Middle School Memories I'd Love to Forget

 

I walked into my seventh grade class wearing glasses and a dress I do not remember. It felt like everyone was staring at me and I think most kids probably were because I was new and had come from another school. I may as well have come from the moon, for all the difference between them.

My elementary school between first and sixth grades was a yeshivah, a Jewish private school in Paterson, New Jersey. Half the day was devoted to Hebrew subjects; the other half to English, and by age nine I was fluent in Hebrew. The emphasis was much more religious, though of course we weren't angels; but we did learn to think seriously about the Big Stuff, whether it was about God, the whole Right/Wrong thing, laws and Torah Law and the Holocaust.

Seventh grade in Englewood Cliffs revolved around the clothes you wore, where you bought them, what boy liked you that week, what sports you could play well and that mystical state of popularity some kids achieve effortlessly and others not at all.

In other words, a kind of Hell for someone who came from a Yeshivah. Most of the girls in my class took special delight in tormenting the unpopular kids or nerds. I remember someone yelling at me because I didn't want to volunteer my mother to pick up pizza for a class party early in the morning.

What I couldn't explain was that my mother was depressed and getting her up early was a perilous gesture, doomed to fail. Instead, I hung my head and listened to her rant--and that lasted at least half an hour in the middle of class while the teacher was off somewhere.

One thing I did when I grew up was to invent a twelve year old (growing up in an earlier era in the 1950s) in the midst of the Beat Generation. Ruby TaBeata is an outsider in every way its possible to be. She hates going to school with all the conventional conformers around her--and I did too.

I thought of this today while reading about the show Pen15, which I haven't seen yet. I did love Glee for those same themes, though the outcasts could sing better than most pop stars. What's most interesting when I look back on seventh grade--the worst year of my school experience--is what a friend said about them.

"What happens to the kids who are super popular in junior high and high school?" she asked. "A lot of them stay there in their minds, trying to relive old times when somebody thought they were something."

I don't remember any popular kids who wound up doing anything amazing, which doesn't mean they didn't but-- you know? Maybe it (mostly) does.

Some reading about navigating middle school is here:

How to Bully-Proof Your Middle-School Daughter

How to Help Your Child Avoid Drama in Middle School

Why is Middle School So Hard for So Many People?

Middle-schoolers photo  USAG Humphreys