergarten (ages 3-6)[/li][li]Primary school (ages 6-12)[/li][li]Secondary school (ages 12-18)[/li][/ol]
My worst year was the first of secondary school by far, which I guess corresponds to 7th grade.
Between the ages of 3 and 12 I attended a smallish school (about 200 kids) in a very quiet suburb within walking distance (i.e. literally one minute) from my grandmother’s place. That school didn’t offer secondary education however and I had to switch to another one at the end of what we call 6th “year”.
My new school was right in the town centre. Quite a bit of traffic. 1000+ students. My grandmother’s place was about 45 minutes away on foot, my home almost an hour.
That was a bit daunting but that was not the worst.
There were about 20 students from my former school who made the same move so you’d think that there was a fair chance that I’d end up with at least one kid I knew in my new class. Wrong! As it turned out, I was the only one who ended up alone in a class full of complete strangers. And among these kids, there were no less than five who had failed the year before and had to take the class again. Needless to say, they didn’t care much for discipline and were borderline bullies. Since I was born in November, I was already the youngest in the class which meant that all in all, I was almost two years younger than these guys. Every minute at school became an exercise in keeping a low profile and trying to avoid becoming one of their targets. I more or less succeeded in that I was not bullied on a regular basis but I did get the occasional beating (and one stray pair of scissors buzzing by my right ear once).
And finally, I had trouble adjusting to the demands of secondary school. I’d been a very good student in my former school but now, I was only slightly better than average. The teachers were strict, the topics were boring and difficult.
Not a great time.
7th.
Seventh grade already sucks for most Americans. Huge transition to a 7- or 8-period a day class, much larger school population, onset of puberty, etc. Add to that, in my case, being a tool for school gentrification.
I got bussed 30 miles both ways to a “Magnet Program” for gifted math & science students. The program was intended to pack a ghetto inner city school with more white and Asian kids, which it certainly did, but in a more or less apartheid-like situation. (No, I didn’t grow up in Utah. I grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC.) It made the school’s demographics and test scores look more palatable, but the regular kids and the Magnet kids didn’t actually mingle much at all except to fight. We stuck out like sore thumbs among the overwhelmingly black, poor studentry of the actual school boundaries, and the physically smaller and less socially-adept Magnet kids; e.g. me, were picked on relentlessly.
It was absolutely horrible. I washed out of the program in shame and disgrace by the end of eighth grade, and in hindsight I think I actually sabotaged myself so as not to have to go to the Magnet high school.
Hmm, it’s so hard to decide between 6th grade when my mother was hospitalized for alcoholism and my older brother was molesting me and my senior year, when my mother wasn’t hospitalized for alocoholism until the week after I graduated and had gotten the hell out. She showed up at honors night barely able to stand, sometime that week I came home from school and the whole side of her face was black & blue (I still don’t know the story behind that) and she was too drunk to go to my graduation. And there was the time she bitched to my dad at the dinner table that I’d been disgusted because I had to help her out of the bathtub, and that time she passed out in her plate when a friend was over for dinner, and… Ok. Senior year wins.
Another one for 7th grade. Not so much in terms of academics (my first two years of high school were much worse), but puberty was in full swing and I felt like a complete train wreck physically and emotionally. I compensated for my insecurities by being a complete jerk to everyone I came into contact with, alienating myself from them as a result. Near the very end of the year, I got over myself and made amends with a lot of my friends and family, but for the most part 7th grade was my school year from hell