bironic

Ha. I admire you for managing not to laugh and for coming up with a response that wouldn't further humiliate him. And for dangling it over his head later.

From:

topaz-eyes.livejournal.com

Middle school is over-rated in hindsight. Actually all the teenage years are. :-)

I was in Grade 7 and our class was playing volleyball. I had my glasses on. The ball hit me in the face and knocked the glasses off. They clattered onto the floor, landing on the frame. I thought OK, they're fine. Then the ball landed, bouncing right on my glasses, smashing them to bits on the hardwood floor.

(I have a habit of breaking my glasses in the oddest ways.)

From:

What marvelous comic timing! In retrospect, anyway; I'm sure you weren't happy about it when it happened.

Middle school... not the best years. High school was fun, though, for the most part.

From:

nightdog-barks.livejournal.com

LJ ate my first comment. *is sad, but not really*

When I was in middle school, they were still called junior highs. Court-ordered busing had just come into effect, and a lot of the white kids staged a walkout as a protest.

Chaos ensued, and by the time they let us all go home, the school (John B. Hood, named after a one-armed Confederate general) was surrounded by cops.

It was nuts.

From:

Yipes. Were they still holding classes while the walkout occurred? Did the protesters just mill around or did they have chants or signs or somesuch?

"Middle school" and "junior high" were interchangeable terms, though high school was just "high school" and not "senior high."

From:

nightdog-barks.livejournal.com

Were they still holding classes while the walkout occurred?

Yup -- the teachers actually locked the classroom doors to keep the students inside (the ones who hadn't left already).

Did the protesters just mill around or did they have chants or signs or somesuch?

No chants or signs that I recall -- there was a lot of running through the halls and shouting. Once the kids who had walked out got outside their parents were there to pick them up, proving the whole thing had probably been planned by the parents in the first place.

A petition had circulated throughout the neighborhood a few weeks previously, condemning the court-ordered busing and lamenting the fact that black kids would soon be sitting alongside white kids (TEH HORRUR!!).

My mom refused to sign, which caused her to be somewhat ostracized for quite a while.

From:

Hurray for your mom!

That must have been a very scary experience, though (especially being locked in by the teachers).

From:

Good for her. It can't have been easy to do that. Did the other parents' reactions affect you at all?

(You've made me think meta thoughts now about liberal parents raising tolerant fanficcing/slasher children.)

Some kids in our school tried to stage a walk-out over a minor policy change I can't remember, but they couldn't organize themselves properly and the plans fell apart. I remember thinking the whole thing was ridiculous because they could have gone to the student government if they had a legitimate complaint and it was clear they just wanted to skip class.

From:

nightdog-barks.livejournal.com

Did the other parents' reactions affect you at all?

Not that I recall, although at that age I was pretty oblivious to parent-related stuff.

(You've made me think meta thoughts now about liberal parents raising tolerant fanficcing/slasher children.)

*grins widely*

My parents were very liberal, considering the period and the neighborhood in which they lived. My mom was a farmer's daughter raised on a cotton farm in Nowheresville, Texas; my dad, a Yankee agnostic from Pennsylvania. The neighborhood I grew up in was redneck whitebread to say the very least. I didn't meet a black person until junior high, and didn't meet anyone who was Jewish until college.

I inherited my dad's fairly nondescript accent, but sometimes if I'm very tired ~~or drunk~~ I slip into the sliding, easy accent of my childhood. My husband thinks it's funny. I don't think he really understands how dangerous some of those people were that I knew. The bad guys in The Better Angel were partly modeled after some of our neighbors.

And here I'm rambling in your LJ. *shuts up*

From:

Telling stories about yourself and getting into conversations with people is kind of the point! Ramble away, please.

From:

purridot.livejournal.com

Hmm, we don't have middle school here, but your comment reminds how I went all the way through 12 grades of school with a guy to whom I always thought I was "cosmically linked" -- from the moment where we were forced to play the roles of Mary and Joseph in the Grade 1 Christmas Play (this was Catholic school) to being badminton champs in the school doubles competition, to both winning archery awards at summer camp, to being on the "Reach for the Top" (trivia contest) team together. And yet, we never dated and were never that close, but there was an undefinable connection there. I wonder what ever happened to him? It would be so interesting to meet up after all these years. Huh.

From:

This is too funny: You went to Catholic school? So did I! And we both seem to have ended up as atheists. Hmm...I wonder if there's a correlation?

From:

stephantom.livejournal.com

Haha, add me to the list of atheists who came out of Catholic schools.

From:

purridot.livejournal.com

LOL! Actually, I was never officially Catholic (I went to that school to learn French) so I was excluded from all their rituals; they still seem very mysterious to me!

From:

That's pretty neat. Did you get the sense that he felt a connection between you as well, even though you weren't very good friends?

Off-topic: Hooray for badminton! I was on our high school team as well. Played singles for three years. I miss it.

From:

purridot.livejournal.com

Badminton ROCKS! So much fun!!!

Was the connection reciprocal? I really don't know! I would like to meet up again and see if it is still there (from my POV, anyway!) Of course, I want to lose 10 pounds first, LOL! Weirdly, his name is Greg ;-)

From:

First off: Wow! I love the new look of your journal (especially the photo of the books). I really have to redesign mine, but I'm pretty clueless when it comes to HTML/XML for purposes other than typemarking manuscripts.

We didn't even have the concept of a "middle school" in the schools I attended. There was just "elementary school" (grades 1-8) and high school.

I'm afraid my memory is totally unrelated to school; instead, it was inspired by the time of year. It's kind of long, so I'll just provide a link:
New Year's Eve (http://elynittria.livejournal.com/17198.html#cutid1).

From:

Hi there! Thank you again for the LJ gifts that pushed me to finally lay this journal out as I've wanted to for a while. I still have to tweak the shades of blue in the middle areas, but it's pretty close to how I want it now. I definitely thought of you as I uploaded the photo of my books!

And by the way, you don't need to know HTML to customize your LJ. I work with websites for my "day job" and let me tell you, all it did was make my life more difficult! I was totally frustrated with their cryptic coding and ended up going with an S2 template. Et voila. Foolproof.

Will come on over to see your memory-story.

From:

I might as well ask - how are the grades divided in the US, and what constitutes 'middle school'? In Australia we have primary school (K-6) and high school (7-12). That's it :)

From:

Ah, someone was bound to ask. Public school districts vary in the States, but the most common breakdown to my knowledge is kindergarten/primary/elementary school, middle school/junior high, and high school/senior high. Our own district rearranged itself just before and soon after I was going through the system; I don't know how it's organized now, but when I attended it was:

- Kindergarten (age 5),
- Elementary school (grades 1-5, ages 6-10),
- Middle school (grades 6-8, ages 11-13), and
- High school (grades 9-12, ages 14-17).

Having a summer birthday does help with remembering which age went with which year. :)

I also went to a Jewish pre-school at our temple for two years before starting kindergarten.

From:

Man, that's... complicated *g*. Although I can see the sense in separating out those ages. Were they all separate places? So you went to four different schools + pre-school?

From:

Yes -- in "my time," each had its own building, including the kindergarten, which they opened the year I started and closed after my sister went through; it's since been tacked on to the elementary schools. We had one kindergarten, four different elementary schools that merged into two when I was halfway through, one middle school (though there'd been two in the past) and one high school.... Yeah, stupidly complicated. :) All the separate buildings and rearranging may have had to do with the size of the student population. My graduating class was 450 students, and the numbers went up each year. Smaller districts may have simpler structures.

And then you have

elynittria, who was saying up above that she just went to elementary school (1-8) and high school (9-12), which is close to what you've described.

From:

Eep, that's massive. There were 150 students in my final year. It had been 120 up to year 10, and then there was a new intake for years 11 and 12.

From:

That must have been nice and intimate. Or incestuous, depending.

Being in a high school with almost 2,000 students seemed pretty big at the time (though you ended up being in classes with groups of the same 40-50 people all the time). Then I went to college, where my graduating class was double that size, and now 450 seems like nothin'.

From:

I thought that was a pretty standard number, but a little net research shows it was probably a little on the low side, at least compared to current enrolments. I studied a very specialised course at university - my graduating class was about 50 XD

From:

A graduating class of 4,000+ is average? I thought our university was pretty big. But yes, the numbers in my majors were much smaller. More than 50, though. You were something to do with agriculture, right? Or am I misremembering?

From:

I actually meant I thought MY high school enrolment of 150 was fairly average for Sydney. I seem to have switched subjects somewhere in the middle *g*.

No, my school was agricultural, due to an odd quirk of the NSW school system. I still remember how to "throw" a sheep XD

From:

I still remember how to "throw" a sheep

Now there's an image that's going to remain in my head for a long time: you throwing a sheep! I don't suppose you had to learn how to shear it, too?

From:

Hee, thank goodness, no. We did have to learn how to 'drench' a sheep (squirting liquid down its throat with a drenching gun) and 'age' a sheep by counting the number and type of teeth it had. Once, while I was attempting to do this, a sheep sneezed on me. It was... every bit as gross as you might imagine. Sure, I can laugh about it NOW *g*

From:

silsbee329.livejournal.com

It's so pretty in here!

In middle school, my friends and I were silly enough to try to call a celebrity. On a pay phone. From Connecticut to California. Using directory assistance.

Poor operator... ;p

From:

Hee. Yes, I did some redecorating today for the new year.

Great little anecdote. Dare you admit which celebrity you tried to call?

From:

silsbee329.livejournal.com

Dare you admit which celebrity you tried to call?

I think I will pass on that... ;D

From:

nicocoer.livejournal.com

In 8th grade My mother gave me a Valentines shirt with the words "Free Hugs!" and hearts on it. I wore it to school, being the weird child that I was, and The THen class jock at the time Asked if he could have a hug. I said no, and he hugged me anyhow. Silly Jock.

From:

Cute. You were very brave to wear a shirt like that to school at that age!

From:

ryokophoenix.livejournal.com

High school. :P

My school, like most, was divided into blocks. D-Block was Maths, for example. B-Block was English, A-Block Arts, and L-Block was Languages. Most of the blocks taller than one floor had open-air walkways and staircases, with classroom doors opening to the outside.

L-block was the tallest building. Its topmost floor had mesh to prevent students from falling, but it was essentially still outside. You could look out over the top of the stairs at the most incredible view - all the way into the centre of the city. Looking over the edge of the walkway you could watch groups chatting and milling around the Arts centre, while the mesh prevented them from seeing you. It was always quiet, soft, muted, with a slight cool breeze. There must have been windy days, rainy days, but I don't recall them.

I remember everyone used to hate it up there - they'd groan about having classes in L1 because of all the stairs. But I loved it - I'd bound up the stairs and arrive breathless. It also became my sanctuary when I was upset or angry, calming me down in isolation.

And you're the first person to know. :)

From: