were u cool in middle school?

Primary school = 4/5 - 8
Middle school = 8 - 12
High school = 12 - 16
(you go at 11 now, but we stayed at middle school til we were 12 back in the day) College = 16 - 18
University = 18 - for as long as possible.

i became much cooler in 8th grade then 6/7th but maybe that has to do with the fact that i moved to a new school, and playing the new-kid card always has its benefits..no one whos what a geek u were where u came from!

guys, I used to wear a shirt like this

http://i51.tinypic.com/15f5cw5.jpg

that said "hocus pocus I'm out of focus"

there, I said it

i was so fuckin uncool then

I was so uncool in junior high I thought I would never have any friends ever ever and it sucked so bad.

^^^yeah, that

like I'm pretty sure junior high was where & when I became convinced that the proper end to my life was gonna be suicide

but in defense of junior high, that was when I learned that music & books can save your motherfucking ass when the going gets rough

I don't really know anyone who says they enjoy those years of life. It is a crazy fucking idea, to get hundreds of people of that age/misery level and box them up all day every day, together!

I didn't hit puberty until the summer before high school so in middle school was living hell. it sucks when everyone's making out and acting like the Smashing Pumpkins 1979 video and you're still shopping in the little boys section at JC Penney

honestly, just thinking about this time in my life gives me the howling fantods

also, oozing pimples

and people calling you out because you don't know certain dirty words yet

oh god

trick question: no one was cool in middle school

Not cool. Very far from. Yearning, dying, famishing to be cool though.

I have heard it said (with some apparent justification) that being the most popular kid in middle school is a handicap that is very difficult to overcome, since many of the traits that will earn you that popularity will need to be painfully unlearned if you are going to become a decent useful human being, and that early success you had with them makes it all the harder ever to let go of them.

I didn't hit puberty until the summer before high school so in middle school was living hell. it sucks when everyone's making out and acting like the Smashing Pumpkins 1979 video and you're still shopping in the little boys section at JC Penney

― Z S, Thursday, September 16, 2010 10:09 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark

thats hardly late bloomer there dude!!

I remember in yearbook class, someone pranked the head editor (another student) by photoshopping a pic of us looking like I was leaning in to kiss him. This was considered the meanest thing anyone had ever done to him, and he got a lot of ragging.

xpost
well yeah, but I still didn't break "the 5 foot barrier", as I used to refer to it, until well into my freshmen year. I was the shortest shawty in school!

I was ridiculed in middle school to the point where I would consider it in hindsight to have been pretty serious abuse. I was smart, chubby, had bad glasses and wore braces. Also, the teasing bothered me which only made me an even bigger target. I'm talking boys mooing at me in the hall and pantsing me in the lobby and girls following me home taunting me. I came home crying most days. My parents had multiple meetings with school authorities and it was just horrible. I basically went to a different HS because of it. Things got a lot better then. The only good things to come of it were that I think it made me a pretty strong person and it's provided me with several awesome moments of encountering these middle school dickheads who are still living on Long Island with their parents and watching their jaws drop when they realize who I am. I can't lie - that part rules.

I was reclusive, prickly, had some problems picking up social cues, stuttered, and had some nasty personal habits that I've since gotten rid of. I was removed from school for a few months because I slapped a girl who was bullying me, and banned from some school events in my last year there because the school thought I was acting strangely (I was, but I was in no way dangerous to myself or other people.)

man this thread is a snakepit of misery just starting to get its hiss on

middle school was where I learned to fear being alive

Also, the teasing bothered me which only made me an even bigger target.

It would have been worse if you had ignored it, trust me. The only thing that got any of my bullies away from me was to call the cops and have them arrested.

No I mean some kids can just laugh off that kind of stuff but I was a ~sensitive~ kid and it really upset me and they knew that which I think made them more likely to tease me if that makes sense.

I was ridiculed in middle school to the point where I would consider it in hindsight to have been pretty serious abuse.

this, basically. 7th grade was a bad year. so weird how everyone acted like none of it had ever happened the next year.

just waiting for the first wiseacre to come in here flaunting their MS coolness...

come on, we're WAITING

+1 on fantods

it wasn't about middle school, but i recently got sucked into watching some mtv reality show set at a smalltown texas high school where they had, like a special day that turned into a breakfast club-y share-fest where they also talked about racism and sexism and all the kids ended up crying and all i could think watching it was thank god i never have to be this age again.

There was this one kid John I. who was the worst. He zeroed in on me and made it his job to make me miserable for 7th and 8th grade. One of the things that stands out is him coming right up to me and looking me in the face and saying "You're the ugliest girl I've ever seen." He was a mean bastard. I would love to see what that fuckface is doing now. I swear to god he played a big part in the disordered eating and really fucked up relationship with my appearance that followed and still exist to a much lesser extent today.

I didn't consider myself cool.
People who had it really bad may have called me cool.
Jocks still gave me wedgies after lunch.

HS I saw that show but a diff episode and felt so bad for the kids I wound up crying

Erica, what I remember most from that year is all the intimidation tactics the boys used. girls teased me too, but there wasn't the tinge of...i guess of a sexualized power dynamic? i always think of this when people talk about the mean girls phenomenon; i'm not saying that doesn't exist, but i wonder how widespread the experience is of girls being targeted and aggressively harassed by boys at that age.

middle school was where I learned to fear being alive

^^^^^ this

And, yes, Christine 100% OTM. Ignoring my tormentors in middle school only led to frequent after-school beatdowns. Two stories that haunt me to this day:

1. I was picked to be a crossing guard in fifth grade. Yes I was a hueg dork. I was so excited because at the end of the year all of the crossing guards got to go to a Chicago Cubs game as a reward, I was so excited for that. Three weeks before this trip, a kid named Cory that used to constantly beat me up walked up to me while I was on duty, and swung a metal lunch box at my stomach so hard that it knocked the wind out of me and I fell to the ground. The teacher in charge of the crossing guards saw me laying down on the ground during my "shift" and "fired" me right away. I didn't get to go on the field trip because I got beat up by a bully.

2. The following year Cory made solid buds with two other guys that gleefully joined in tormenting me. I lived 3 blocks from school, so I always walked home. 80% of these walks would find this evil trio accompanying me and making fun of me. Mostly just calling me names and trying to provoke a reaction, other times pelting me with rocks or whatever else was at hand. One day, having quickly learned that trying to call them names back never worked, I decided to do my best to completely ignore them. They followed me home again one day and started up with the usual name-calling. But when I didn't respond, they only got angrier and the names got worse and worse. Finally Cory shouted "you're going to die faggot-nerd" (yes, "faggot-nerd" was one of their particular favorites) and they all took off running. Frightened as hell, I sprinted for my house. Just before I got home they popped out from the side of my neighbor's house and proceeded to beat the crap out of me. I ended up with broken glasses, bruises all over, and blood pouring from at least four different places.

Wow, just typing that bummed me out.

i am not going to lie i shed a tear or two watching that show

xxp

I think one of the most astonishing moments in my life was when I was working cashier at a music store in Boise and some shit from junior high, the dude who had made my life the hardest, came through my line. This was in a city 400+ miles away from my junior high but Idaho didn't have a lot of cities so it made sense most people ended up in Boise. I had not anticipated seeing him and I was totally having an internal flip-out. But he was super nice to me and said, "Sorry I was such an asshole to you." The cognitive dissonance, and the surprise at the difference from the encounter I had been worrying about, was just killer. But it was an awesome moment.

wow! genuinely amazed that he acknowleged it

Teenagers are fucked

Erica, what I remember most from that year is all the intimidation tactics the boys used. girls teased me too, but there wasn't the tinge of...i guess of a sexualized power dynamic? i always think of this when people talk about the mean girls phenomenon; i'm not saying that doesn't exist, but i wonder how widespread the experience is of girls being targeted and aggressively harassed by boys at that age.

― horseshoe, Thursday, September 16, 2010 11:49 PM (35 seconds ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

This is really interesting to me because I've actually never thought about it that way before. It makes so much sense though because while yes there were girls involved, I feel like the most aggressive harassment came from boys.

I had that happen with both of my major bullies. One of them after I was 18, and he said "hey" in a friendly way in a public place on the fourth of July and I said "hey, how are you?" and he says "I'm great, great to see you, how are you?" and I paused and said "I'm fine; the last time I saw you you were getting ready to kick my ass and I was trying to figure out how to run away from you" and he smiled seriously the most gentle smile and said "oh -- yeah -- I'm not angry any more." like, it was audible that he didn't mean "angry at you"; he meant "I was an angry person then." it gave me a tremendous amount of relief, I have to say.

But he was super nice to me and said, "Sorry I was such an asshole to you.

man, how often does this ever happen?

(xp in re: bully atonement)

When I fist signed up for Myspace (lol) I was friended by a handful of ppl from my hometown and one particularly Mean Girl sent me the nicest and most since apology ever. She then went on to say that she wished we could hang out now because we seemed so similar and that she was sorry for torturing me. Reading it made me bawl because it was like astonishing to me that someone had acknowledged and owned it. It wasn't in my head and it was real enough so that others remembered too. That was a pretty amazing moment.

Sorry my getting bullied stories got in the way of all the touching atonement stories. I have no such follow-up.

x-post to self errr most "sincere"

i just feel like, ostensibly they were mocking me in part for being unattractive to them and they knew there was a power in making a girl feel unattractive because it's v v important for girls to be attractive, but the other side is that there was almost a sexual menace to it? because it was like, your unattractiveness so flies in the face of what i'm entitled to demand as a boy that it almost makes me feel violent? "violent" is probably not the right word...i haven't worked out exactly how to convey the experience and most days, thankfully, i don't think about it, but now that i'm training to teach high school i've been trying to figure out exactly what was going on.

many xposts back to Erica

those stories are horrible, jon; i'm sorry those things happened to you

yes they're awful and I'm sorry you had to go through that

HS - I need to think about it for a bit because it's so complex but I think maybe you're onto something.

yeah co-sign I hardly even know what to say to the field trip one, it makes me really sad.

Didn't intend to be asking for sympathy, just noted how bad my timing was when the thread took a turn to those cool atonement stories. I never had the chance because we moved a lot when I was growing up, which was a big part of why I was always being tormented. Being a "smart kid" with awkward social skills was bad enough, but nearly always being the "new kid" on top of it made growing up difficult.

The interesting thing about bullies is that they tend to do well later in life--the personality traits that make them that way are the very ones that are valued in business.

well also sometimes they end up in prison

The thing that gets me the angriest is how the effect of this sort of thing can linger long into adulthood. I wound up going to and all-girls catholic school and was a late bloomer so didn't really get any attention from boys until I got to college. When I did get there I was so overwhelmed by the attention and so starved for it that it definitely had an effect on some of my decision making.

Even today (and this is something pretty fucked up that I rarely admit) I feel more proud/flattered if someone finds me attractive than I do if they find me smart and/or interesting. I think that's because I know I'm smart and p sure I'm at least somewhat interesting but have such lingering issues/doubts about whether or not other ppl perceive me to be attractive and put a skewed amount of importance on it so that I still need that outside approval.

I think I made it clear earlier that most of the bullying I experienced focused on my appearance and weight hence the above.

yeah i feel like the girls who are identified as pretty in middle school/high school deal with some serious shit related to it, too. no one escapes.

not least because iirc they are often identifed as pretty by adult men which, gross

While living in London, I've often described 'junior high' as 'the building where they make all the kids of one town who are going through puberty stay - and they lock the doors from 8-3'.

Junior high made me so miserable I got mono in my final semester of 8th grade; My grades plummeted from straight As. I was flat as a plank and felt like everything I did was being monitored by the sort of girls who lurked outside classes and followed you home, or called the house to make threats. I continually felt that people made overtures of friendship to me just to yank it back for their own amusement and when I tried to get help, I was told to just ignore it. I'm not an ignorer by nature, so one day I wound up in a ridiculous fight situation with a girl who was equally unpopular and had been egged on by a bit of attention from the cliquey girls (I think they asked to copy her homework or something). The ringleaders wound up in the principal's office sweetly denying all knowledge of the calls and the threats and the crazy-glued combination locks on my locker, and the principal tried to palm me off with 'it's one person's word against another' but was the type of guy more likely to serve detention for *being interrupted*. Which I would not accept because it did not solve the problem that brought us here, and said so. That's the point at which I became very cold-blooded towards adults in lame positions of authority and told him in front of the girls that I would take things further because me and my family were sick and tired of getting lip service from middle management. That bought me a psych evaluation, but when the tests came back I got shoved into the gifted and talented group and my tormentors got told that the next person who so much as said boo to me would be suspended. Three days before the last day of junior high, the meanest girl came up to me in the locker rooms and slapped me, but almost the second she did it, she realized that I had the power to have her suspended over finals - meaning she would have to repeat the whole year. The look in her eyes and her retreat at Roadrunner speed was worth more to me than actually reporting her, and she did not bother me in high school. I should also note 50 per cent of the bullies did not come to high school because they were too busy LACTATING by then.

The boys did have their menacing qualities, but it was mostly confined to barrette-yanking and pool-ducking. The apologies I get from people years later kind of involve 'all those things you were interested in were very cool, as were your clothes, and I still remember what you said to that asshole.'

well also sometimes they end up in prison

Mine probably did, because I was in special ed most of the time I was in school (learning problems) so my tormenters were drawn from the ranks of the emotionally disturbed and mentally deficient.

7th gr:
only child attending the all girls school with the girls i had grown up with, voted class clown, around friends 24-7, watching Dirty Dancing, listening to Violent Femmes and DM, learning about Latin America, best friend publicly dumps me and i have to read her dump-note to the entire class because i was crying and caught passing notes, thinking about suicide because i got a detention, suspected of taking drugs by the nuns who worked at my school, had my locker searched, mass exodus from this school

8th gr:
transfer to public school where my mom worked, knew 3 people because my mom had made me take a jazz dancing class but they were all cheerleaders, knew 0 boys up to this point but suddenly in a room with a bunch of boys, felt their predatory stink for about 6 weeks and then promptly turned into a weirdo (i was always a weirdo but at this point after trying to join the ski club i gave up) and started wearing nothing but black turtlenecks and listening to XTC and REM and hanging out at the public library pretty much nonstop.

this is middle school

that story about the chicago cubs trip made me cry, that kind of injustice infuriates me.

yeah that's just horrible wrong and i feel like you still deserve an apology, jon

knew 0 boys up to this point but suddenly in a room with a bunch of boys, felt their predatory stink for about 6 weeks and then promptly turned into a weirdo (i was always a weirdo but at this point after trying to join the ski club i gave up)

i just want to say that i love you, Amanda

aw, i mean, i could go on and on, but "predatory stink" pretty much sums it up
my time with the ski club will go down as the ONLY TIME IN HISTORY that i ever tried to be popular
it was so embarrassing

i have a lot of stories from this era, including a very important and historic bipartisan congressional retreat at the greenbrier. no comment on that unless you actually know me irl though. too weird.

ps i love u too

aw, i mean, i could go on and on, but "predatory stink" pretty much sums it up

I had no male attention in junior high--none. (I was pretty and slender, so no problem there.) I did end up getting something almost like a boyfriend (a friend of my nephews' whom I made out with whenever I visited my nephew) for a few months in my senior year.

Oh, and I love you all. Really.

^^yes, much <3 to everybody itt

" "

the ONLY thing anyone was paying attention to was that i was the NEW GIRL
no one bothered to pay any attention to who they were stinking over and when they did, well, it was pretty obvious how that worked out

funny how indignant i still am about this

i thought everything would change at band camp between 8th and 9th gr, but...no such luck
pariah 4 lyfe

^^middle school to high school transition in a nutshell

man, since we're telling stories...

Do go on.

6th grade: extremely skinny, bad acne, dandruff, braces, thick glasses, straight A student, picked on by everybody, even other nerds. Extremely optimistic about stuff and still pretty happy go lucky despite it. Don't even listen to music at all, but good at baseball.

7th grade: still skinny, still bad acne, dandruff, braces, thick glasses, mostly A student with a few Bs and my first C, still picked on but not as much as in 6th grade. Not as happy go lucky anymore. Start listening to music regularly, develop an affinity for Snoop Doggy Dogg. ok at basketball, suck at baseball in the fall, but have a good spring season.

8th grade: Still skinny, acne clears up, dandruff still rampant, braces gone, wearing contact lenses. TORMENTED by everybody, become very jaded and start becoming cynical and extremely negative. Start playing guitar for the first time.

I don't miss those days.

high school was MUCH better.

my condensed story is that school was bad but home was worse.

sixth and seventh grade gym class is probably the worst memory of my life. Guys and girls both had plenty of remarks about my weight, dorkiness and perceived homosexuality. once someone threw underwear at me and about half the class proceeded to join in a chant of "fag, fag, fag." my gym teacher hated me & turned a blind eye to it.

I made a lot of dumb jokes to try to get ppl to like me. once a girl laughed at one of them and her friends promptly chastised her. "oh yeah, like curt1s st3ph3ns is SO funny."

middle school kids are the worst.

^^^

i was easily the second heaviest kid in my junior high. One time I was watching some contractor guy put in a new sidewalk outside the cafeteria. Dude apparently thought i was going to step in it or write my initials or something, though I was just standing there. He looks up and says, "Don't even think about it, fat boy." I was pretty sharp with jokes, so I could usually retaliate when kid was snapping on me. But to get decimated by a fucking GROWN ADULT was pretty much the most helpless I've ever felt.

middle school kids are the worst.

OTM. middle school started my inferiority complex when I previously didn't have one.

xp - that is deeply horrible, my god

middle school is the only time when people paying attention to you and ignoring you hurts in just about equal amounts

I found it amazing in sixth grade that people who'd been my friends just a year or less earlier turned on me. it's like in elementary school, nobody cares about the 'statuses' of the people they hang out with, then in sixth grade it suddenly matters.

I kind of lucked out big time in 7th grade. My stepdad sold the family business and we rented out our house back in Kentucky and we just moved to Europe for a year long vacation and I went to school via the Calvert School Correspondence Course. So a whole year of living in a really small town in Burgundy and then living in a really small town in Andalucia, just riding bikes around these villages and doing our own thing. Lame part: being homse-schooled means your parents are your teachers and there is no escape, and if you do this while in countries where you don't know anybody then you kind of just don't have friends and have to learn to make your own fun. But: really amazing, weird year, and I didn't have to deal with normal 7th grade brutality.

was a weirdo loser outcast in middle school. not st8 pariah, but somewhere between that and nonentity. wore bad corduroy pants and a tweed jacket, rarely bathed and wasn't noticed often enough to feel actively picked on. mostly i just felt like an alien and probably was one. i read crappy sci-fi novels constantly, zoned in class, did maybe 1 homework assignment a year, scraped by on test scores, never got better than a B in anything. thought about suicide more or less constantly. my life was horrible in many ways, but i was the primary author of the horribleness and knew it. and it's not like i had no friends. i had a few close friends and a bunch of casual hang-out acquaintances, enough to keep me loosely connected to sanity.

it's funny how the person you were becomes you the person you are. i still feel somewhere between pariah and nonentity a lot of the time, though i'm generally much more comfortable in my own skin. maybe it's less a product of my youthful alienation than of my basic psychology, i dunno.

oddly I never got beat up. mostly cuz I avoided conflict, though I did almost start a fight with my nemesis one day after he pushed me over the edge. I'm glad i didn't, dude's friend was right there and he then threatened me, it was 2 on 1 and all of my friends were long gone.

it's funny how the person you were becomes you the person you are.

OTFM. what I try to teach to kids that age is that some of the shit they do to each other sticks with people for ages.

my bad experience at that age is what changed me from being an eccentric guy who liked talking to people to someone who liked to curl up by himself and didn't want to be bothered by anybody.

really took me until my mid-20s to shed a lot of that shit, and some of it stuck with me.

the fact that i barely remember anything from 7th grade speaks for itself, i think

i was easily the second heaviest kid in my junior high. One time I was watching some contractor guy put in a new sidewalk outside the cafeteria. Dude apparently thought i was going to step in it or write my initials or something, though I was just standing there. He looks up and says, "Don't even think about it, fat boy." I was pretty sharp with jokes, so I could usually retaliate when kid was snapping on me. But to get decimated by a fucking GROWN ADULT was pretty much the most helpless I've ever felt.

― t(o_o)t it and b(o_o)t it (Whiney G. Weingarten), Friday, September 17, 2010 1:13 AM (12 minutes ago) Bookmark

fuck this dude i srsly wish i could punch him in the face adults who treat kids like this are the scum of the earth

yeah i barely remember anything about Junior High except it sucked. I hated just about everyone. The depression started around then, and I didn't know exactly what it was. I remember getting detention a lot. In 7th grade, my best friend from grade school and I had a falling out because I thought the Anne McCaffrey novels she liked were lame. I did make friends with this girl Christina Fernandez, who respected my determination to chew gum in class even though it was against the rules, and I consistently got detention for it. Her brother was in a gang, so no one fucked with her or anyone she said was ok. I made friends by forging their parents' signatures on detention slips and letting the dumb metalheads in pre-algebra copy my homework.

i went to "junior high" rather than middle school. it was the closest thing to hell i've ever experienced. to answer the thread question, if i was cool back then, no one told me.

i got made fun of in 8th grade because I listened to Aerosmith (at the time my fav band) and didn't like Green Day.

i think my only moment of "popularity" was when we had supreme court debates in civics class, and my team chose to debate in favor of warning labels on recorded music (this was during the Tipper Gore PMRC era) - and we pretty much used the opportunity to write "bad words" on the chalkboard.

ok, i DO remember in 7th grade english we had an assignment: give a class presentation on a topic that you think you know more about than anyone else in the classroom. (this was 1997; two girls did a presentation on 'titanic'.) it was around this time i started watching MTV AMP and listening to 'solid state' with DJ liquid todd on 92.3 K-ROCK (RIP) so i was getting really into lol 'electronica', and someone else was doing a presentation on how to play guitar, so i figured i'd talk about this thing i was really excited about that i knew stuff about. i talked about the differences between house, techno, trip hop, drum & bass and electro and played some samples from the 'urbal beats' comp to illustrate. everyone was either indifferent or made fun of me for it for the remainder of middle school. like whenever i had to get up to talk in any other class, this one kid would always be like "oh great, are you gonna play more TECHNO?"

it's funny in retrospect but there was definitely more brutal teasing every now and again that made me feel totally miserable. plus i think the lesson i took from the above story was 'hide your eccentricities, no one wants to hear about them anyway', which, bleh.

middle school really was one of the first times where i couldn't tell what ground i stood on with certain people - some kids would be totally friendly with me one week, or in certain classes, and then ignore/tease me the next. made me appreciate those who were consistently assholes to me.

i think my favorite book in junior high was Lord of the Flies

my fav book in middle school was 1984 iirc

or harry potter lol

plus i think the lesson i took from the above story was 'hide your eccentricities, no one wants to hear about them anyway', which, bleh.

the only non-hipster-weirdos i'm friends with on facebook are alums from my master's program, and they're very normal and square -- the arty shit i post about regularly must seem so strange to them. they're all still bffs with each other but they never hang out with me anymore. funny how you can be "cool" in certain circles and "uncool" in others.

Oh, and I love you all. Really.

― Christine Green Leafy Dragon Indigo, Friday, September 17, 2010 12:50 AM (49 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

^^yes, much <3 to everybody itt

― subtle like the g in 'goole' (dayo), Friday, September 17, 2010 12:50 AM (49 minutes ago)

<3 ilxors imo

much mouse head <3 to all survivors

thread is not doing much for my sense of well being, tbh. i think i get through the day, most of the time, by keeping the scroll of humiliations tucked away in dark and rarely visited corner of my mind.

well - at least as long as you're not regularly updating it ...

nah, i haven't felt crushed that way in a long, long time. in other ways, sure, but...

well, it should add to your sense of well-being that it's been such a long time and that it probably won't ever happen again

oh yeah, my concerns have shifted. not so much abject humiliation at the hands of my so-called peers as decrepitude and poverty.

:D

decrepitude and poverty are kinda cool tho

the have the stink of romance about them, sure

(they)

for whatever reason, i always got along okay. but my brother, 3 yrs older and at the same schools, was constantly picked on. the worst was that there was no discernible reason for it and the longer it went on the more antagonistic he would get in turn, so it got worse and worse until finally he went to high school and pretty much got to start over.

but man, not only to watch your older brother get picked on, but to know he knows you're seeing it, was like the most heartbreaking thing. it did help me see early on even the most passive, insidious forms of bullying for what they were, and the effects they can have even on a whole family, and to want to never knowingly cause anyone to come home after school everyday basically in tears asking their parents "why?????" (and them not having an answer because there is none. gaahhh). even now i know it affects how he sees himself.

maybe sub "overly defensive" for antagonistic

man i was just thinking that part of what made my period of humiliation bearable is that my sisters weren't old enough to be at the same school as me when it was happening...i remember really dreading the beginning of 8th grade, because my middle sister was going to start 5th grade at the same school that year, and i just didn't know how i was going to deal with her witnessing all this shit. and then i didn't have to worry because it had evaporated somehow over the summer. i really feel for your brother back then, rent.

and to want to never knowingly cause anyone to come home after school everyday basically in tears asking their parents "why?????"

yeah that was how i made sense of 7th grade after the fact, i was like, i guess that had to happen so that i would know to defend kids that are getting treated that way in the future.

heh - junior high made me an atheist

thanks horseshoe, me too, still, to the point it's hard actually to dwell on even though it was long ago and he's totally fine and happy now. but i remember it pretty vividly. little jerk bullies in their vaurnet shirts.

junior and high school were unbearable for me. i was a mess -- chubby, pimple-y, huge glasses, a mop of hair, embarrasing clothing -- awkward, and painfully shy. i got attacked all the time; two older guys sat in the back of a social studies class and threw wads of paper and spitballs at my back every day; i was shoved, then locked inside, the trash-shoot room at my mom's condominium; at a university of kansas summer debate institute, my roommate wrote (in permanent ink) some horrible name for me across all my stuff when i was out of the room, and later in the term, when we all had to gather in the hall, he organized all the other kids to chant that name at me when i arrived (to the tune of some terrible old alabama song); the closest i got to a date was when two girls drove by me and my best friend, rolled down their window and yelled "hey fat boys!," then sped off laughing.

some posts upthread -- jon's, enbb's, others -- struck a nerve with me. especially this:

The thing that gets me the angriest is how the effect of this sort of thing can linger long into adulthood.

it's true. i'm 42 now; i've turned out okay. but i'll never get over these years.

i got teased but never beaten up. i was strong (still am) and could take anybody, *especially* those puny prepubescent boys.

once I'd given up on trying to make normal friends (this probably had something to do with my home situation, a separate story) I developed a kind of weird parallel life in the 8th grade, of which I have sweet memories. by 8th grade all I wanted to do was read and listen to music (and dream of meeting a girl who liked to read & listen to music, too, and who didn't look at me like I was a malformed product) and be left alone by bullies, who were starting to get bigger (one, who pressured me into "loaning" him five bucks which I did because his story about his hypoglycemic mom was sad to me [sidenote: lol], pulled a knife on me in the boys' restroom when I asked for my money back; a big fucking buck knife; five bucks had been a lot of money, all I'd had but I have a soft heart, and to learn it was gone was a hard knifepoint lesson) -- once, anyhow, I'd figured that this maze was maybe not worth the pain of navigation, I started hanging out on a bench at the end of the football field; eating lunch there and reading. I think one of my bullies was making the lunchyard hellish, the guy who used to follow me home. so, anyway, a girl from Japan named Teresa also ate lunch there. we would read and eat next to each other in silence for an hour a day. we would say hi at the beginning of lunch period, eat, and read. nobody would come to bother us and it was a zero pressure situation. I don't remember how that period of time stopped or how long it lasted - it may have actually been how I finished out the year - but it was a safe place of silent acceptance that never changed in any way. at the end of the year she signed my yearbook & I signed hers & then next year was high school which as we all know is its own deal.

No--not even on the second go-around as a teacher.

lol<3

Tell me about your experiences teaching middle school clemenza!

This thread is horrifying reading - I had no idea how lucky I had been to go to the kind of school I did at this age.

I'm actually getting ready for work--why I am I checking this site at 6:15 in the morning...?--but I'll try to think of a couple of innocuous ones and post them later. I link to all my ILX comments on my site, so I have to be careful. Anyway, third time's a charm: I hope to be reincarnated as, I don't know, a really cool hang-out spot and finally get it right.

i was uncool. I didn't get beaten up, as I went to a school for nice middle-class young ladies, and therefore was only, you know, ostracised. i suspected the motives of everyone who spoke to me or about me, because it always seemed to have the ultimate end in mind of reminding me that I was a worthless and repulsive person who no-one would ever like. to be honest there's no way of knowing how much of it was in my head.

Are you on 77? There's a google-free teachers thread there - I teach middle school now so it'd be great to have you!

I was fat, I had glasses, I was ugly, I had an ENGLISH ACCENT, I was a bookworm, I had ridiculously high test scores, I had skipped a couple of grades so I was younger than everyone else in the class, my parents believed the myth that America was a classless society so they'd sent me to an Upper Class school in second hand clothes...

Jesus Christ, there are memories there, but they are actually too painful to touch nearly 30 years later.

It was, however, the time that I discovered that although my gender made me a target, sexuality could be used as a weapon right back at those who were tormenting you. I did make the crucial discovery that if preteen boys could ordain you as the "Cootie Girl" there was nothing that would topple their reign more quickly than forcing on them the idea that the Cootie Girl liiiiiiiiiiiiiiked them and use a fake crush as a weapon until the whole school bus was laughing at them as much as they were taunting me.

Obviously this has fucked up my sexuality on a probably permanent level and it is kind of astonishing that a middle aged woman can still be reduced to tears by something that happened when she was 11, but this is why I try to leave these memories alone and just try to leave it a hole in my memory that has been examined and explained and left the fuck alone.

That's the thing that this thread has reinforced - how actually long-lasting this stuff is, how it fades but it never really goes away.

And if you think "oh no, we're adults now, this couldn't happen now, couldn't happen here, I'm a better person than that" just look at the way that people behave on the "Ban XXX" threads and the pile-ons that used to happen on the Noize Board and know that this kind of insidious bullying behaviour doesn't go away, even when people ostensibly become adults.

Kinda wish I hadn't read this thread, because it's put me in quite an uncomfortable place, emotionally, now.

jesus this thread.

wasn't cool in any of the schools i attended, but it helped that during probably the toughest years i was in a small island school where any bullies would just have been battered by three of the victim's cousins before things got out of hand.

I wasn't "cool" per se in middle school but it was bad in ways different than what's been written here so far. I lived in a suburban town near a couple of biggish cities & my middle school was heavily bused from those cities, so that the school was about 50% suburban kids & 50% inner city kids. There was a lot of violence, mostly amongst the inner city kids---I saw one guy throw another off a second floor walkway once, saw a girl smash a huge heavy wooden chair into another girl's head once (both of those episodes involved ambulances). One day there was a riot, involving the city's riot police eventually. When suburban kids got harassed, though, it was from both the inner city kids & other suburban kids. I remember one guy getting stuffed into trash cans everyday in gym, & the whole locker room (well, not me) chanting "Harold, take a bath" (sometimes they force him to take a shower). I feel kinda horrible that I didn't do anything about, but at the time I was just happy it wasn't me. I remember one time an inner city kid, who at that point was like 7 feet tall, stole my friend's book about Army tanks: I worked up the nerve to confront the guy & he gave it back. But I think life at that school molded my views re. race & class in complicated ways: like, a lot of stuff regarding those things is very complicated for me to think about, b/c of how "real" things were for a few years.

I don't remember getting picked on in any significant way, which is weird: I think of myself as an outsider & as someone who's suffered a fair bit of verbal abuse for how I look, but I can't reconstruct of any of that from that middle school---I moved to another middle school in another state in 8th grade so maybe things were building up to something bad then. I was in advanced classes so except for gym & lunch I was removed from the usual rough-and-tumble, & I guess we weren't the kids to end up cool. I remember in 7th grade that a bunch of girls started dressing like Madonna circa the "Like a Prayer" video (it was about that time) & I was really into that! If we hadn't moved I think 8th grade there would have been pretty cool. I remember leaving 7th grade the last day & giving the bird to the school, so I must have been unhappy about something there.

jesus this thread.

ILXors are fucked up weirdos, news at 11.

I was never cool in any level of school. But I always had friends.

xp it was really in reference to the other kids involved

It was, however, the time that I discovered that although my gender made me a target, sexuality could be used as a weapon right back at those who were tormenting you. I did make the crucial discovery that if preteen boys could ordain you as the "Cootie Girl" there was nothing that would topple their reign more quickly than forcing on them the idea that the Cootie Girl liiiiiiiiiiiiiiked them and use a fake crush as a weapon until the whole school bus was laughing at them as much as they were taunting me.

This is another thing--the bullied person who becomes a bully themselves. It's a common pattern and I don't think any less of you for following it.

Wow, erm, that's a really judgemental thing to say.

I was never cool in any level of school. But I always had friends.

I had friends, too, but they were usually younger or older than me and/or didn't go to the same school. (And I had no friends during the period we're talking about.)

It's a common pattern and I don't think any less of you for following it.

And no, I didn't go into details because I don't want to dredge up those memories - but for you to call me a "bully" because I turned around someone else's bullying tactic to make a fool of a person who was basically terrorising me - that makes me think that you really don't understand what bullying is.

I don't give a shit whether you think less of me, what I am debating is the idea that what I did was bullying.

It's like saying "I don't think the less of you for slapping someone in the face while they were attempting to rape you, bullied people often become bullies."

Let's get cool in ze middle school...

I have to agree with Karen here, re: bullying vs. tactically fighting back.

There *really* is a difference between "bullying back" and "learning to actually stand up for yourself."

The most humiliating thing about middle school for me by a long shot was gym class. This has to be a universal nerdy thing, right? I met my best friend for the rest of school in the 7th grade, because we were always the last two dudes to finish running laps. Always. It wasn't because we couldn't do it faster, it's because we couldn't care less, and that was the basis of a solid friendship. And sure we were both humiliated on a daily basis, and often more frequently than that, but I can't remember by whom or for what reason. Is is uncool on this thread to admit that you don't have nightmare memories of middle school?

I'm at a disadvantage here in talking about this for two reasons: 1: I don't know all of the details about what happened (and, no, I'm not asking you to provide them) so I don't know how big the offense was compared to what you did in response, and 2: Everything I did to my bullies backfired on me, badly. I told all of you how a quick slap that didn't even connect ended up as a school banning me from events because they thought would go berserk and attack people. A mild name-calling in response to a bunch of threatening phone calls ended up with my cat being kidnapped (he clawed them to pieces and ran away) and a barrel of trash thrown over my head. In short, I have no idea how you got it to work for you.

There *really* is a difference between "bullying back" and "learning to actually stand up for yourself."

I'm willing to admit that I might have misunderstood you.

I got cursed out a lot by this girl on my bus named Esperanza just for sitting behind her and for smiling too much or something. So I wasn't cool at all but I always had friends because I was in a bunch of activities: girl scouts, student government, band, chorus. I was a huge nerd but extra curriculars kind of saved me from 6th grade through senior year in college. Also the more people teased me the friendlier I tried to be towards them and it kind of worked.

what ages are middle schoolers, out of interest?

12-14 or so

I was definitely not "cool"; I was always one of the smallest guys, had dorky glasses and clothes, etc. However, at both of the middle schools I went to, I managed to be friends with kids who were considered pretty cool so I think I was somewhat "cool by association." I was lucky in that both middle schools I went to were "international schools"; basically private schools in foreign countries (Yugoslavia and India) catering to kids of diplomats and foreign military. So every kid in these schools was moving every 2-4 years as their parents were reassigned, meaning every kid had had the experience of being the outcast, outsider, "new kid." I think this really reduced any kind of bullying; I don't remember any serious physical violence (ie outside of horsing around or squabbles among friends) at either school. There were definitely kids who were perceived as weird or gross, but they were pretty much just ostracized (which is a form of bullying, I know).

Then we moved back to the U.S. for my last two years of high school and I went to a bad public school with gangs and drugs and daily massive brawls in the cafeteria and I basically spent two years doing things by myself and being miserable and trying not to be noticed.

xp cool thanks

i guess i got lucky with the town/school i grew up in judging by some of the stories on this thread. i was uncool and unfashionable but i still managed to be friendly with everyone and never felt ostracized. i got bullied in elementary school a bit but never badly and by middle school it had mellowed down to just some jokey teasing that i never took seriously.

It sounds like you had one of *those* school districts, Christine. Mine was one of those when I was little, because they had some hippy idea that the kids should solve interpersonal problems themselves and I don't think the people who conceived that plan thought 'what if there's a crazy smart kid kid in a wig having chemo and the other kids just see a teacher's pet who gets to miss school and treat her badly'? Chemotherapy also makes patients ORNERY because all of their sensitivities are heightened, especially to pain, noise and nausea. My mom had to raise hell when my first-grade teacher disciplined me for complaining about the way I was being treated (the lady had also been her teacher for first grade) so I feel like I suffered early on from adults not doing what society expects them to when they have authority over a group of children. It probably made me more willing to challenge authority when it was trying to shove the problem under the rug six years later.

Yeah, I scratched to ribbons the backs of boys who ducked me in swimming, so I agree with K - when it was happening to me, I made a real effort not to pass the hot potato of bullying onto some other kid, but if someone was stupid enough in their harassment method to give me a rhetorical opening, I would retaliate bigstyle - like the time someone stole a manuscript I was working on in 8th grade and I check-pointed at the door when class ended because the teacher couldn't make anyone fess up. The girl I suspected of stealing it had been stalking me around the school for months and calling me a lesbian, so when she was discovered with the notebook, I stuck my arm across the door and slowly (but loudly) ticked off all the reasons why I thought an illiterate piece of shit like her probably shouldn't be going around stealing my stuff - and top items on the list were 1) why bother when you probably can't even read half the words and 2) it just proves how obsessed you are with me and people might wonder why you're so in love with the idea of my being a dyke. Then I'd smile cheesily and drop 'just saying.'

Obviously when I was in 9th grade there were still a few rumblings until my new friends the punk rock upperclassmen intervened, and I don't know if it was a bad or a good thing that actual teachers choked down laughs when I zinged certain troublemakers in class.

My little sister had the more common thing of being in a posse of six girls, one of whom was always on the outs with the other five, and sometimes it was her.

xxp Yeah maybe 11 at the low end of middle school, but 15 is def. high school, and at that age they'll bump you up no matter how dumb you are, just because it quickly becomes obvious that you're two feet taller than every other student in the building and kids start thinking you're a teacher.

I thought it was younger, like 9 to 12, but then again, like I said, I skipped a couple of grades. I went to alternative schools (which oddly didn't have anything like the same scale of bullying problems) until I was in about 5th grade, though.

i remember wearing the metallica tshirt w/ the two skulls on it, i think on the first day i was in 7th grade and getting a 'cool shirt' comment from some random 8th grader i didnt know in the hallway. in that moment i felt extremely cool iirc

This is it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_the_United_States#School_grades

xp That shirt would likely have gotten me sent home in 7th grade, or at least labelled a problem child of neglectful rednecks. (Of which there are no shortage in TX.)

"Somewhere between pariah and nonentity" would describe me in middle school also, with the added titles of "smart kid" and "funny kid" — neither of which brought me respect, I think. I had a couple friends with whom I would sit at lunch. There were some idiots who gave me shit, but they did it to everyone. In retrospect, it wasn't miserable or great, just an animal constant present with desires that probably didn't go past hoping the lunchroom was having chicken sandwiches that day and going home to play video games.

i just feel like, ostensibly they were mocking me in part for being unattractive to them and they knew there was a power in making a girl feel unattractive because it's v v important for girls to be attractive, but the other side is that there was almost a sexual menace to it? because it was like, your unattractiveness so flies in the face of what i'm entitled to demand as a boy that it almost makes me feel violent? "violent" is probably not the right word...i haven't worked out exactly how to convey the experience and most days, thankfully, i don't think about it, but now that i'm training to teach high school i've been trying to figure out exactly what was going on.

THIS. The menace...it's like...if you're unattractive to a teenaged boy, you make him doubt himself, because he doesn't really know what he's SUPPOSED to find attractive yet. So his rejection is meant to send a message to others and to reassure himself too, that he's not some kind of freak, that he's perfectly normal and has the power to decide who's attractive and therefore worthy of life. This insecurity gives his insults a desperate edge, something scarier than just basic slagging off.

Oh wow, I had the same kind of international school experience as N/A, except I was in Munich. I was dreadfully quiet and shy though, had a super-terrible haircut and disastrous glasses, was already really geeky about music, and was otherwise hugely bewildered in my dealings with other people and by life in general.

I was made fun of for looks more by girls than by boys. xp

My first day of 7th grade was the coolest moment of my life, but I didn't know it at the time. I had an oversized untucked button-down shirt, bright yellow, and blue jeans tight-rolled above my red Chuck Taylor high tops. Later my friends Sanjay and Aamer told me that when they first saw me, they though I was just another one of the cool kids, which was high praise. Because by then everyone had figured out that I was one of the nerds.

I still own a pair of red Chucks. Some nerds never learn, I guess.

Our best flunking punk was always getting in trouble for his Stiff Records shirt, the one that said 'if it ain't STIFF it ain't worth a FUCK'.

Some of the stuff we pulled to freak out bullies would probably have gotten us close obs from school shrinks in a post-Columbine world. Example: one of my upperclass friends was the cousin of a Manson Family member and she and I took red lipstick and scrawled HELTER SKELTER SQUEAKY SAYS YOU DIE all over some guy's locker because he'd upset my books three times that week.

I think Laurel has a point, but also there really is something to the idea that women police each other just as hard (or even harder) for looks than men do sometimes.

Because young women are under such pressure at that just pre-pubescent/pubescent stage where they're just starting to understand gender roles and the huge part that sexual attractiveness plays in them for women - that if you somehow shirk that "duty to be beautiful" it's that you are a threat to *them* so much as you are a threat to the entire *order* of How Things Are Supposed To Work.

And if they have been working really hard to be good girls and be "Pretty" and investing so much in it, for you to be a woman and flaunt those rules or question or challenge those rules existence, that throws their entire worldview into question in a way that is very very threatening to them.

I was a bookworm and often bullied tho not like remy or ENBB or some other people -- mostly just intimidation & insults from boys, and emotional manipulation/bullying from girls, and I tried never to show anyone that their barbs had landed. Used to have a pretty good stoneface, I guess -- although I tried to barely notice anyone around me, books were much to be preferred and I was never without at least one.

xp Girls made fun of my clothes and my being unpopular, these are things a person could hypothetically change if they wanted to, and at least they weren't wrong: my clothes weren't "cool" and I was unpopular. Boys called me a dog and made sexual jokes about ugly things and animals, while trying to look up the baggy sleeves of my shirt to see my bra and point it out to their friends.

Our best flunking punk was always getting in trouble for his Stiff Records shirt, the one that said 'if it ain't STIFF it ain't worth a FUCK'.

I want this shirt.

I guess in retrospect the school climate is a lot of why I found it safer to give no evidence of sexuality at all. Looking "cute" or stylish or proportionately & thoughtfully dressed got completely separated from "sexy" in my mind. Dating was out. Showing my body, showing interest in anyone, and showing any evidence of not being completely happy being completely alone were all also out. Having a crush was shameful, possibly a sign of weakness; no one should ever know. Not to even mention the religious stuff.

Now that I think about it, this is all so alienating from normal humanity...how are you supposed to come of age into a newly adult body if you think it's bad, it's all bad?

The girls and ugliness thing is even more basic - one girl asserts herself over another by calling that girl ugly in public; by speaking first, it is an inoculation against charges of ugliness from others, because any echoing of the insult is ineffective.

I just took myself right out of the running in my schools Cuteness Olympics at 14-15 by making it really clear that none of the boys was either sexually or intellectually interesting to me, because I was Headed Places. As above, if they called me unattractive it didn't matter because I was firm in my belief that to make the mistake of fucking one of them would leave me spot-welded to the zip code 4 lyfe.

generally memories of this time are coloured by the immense sense of betrayal i felt after being sold the school as a nerd's paradise only to be thumped regularly for not playing football

suzy, my strategy of showing no interest and scornfully turning down all invitations either mock or real only succeeded in convincing everyone else that I was certainly a lesbian.

It sounds like you had one of *those* school districts, Christine. Mine was one of those when I was little, because they had some hippy idea that the kids should solve interpersonal problems themselves

No, this was an old-fashioned lower-middle-class school with old-fashioned notions about the school of hard knocks, making an example of someone, and toughening kids up. The two things I had for me was that my mother was willing to go to bat for me with the school, and that the cops were sympathetic to me.

Thinking about Kenan's "this has to be a universal nerdy thing, right?" (re: gym) makes me realize what a massive life changing deal being the oldest in year was for me, in school - I am hopelessly unathletic really but being older was enough to reliably get onto B teams etc - it'd have been really different if I'd been 11 months younger.

this was an old-fashioned lower-middle-class school with old-fashioned notions about the school of hard knocks, making an example of someone, and toughening kids up.

sounds familiar /bitter

i think seventh grade marked the peak of kid-on-kid cruelty. i remember someone would commit an exceedingly minor faux pas and it would result in them being made fun of relentlessly for weeks on end. i guess identities are so fragile at that stage of adolescence that it just makes sense that kids are so susceptible to gang mentality

Christine, the same principle was in evidence at our school: all the 'solving your own problems' stuff was supposed to make us more robust but in practice it was a bit Lord of the Flies. My mom scored a direct hit by saying that the district only knew how to manage situations with kids who'd had cancer if they died, at which point they got a grade school named after them.

Our school had an unsaid rule that people who wore GREEN on THURSDAYS were HORNY.

haha

we had this thing called "the chop" and if you committed one of these minor faux pas you would get a room full of kids yelling "OOOOH THAS A CHOP THAS A CHOP" and doing a chopping hand motion, sometimes they would chop your neck.

sounds like some CANADIAN shit or something

(I think of middle school as a time of uninterrupted happiness, but my school was very strange - selective, single-sex, very academic, etc - I wasn't with hindsight cool but at the time I thought I was. The actual cool kids were those who'd discovered girls but I was largely to blind to that - I hadn't - as the years went on into high school I came to resent those kids, now clearly on top, as having stolen something that should have been mine, and resentfully refused to admit to any sort of pubescent identity pretty much through to 18; this may looking back not have been the most sensible reaction)

this was an old-fashioned lower-middle-class school with old-fashioned notions about the school of hard knocks, making an example of someone, and toughening kids up.

I've always wondered about my earliest school teachers, up until about the 5th grade level, whether there was a method to their apparent sadism, or if they would actually make the children eat mud and stand naked in front of the class all the time, as long as the parents didn't complain. Maybe that's why I don't think so badly of middle school, because primary school was spent in a tiny town in the sweaty southern crack of America, and the teachers were MEAN. Habitually cruel and taking real joy in humiliating children. That's at best, there were constant sexual abuse scandals as well, which I only heard about later. I only realized how horrifying these teachers were even in their day-to-day practices much later, in retrospect. The parents were not about to stop any of this. No such thing as an overprotective parent where I hailed from. Barely even a protective one. I haven't looked it up, but I would not doubt for a moment that my old school district still whips 8 year olds with a huge paddle while the parents nod and smile in approval, county-wide. Kids gotta learn.

Fucking hicks.

Middle school was in a city. A cake walk by comparison. In fact, you can use cake walks as a measure of the difference between the two schools. The former one literally hosted them, and the latter one did not.

hey, like i said upthread, i am not saying that girls were not mean to each other about this stuff, but the whole mean girls phenomenon does not match up to my experience. that's all i was saying. when i was in 7th grade, the kids who i was deathly afraid of, who were most cruel to me, were boys.

my crummy suburban junior high was dominated by two rival "gangs": the mexicans and the chaldeans. "conflicts" were always most likely during PE, which was basically our prison yard but with flag football instead of weightlifting. anyway, prior to heading to the locker room to change into our official PE outfits, the hour would begin with everyone congregating in this fenced-in blacktop area upon which were painted a hundred or whatever different numbers. we were to go and sit down on whichever number had been assigned to us so that the instructor could take roll easily and efficiently. sounds easy, but it was always completely chaotic and took forever what with everyone insisting on yelling and screaming the entire time. well one day, in the middle of the typical blacktop chaos, this big ass chaldean dude (with his fake gold jewelry and slicked-back hair, their trademark look) comes walking up to me (pasty, scrawny, prepubescent white kid, definitely not a mexican). totally unprovoked, he orders me to never again wear the t-shirt that i happened to be wearing, because it featured "their colors." i'll always remember it: it was a green, blue, and black horizontally-striped Anchor Blue tee from Miller's Outpost, totally innocuous, totally inconspicuous. yet i didn't even bother to ask if it featured all of their colors or merely a combination of two (or maybe it was just one?). i simply never wore it again, in fact i threw it in the trash that night, because i was petrified of horrible chaldean gang retaliation.

Chaldeans?

Boys at my school mostly had guns, too, which gave them a whole additional layer of menace. Watching an uncouth 13 yr old absolutely glory in having the power to kill things like songbirds and squirrels is flat-out fucking creepy.

xp yeah, christian iraqi refugees that had immigrated to the united states in the 80s & 90s. they formed enclaves in my san diego county town and dearborn, michigan, and they all claimed to be very rich, and wore lots of cologne.

Our school had an unsaid rule that people who wore GREEN on THURSDAYS were HORNY.

You know, I'm wearing green in a lot of my middle school photos....

(Actually, I was constantly horny much of the time I was a teenager. Not that I could do anything about it ,other than the obvious solo activity. Those darn social skills....)

I think the place people were meanest to me was Mormon seminary. My junior high's territory had people from a very well-to-do part of town and then kind of gerrymandered out this little strip of town by the highway, where my family lived and where all the halfway houses were. So there were a couple dozen of us whose parents were in a much lower tax bracket than everyone else's. I did not know it was not cool, in 1998, to wear what we called "stretch pants" (lolol leggings) sewed by my grandma from mill ends. Those were seriously the only pants I owned most of my life, my grandma just kept sewing me a few new pairs every Christmas and birthday. (Wait, this was bad in gym too because my mom refused to buy me gym shorts so I was being astonishingly below average in colorful, boldly patterned skintight pants.) Anyway, in seminary, they just gave me tons of shit, and my pants were always a popular topic. One dude one day, in the middle of Mormon-sanctioned seminary class, pulled the waistband away from my back and cut a giant hole in the ass with scissors. My parents weren't home so I had to just go around pulling my shirt down all day. The gratifying thing was is someone told me, years later, that this incident is why they left the church.

*Gives Kenan a sympathy hug*
*Thinks, and then gives everyone else on the thread a sympathy hug*

my condensed story is that school was bad but home was worse.

^^^ mine too. i was never popular or cool at all, i dressed badly and wasn't a cute kid, we moved a lot, plus i was always in the advanced classes/groups and was completely terrible at anything athletic - but i always had at least a couple of good friends, and i was lucky enough to never attend any schools where severe bullying was a problem.

I did not know it was not cool, in 1998, to wear what we called "stretch pants" (lolol leggings) sewed by my grandma from mill ends

*Starts humming "Coat of Many Colors"*

Oh man, I forgot junior high was where I started getting classically terrible advice from school counselors.

ME: I can't make any friends...it's really vexing?
HER: "Vexing"? If you want to make friends, you shouldn't use such big words.
ME: *realizes trying to find help from any adult was pointless*

ugh again the people i hate most in these stories are the adults >:[

the other thing i got lucky with was having great teachers - actually, this was something i had through probably at least 90% of my schooling.

so was there really no one on ILX who was cool in middle school? Is this like that thing where supermodels and actresses are always like "you wouldn't believe it, I was so dorky in middle school, I had braces and no one wanted to date me"

my condensed story is that school was bad but home was worse.

yeah another tick in this box tbh, tho school wasn't bad as i've said. had good friends and three brothers whatever went down.

i think my worst teacher - the woman who taught 7th grade pre-algebra - actually gave me the best coping strategy to bullshit. At one point after a couple months of me constantly disrupting the class with heckling her, she said, "Instead of disrupting my class with your clever, sarcastic remarks, why don't you just write them down?"

xposts i dunno how "cool" i was, but those school years for me were smooth sailing

xp I think I got that advice at some point, too, but decided that the teacher had no idea what she was talking about. Disrupting the class was the point. How could she not get that?

Disrupting the class was the point. How could she not get that?

oh definitely! And in that class it really didn't help that I already knew all the material because father-daughter bonding consisted of my dad (who was a middle school math teacher) teaching me math. For whatever reason, this class taught some sort of "new math" unconventional approach to the subject, which made very little sense, and the book was poorly written.

"How about instead of me disrupting your class with my clever sarcastic remarks, you tell me something I don't know for a fucking change?"

No idea how many days of suspension you'd get for saying that, but more than one.

i'd imagine that ilxors in general were pretty disruptive in class, as long as they thought the teacher would let them get away with it.

xp - I actually did say that, but I didn't use the word "fucking" - but I did get detention on a regular basis.

Detention was the only place I ever got any work done.

I just wanted to read in class, every class. Even in my Reading class, the teacher insisted that listening to other students read aloud, poorly and slowly, was part of the "class experience" and I shouldn't be reading ahead in the book on my own.

Most of the work in junior high was bullshit - like, maybe if the curriculum had actually been interesting, it wouldn't have been so awful. I'm trying to remember if we actually read any literature in 7th grade.

I think all of middle school literature was "The Good Earth" over and over.

At least that's how I remember it.

I've routinely stated that middle school kids are among the most evil people on earth, and that middle school is a veritably dank, urine soaked* hell hole. My middle school experience was no exception to this, and 7th grade was pretty agonizing (though by gr. 8 my deep immersion in skateboarding, my newfound interest in indie rock, and skateboarding message boards allowed me to cut myself off from the rest of the world and be happy on my own), but this thread has made me appreciate how relatively easy I had it.

Additionally, it's also made me terrified at the thought of what extent I might have made other people's lives somehow worse without even realizing it (I wasn't ever one of the cool kids, or a bully or anything like that, but this thread makes it apparent how insensible people can be to human suffering, and even be oblivious to their role in it).

Of course I had summer camp to be the butt of cruelty and teasing, though I eventually was old enough to take it with a sense of humour and play into jokes about me. However, now, in my early 20's, I still blame those kids for a mild inferiority complex regarding my intelligence, which has subsequently caused me to really excel in school; however, even in spite of this success I remain paranoid that everyone thinks I'm stupid, and hence often feel compelled to prove my intelligence to people. Also, the conception of a girl actually liking me still doesn't quite register.

*actually I had a friend that would piss in the radiators, for God only knows what reasons.

i'd imagine that ilxors in general were pretty disruptive in class, as long as they thought the teacher would let them get away with it.

lol funny joke

xp - yes - The Good Earth! I think we also read The Day No Pigs Would Die - with the goiter scene - and To Kill a Mockingbird. Brad, who was the class clown, convinced the senile typing teacher to call him "Scout" for the first month or so of class.

We didn't read any of those! We had a textbook with excerpts from other books in it, we just read a chapter of this, a chapter of that, some short stories...all pre-selected by some textbook publisher/editor.

I don't remember reading any whole books in class until high school.

that's weird, those are all books i associate with my parents' generation

Del - are you aware of the arduous, contested process of curriculum adoption in public school districts? Like, I doubt they changed it - with the exception of adding coursework on self-esteem and saying no to drugs - since my parents' generation.

Brad, who was the class clown, convinced the senile typing teacher to call him "Scout" for the first month or so of class.

This wasn't middle school, but in my 9th grade health class, one guy had the teacher calling him "Big Daddy Kane" for the entire semester. He earned it, too. He was always the first guy to get descriptive about how, no, it does not feel the same with a condom on.

Aw, man, I haven't though about BDK in a while. He was the whole reason to be in that class. The teacher with her, ahem, comfortable shoes, and Big Daddy raising his hand and asking, "Are you a lesbian?"

oh man, they split us into same sex groups for sex ed

oh man you got sex ed

Health, they called it. Though it was entirely about sex, yes.

it was mostly how not to get pregnant and get diseases

In grade school we got split up for The Talk, but in 'health' classes we had to have The Talk co-ed.

Health, they called it. Though it was entirely about sex, yes.

sounds pretty healthy to me

Robust, even. Positively ruddy.

But that's high school. We should get back to our regularly scheduled misery.

it was mostly how not to get pregnant and get diseases

I read this as "how to get diseases."

That's the advanced course. Getting pregnant at that age is way easier.

lol - it was awkwardly phrased - we were very fascinated by the names of the various venereal diseases though

for some reason we got the 'how not to get pregnant or get stds' talk in biology classes before we had it in PSHE? ('personal social & health education')

i guess maybe they thought it would stick better if we first encountered it as an intellectual challenge-- or at least if it was something we had learn for a test.

We had a 7th grade class called "life science", and it covered some sexy stuff. Mostly it was intro biology, a lot of flowers and ferns and such, but there was a human sexuality bit that was a couple of videos worth of material, largely uncommented upon by the teacher. That's all I remember from that class. Ok that, and the fact that the teacher played Pink Floyd while we dissected worms. We thought that was cool, too.

i remember having to collect bugs for science class - and spending quality time with my mom hunting cockroaches in her office.

<3 reading-on-the-bench part of aerosmith's story upthread

Wow, reading this has been interesting. Ages 10-15 were horrible for me; there wasn't really any physical bullying but I rapidly went from "quite shy" to "completely unsocialised" and became obsessed with schoolwork as my means of self-validation (which admittedly had beneficial side-effects). I was slow in developing as a functional member of society - I was in my twenties when I learned to say more than single sentences to girls, and the drink-as-social-crutch years happened then too when most people had outgrown it and kind of thought I was an idiot. Things are ok these days, I'm just "quite shy" again.

health class for me was the teacher putting notes on the overhead and telling us to copy them down verbatim and then turn them in for a grade

it was pretty cool but at the same time my hand always cramped up by the end of class because the notes were pretty much paragraphs from the textbook

My school was pretty terrible all round. We had zero funding for anything because we were a "bad" inner city school. Since then the neighborhood has been gentrified into one of the more upper class areas in the city so the same school is an A+ school and has all these programs for struggling kids. yay.

Oh man, some of the stories on this thread are heartbreaking.

I went from a mixed primary school to an all-girls school in a new town and went from having almost all male friends to having no contact with boys except when they shouted insults about my appearance or threw rocks or fireworks at me across the street. Sometimes wonder if my previous friends would've stuck with me if I'd stayed in the same town, and how different my adult life and personality might be if that was the case, but I suspected the onset of puberty would've destroyed all my friendships, which this thread is confirming. Thanks, thread!

(thread is also making me feel lucky: school itself was ok, if a bit lonely, and while I got shouted at and intimidated on the way home, the things thrown at me always missed, and when I was cornered in the underpass bottles would get smashed behind my head and never on it - I was never physically beaten beyond some coat-shaking and spitting)

Oh man, I forgot junior high was where I started getting classically terrible advice from school counselors.

ME: I can't make any friends...it's really vexing?
HER: "Vexing"? If you want to make friends, you shouldn't use such big words.
ME: *realizes trying to find help from any adult was pointless*

my mom has a story about talking to one of my school counselors and saying i felt alienated from the other kids. the counselor's advice: "well, she could just try harder to fit in." my rebellious mom would not take that for an answer.

you actually had counselors? I think we had one counselor for every 700 kids or something. I got sent to the school psychologist once because of something I wrote in 7th grade. I did not think of this as a future opportunity I could conveniently seize to get out of boring classes.

IDk, it was the first & last time I went to see her. I had expected something very different based on childhood favorite book There's A Boy In The Girl's Bathroom, the tale of an inspiring elementary school counselor who ultimately gets fired for making an allusion to Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.

in high school i went to a school psychologist once a week during lunch hour. i hated the sessions but i loved getting out of the cafeteria!

sometimes i would ask my teachers if they'd let me hang out in the library instead of attending class, and they'd let me! the library was one of my favorite places.

<3 There's a Boy in the Girl's Bathroom

now that I think about it I got some razzing in 5th grade. I won our school's spelling bee, and everybody accused me of cheating. my mother was there, and they accused her of mouthing the words to me.

hell, she probably was - my mom loves her children so much she probably did it without knowing it. But I wasn't watching her, nor can I read lips.

I at one point yelled at them "if you think I'd need to cheat to know how to spell words that retarded, I feel sorry for you". But translate that into how a 5th grader would say it.

I mean in level of difficulty, I think the hardest word was "attraction", which I'd used myself in reports I wrote about Disney World.

pretty huge generalization but it seems american state schools are particularly unpleasant? i dunno what it's like going to school in switzerland or south korea but i doubt these kind of dreadful stories are so common

a lot of this sounds pretty tame and i went to an east london grammar school

i never had it too bad in middle school or high school. not that there weren't moments of feeling rejected or sadness or whatever, but i couldn't complain...i sort of stood between the world of the music kids and the more popular kids, managed to somehow to be accepted in both...i guess i always had some weird ability to blend in with whatever social group i was with.

and i guess in a way i'm sort of self-conscious enough to not really try to have a super big identity, like i dunno, i would go to my room and obsess about trying to learn like a metallica song on tablature from a guitar mag or make endless mixtapes of stuff, but i never really dressed subculture outside of a couple band shirts....i always felt sorta weird about loving music so much, so i wouldn't really talk about it to ppl that i knew wouldn't understand or care...but then i had friends that felt the same and we would talk about rush or n.w.a. or the sex pistols or whatever

i don't know why really.

a lot of this sounds pretty tame and i went to an east london grammar school

― former moderator, please give generously (DG), Friday, 17 September 2010 20:49 (1 minute ago)

damn...that does sound a bit richard littlejohn i guess

Yeah, almost none of us have the kind of stories that can live up to at least one person I know who went to an English boarding school. He said something once about being held down in a bath of icewater, and other horrible quasi-military maneuvers & hazing rituals.

But what was more crushing to me than the actual treatment was the total lack of perspective that I had the choice of not caring about that awful world, that it was small and I could be someone else, someWHERE else. We traveled and stuff, I guess I was just really tied to home and the familiar, and couldn't visualize what life would be like outside of it.

Yeah, my schools weren't very cliquish. I wasn't popular but had a pretty varied group of friends. No one at my school liked the music I liked (punk), but I think it gave me some cred or something.

it may be more to do w/ the unrepresentative sample of ilx (who had a good time in middle school? some other ppl, many of whom are probably now in prison or stacking shelves)

i also think that's about being young, not being able to put stuff in perspective.

xp to Laurel

we didn't haze until high school. in choir when we went into the color guard room to practice, we'd grab the freshman men, shove them in the closet, lock the closet, then pretend to leave.

(I was both the giver and receiver of such a prank in various years).

Well, it's also that we never moved, plus in a small town, there's no escaping the original 80 people you started kindergarden with, you're stuck with them for the next 13 years. I never went to a big high school where you could go unnoticed or change yr image or anything. It was allll scrutiny, allll the time!

i think the english boarding school thing is probably outdated....back in the day some of the worst of them were like prisons w/ more muscular christianity and latin grammar

most ppl i know who've left one in the last 10 yrs or so seem to have had a much better time of it, tho i'm glad i resisted any suggestion of going to boarding school

yeah, my school was small, too. but for real i think maybe "putting stuff in proper perspective" comes with the completion of frontal lobe development in your mid-20s or something

xp

I was decidedly not cool in middle school at first and then I was mostly unremarkably inoffensive.

my 'profane' persona didn't even arrive until I was 14. I didn't cuss, swear, or make any type of inappropriate or lewd joke. I mostly started doing it when I was 14 just to fit in, but that didn't work, it looked phony.

Gradually I got so jaded that the profanity stayed with me and my sense of humor went from real innocent to real dark and isolating. The way I like it. Yet now I know a lot of people who appreciate it, contrary to back then.

now that I think about it I got some razzing in 5th grade. I won our school's spelling bee, and everybody accused me of cheating. my mother was there, and they accused her of mouthing the words to me.

in 4th grade the principal suspended me from school for a week, but before that happened i had signed up for the spelling bee. i had been home for a few days of my suspension when they told me i could come back. my first day back was, coincidentally, the day of the spelling bee -- and i won it. but the other contestants protested my win, saying i wasn't "supposed" to have competed and i should be disqualified. i managed to hold on to my title but i did make a few enemies that day.

omg wtf with these kids giving a shit about the spelling bee

speaking of unable to keep things in perspective

i went to a "gifted and talented" school so even the assholes were nerds a little bit.

wasn't just the spelling bee, either. any competition and someone usually got accused of cheating.

and yet they never found the actual cases (ie, the girl in my class who stole a previously published poem and passed it off as her own, and got an accolade for it).

i had to pester my teacher to hold a spelling bee in 4th grade iirc

this one ratty little girl who i kinda liked but had never spoken to came up to me one day in an art class and asked me in this weird snotty tone, "so what's your deal, like, who do you even hang out with?" i guess she meant which 'clique' i fit in with but i didn't realize that (and also didn't really have one) so i just started rattling off the names of my two or three friends and she walked away.

and was bummed when i got to middle school and learned that none of the administration gave a fuck about having one xp

I'd totally forgotten about winning the 9th grade one until one of the punks put the school paper cutting on FB.

i won the eighth grade one and have not forgotten for a moment

but i think i was literally the only person who cared

i think one of the years i won i had a 100 degree fever and pneumonia, so i won the spelling bee and went straight to the emergency room

i felt somewhat vindicated when i won an adult spelling bee at a bar later in life

comicbookguy-ivewastedmylife.wav

i lost out of the 8th grade spelling bee on the word "lectern" in a late round. i spelled it "-urn". i had seriously never seen or heard the word before. i didn't really care one way or another.

I was so lazy in 8th grade that I got eliminated in the final 10 round (I'd had to win my class title first, then pod) on the word "avocado", despite having spelled much harder words prior to that.

I also got made fun of in middle school because my mother wouldn't allow me to have any albums that had an explicit lyric label on it, but I was just starting to like rap that wasn't Hammer, ie, Snoop Doggy Dogg.

So my only way to watch my Snoop and Dre vids was to turn MTV or the radio on and get the radio edits. all the other kids at school though had the real thing. lotsa kids wore Snoop shirts (one of my best friends had an Ice Cube shirt), and made fun of me as the only rap album I had cuz it was the only one I essentially could get was Shaq Diesel :/

I been thugged out since cub scouts

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l0la7SVEMkI

wish i'd been 'into' music at this stage, would have saved me a fortune in sega gear

this was the age at which i became "into" music, mostly due to my frequent visits to the library and the ability to check records/tapes out there. i didn't have cool older siblings/cousins/neighbors to show me things, so i relied on the library and the radio.

otoh sonic the hedgehog > manic street preachers

i just remembered that this was the age at which i had a polish pen pal! agnieszka. we wrote letters pretty much nonstop until high school, but my faith in her flagged a little when she sent me a tape with bon jovi and basia songs on it :-/ what a jerk i was.

Not cool in Jr High, but not much picked on either because I was a big kid for my age. Got robbed of candy/change on the front lawn after school by a bigger kid:

Bully: "You got any money?"
Me: "No."
Bully: rips candy out of my hand and actually reaches down my front pants pocket to get the money I did have (under $1).

It was kind of funny in retrospect because I had bought a long stick of gum (called Bubs Daddy, about 18" long, anybody remember those?) that I had clutched tightly in my hand, and when he ripped it away I was left with just the 3" section actually in my grasp.

It was a semi-ghetto school, but the thugs mostly fought among themselves.

Ha ha bought superbubble gum at wholesale and sold it retail. Got caught and had to write "I will not throw gum in class" 100 times on the board but I was just delivering to my clients yo. 4th grade good times. Wow things are different now.

i won the school half-life deathmatch competition

Man all your stories sound horrible. I was lucky enough to live abroad and to have studied in an international school where there were like 120 of us max from kg to 12th grade so no such thing as bullying and shit like that. And then I came back to France, arrived midway through 8th grade and that was probably the worst time of my life. I was in a boarding school, stuck with kids that their parents couldn't even bear to live with (while I was waiting for the bus taking us to school on a sunday evening, I saw a kid get into a fistfight with his dad on the curb for ex). It was the middle of the year, I was the new kid, arriving straight from India and they just kept on mocking me, calling me "that fucking indian" (nb: I'm blond with blue eyes, quite tall for my age), beating me up for being a foreigner (their own words). That stopped when I reached 9th grade since most of them failed 8th grade, and from then on life was quite enjoyable and I actually was one of the cool kids.

What I find tremendously curious is everyone's telling stories about their dark days but no one except for San Te has admitted to dishing out the cruelty and bullying. Is it just no one wants to own up to it? Every time I see discussions about high school *everyone* says they were lonely/uncool/picked on. But this doesnt make sense: where are all the popular kids and people who picked on us/beat us? Doesnt anyone wanna come forth and say "actually for most of 8th grade me and the boys ran down this one nerd til he pissed himself, haha!".

I really wished I could have dished the bullying too when I was bullied, but I was just not in a situation where I could have: arriving from halfway across the globe, having been in a school where bullying was clearly non-existent, I just didn't know how it could be done. But I really wished (at the time) that I could give them back the shit I was enduring.

You could probably all guess how it fell for me in middle school. Completely and utterly haywire - outrageously high-achieving academically (at a highly-rated private school), disciplinary liability (sweetly and innocently disrupting everything I touched) and a complete mess to look at. More than at any other stage of my education, I was showbiz, a complete motherfucking tornado - to the extent where it didn't matter how cool I was (and I wasn't cool - I was mocked, cajoled, wound up, teased, prodded and found exceptionally annoying by 100% of my peers) because my irrepressible force of optimistic vigour powered me blindly beyond any conception of social exclusion and into a realm where I was Clown Prince, I got better exam marks than everyone else, I was absolutely impossible to control and I naively assumed everyone would be my friend - that latter foible got me further than anything else, I think.

Anyway, they were all dorks into Warhammer and Pokemon and Tamagotchis and shit and I thought all that was nerdy BS and got obsessed with cool stuff like SPORTS and GENERAL KNOWLEDGE and PG WODEHOUSE and ORNITHOLOGY and all those things were and are way damn cooler so YAH BOO SUCKS 2 LOSERS

Weirdly, later on the cooler I actually got the more out of place I felt.

where are all the popular kids and people who picked on us/beat us?

They're too busy running Republican campaigns and posting to 4chan.

haha

I vaguely remember being a little shit briefly early on in primary school, which is pretty weird given that I must've been the smallest kid in school and something of a cry-baby, but I don't really remember what I did.

Back to "junior high" age, tried to turn a group against someone who was a nice person but whose popularity rubbed me the wrong way, and had some success. I think this only lasted a week or two and as far as I know was all forgotten fairly quickly by everyone else but I still feel bad about it. The person in question continued to be nice to me and was the only one who made any attempt to stay in touch with me after I left school.

the only time i rly colluded in shitty behaviour was after an incredibly strange and timid kid joined the class when i was about 10, thereby deflecting most of the unwanted attention i got for very visibly getting the best results almost all the time. the usual prep school intolerance of outliers, except whereas i was fairly normal in most other respects and just got the silent treatment / bitter sniping from time to time, the new kid was ostracized to a fairly hideous degree. i'll apologise if ever i see him.

I think I helped deflect a lot of attention by my event-horizon approach towards it

basically the difference between me + nakhchivan = the time I spent behaving like a flaming idiot, he spent learning xtra words

i wouldn't exactly say i dished out the bullying pre-7th grade but i definitely looked the other way when it happened, and certainly participated in talking shit about whoever was a pariah that year. until it was me.

More things I regret: became vague friends with a v quiet dude at university who my friends all thought was weird and creepy, and I was too insecure abt my own likeability to go "actually he is OK" instead of just nodding and going "haha yeah"

think about this sometimes, how people are written off sometimes the second they come in the room for just - what? not dressing right? not carrying themselves right as they walk or stand, not looking at people right? and before they even speak people have them down as lol crepe and will not change their minds; I've been written off in this way and been sad/infuriated at how powerless I feel at not even knowing how to fix it, but I also know I've done the same to this guy and probably others

I called a guy a poof once in 9th grade :( I dont know why he was infuriating me so much - I'd decided he was a pompus git (and as it turned out I was right, he was gay but NO ONE would ever come out as a teen at the school I went to, you'd be killed). Anyway, he quite understandably reacted by slapping me HARD across the face.

The teacher laughed. :/

this thread makes me feel really lucky about my own middle school experience, I guess. I went to a magnet school which started from the 5th grade, which meant that everybody there had also just arrived from some other school in the city. also we had relatively small class sizes - about 150 per grade in middle school and 100 in high school - so it was hard for cliques to build a critical mass. my biggest discomfit was not being able to fit in with the cool 'skater dudes' who wore JNCOs and listened to green day. I remember pestering my mom to buy baggy jeans, wearing them to school one day, getting a compliment from one of the skater dudes, then feeling horribly embarrassed at having 'conformed'.

^^ feel really lame for even sharing this story considering what other ppl in this thread have gone through. again, much <3 to everybody itt!

hmm, i think i have been on both sides of this fence, at least pre-middle school. in 4th and 5th grade there was this kid in my class who i had a rivalry with and though it was never violent, it was def not healthy. like, he would make fun of me for being fat or for not having cable tv or whatever, but in those classes, i def had friends in greater numbers at the time, he wore weirder clothes (sweaters better suited for someone 3-4 ears younger than he, odd colors of tight wrangler jeans), and did weird shit like talked up being related to jim thorpe or his german heritage or how his mom was abducted by aliens or something, i don't know. he did a couple of heinous things, one of which i recall him calling the only black girl in our class the n-word.

but i remember coming across his myspace profile like 4 or 5 years ago and just feeling paralyzed with guilt because i def made him miserable because i was cock of the walk or whatever in those classes. i wanted to apologize to him but then i thought, how pitiful am i, we're adults now, would he even give a rat's ass but now i'm like...yeah, he might have! he might have given some animal's ass. ftr he seemed well-adjusted.

middle and high school were a different awful story, got fatter and fatter, had long hair, hid in hallways to read kafka (part of me wanted to get caught reading kafka, like SEE HOW SMART I AM OH GOD SOMEONE TALK TO ME), impulsively asking girls out in MS who were friendly to me partly because i felt some obligation to have a girlfriend since a lot of my friends had achieved that life milestone with relative ease. getting shut down everytime, of course. the friends i did have were not v dear. life stopped sucking after about age 16 or 17 i guess?

then i staged a coup and became dictator of thailand and beat up the world's greatest fighters for the years that followed. found a way to channel that adolescent rage into a successful political career.

http://www.platformnation.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/ssf2t_m_bison.gif

lol

really doubt there'd be many school bullies on ilx, bitter nerds yes

Yes. Yes. A thousand times yes.

i remember getting these two bitchy bully sisters in trouble one day and watching them cry and glare at me on the schoolbus later. it was wonderful seeing them in tears -- is it bullying if i got my kicks from their pain?

to this day i really like seeing people get their comeuppance. karmic schadenfreude = underrated.

really doubt there'd be many school bullies on ilx, bitter nerds yes

^^^

patron saint of this thread:

http://images2.fanpop.com/images/photos/7100000/Lizzy-in-Mean-Girls-lizzy-caplan-7197221-640-480.jpg

There's a T.Ewing post somewhere where he talks about how everyone with a certain type of english-public-school experience is silent on bullying because the hierachy was a ladder not a pyramid; almost everyone had terrible things done to them and almost everyone did terrible things :(

glad i dodged that bullet

i remember getting these two bitchy bully sisters in trouble one day and watching them cry and glare at me on the schoolbus later. it was wonderful seeing them in tears -- is it bullying if i got my kicks from their pain?

No. I misread the original post, and my experience with fighting back is a little different than most of yours (it brought absolute hell onto me).

to this day i really like seeing people get their comeuppance. karmic schadenfreude = underrated.

Yep, I'm all with this.

Not bad at all compared to these horror stories. There were fights, everyone fought with everyone else at some point but then you cry and hug and make up. Adults seemed like the idiots with their heads buried in the sand about drug dealing and pervs. I was younger and smaller than most of the other kids in my peer group, I got some teasing for that, I felt a twelve year old is too young for dating and marijuana, big deal.

I get angry reading these stories about acne and weight, where are the parents to intervene? If anyone bothered me that much my mom was on the phone to their mom.

Well, for many people it gets to the point that you can't run to your folks for EVERY SINGLE THING so you have to develop coping strategies. Some of those are revenge strategies, and I always thought it was fair enough to psychologically lacerate anyone who physically harmed me (generally using stuff from Freud 101), as I couldn't exactly wail on kids a foot taller than me.

I get angry reading these stories about acne and weight, where are the parents to intervene? If anyone bothered me that much my mom was on the phone to their mom.

i always felt a really strong sense of 'adults must never know', though? no matter what it was.

I don't intend to sound glib and insensitive, but it helps if you have relatives who have learned to fire a weapon. Not that anyone was casually waving guns around, but I think I got less shit because my dad and granddad kept guns on the premises and knew how to use them. Not possible or sane in densely populated areas, I know. I am just saying this because a lot of kids I know used to tell bullies "oh yeah well my dad or grandad or whoever has a gun so you better watch it."

Camphor jars, it depends on how repressed your folks are. Some people couldn't tell their parents anything. I grew up in a pretty libertarian environment - two towns over, however, everyone seemed very religious and quiet and possibly repressed so in my community we'd get their baggage.

i complained to my parents abt the brutality of my school and just got told to man up and get on with it. thanks dad!

The only thing cool about me was I had a Members Only jacket.

http://famewatcher.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/justin-bieber-and-members-only-harrington-jacket.jpg

Great color!

So it's weird... The answer to this question is an emphatic "no" and I did get made fun of a lot, called a nerd, feel absolutely hopeless, etc. And in my memory, this was mostly a time of unrelenting, traumatic misery. But, thinking about it, my experience actually doesn't seem as bad as many people's. Certainly, no one would have considered being physically violent towards me - I wasn't disliked that badly. (I don't honestly know if anyone was.) I did get some respect for being smart. Besides, some of the things that got me made fun of might have been justified - trying too hard to be funny to get accepted, not trying at all in gym...

And, also, I was shamefully mean towards some other kids for my part, even including teasing a special ed kid, which I'll probably never forgive myself for.

I am confused as to what "cool" means. Does it mean being good at sports or not? At one school sports is the "cool" thing, at another it is so uncool. At one school it might mean being a music nerd, at another that is uncool. When I was a kid, it wasn't clear what was supposed to be "cool" or not, what was "uncool" was being a religious nutcase where your parents never let you go out or go to movies or whatever, I suppose that is fair enough.

I've never known of a school where sports were uncool tbh (and I didn't even grow up with schools with marching bands and cheerleaders).

But, yeah, I think a key issue was just that: While I would have liked to be cool/popular/accepted, I had no clear concept of what that would have required. Making a few deliberate mistakes on a French test? Interrupting class with stupid jokes? Buying dorky awkward-fitting button-down shirts rather than jogging suits? Making fun of someone else?

I've never known of a school where sports were uncool tbh

Admittedly, I was in middle school a good 15 years before emo/indie actually became cool so maybe this has changed? Playing guitar did not make me cool in middle school, I swear!

(But I guess I did at least have a little crowd and also had, you know, an outlet. There were kids who had it so much worse.)

At one school sports is the "cool" thing, at another it is so uncool. At one school it might mean being a music nerd, at another that is uncool.

Is this like the scene in Billy Madison where he tricks everyone into thinking peeing their pants is the coolest

I've read some of the longer posts here, and they're as unpleasant as I would have expected. I know high school and middle school are hugely different in many ways, but some of the traumatic stuff is the same, so this reminds me of something Frank Kogan did in his '90s fanzine Why Music Sucks, the issue where he invited people to write in about the "social maps" of their high schools. Everyone had different embarrassments and regrets they dredged up, and some people--me for sure--hadn't entirely gotten over them.

Now that I teach middle school (my school's a K-8, but I've been doing 6 or 7 for over a decade), I try to bring really quiet kids into the social mix of the class as much as possible. The kids who are out-and-out pariahs are tougher. Sometimes I do a good job with them, sometimes not.

I know that the people with less than perfect memories of middle and high school end up sharing them on message boards and in fanzines. What about the people we write about? One of the things I love about The Virgin Suicides is seeing the older Trip Fontaine, beaten down by life and somewhat shell-shocked. It humanizes him.

Being "cool" at my junior high - smoking dope and growing your hair out and listening to "hard rock" LPs. Smoking cigarettes. Going out with high school guy. Reading dirty adult books.

Also : shoplifting.

I have a really hard time figuring out how important music is to the kids I teach. Sometimes, like in the spring when the halls are filled with groups of girls practicing dance routines for the talent show, it seems as important as ever. Much of the time, though, I swear music is no longer even on their radar.

video games sell so much better than music these days.

(do they even call them "video games" anymore?)

Yes.

There's a T.Ewing post somewhere where he talks about how everyone with a certain type of english-public-school experience is silent on bullying because the hierachy was a ladder not a pyramid; almost everyone had terrible things done to them and almost everyone did terrible things

From the things I heard, this was going on when I was at school as well (Scottish public school, thankfully the physically abusive bullying was limited to the boys).

I was easily the least popular girl at school until sixth form, my teachers actually tried matchmaking me into friendships with other people who had a little clique outwith the popular kids (didn't work, there was a reason I wasn't in their little clique either). A popular way of bullying boys in my year was to tell them that I fancied them. I was routinely told to my face that I was ugly. Being seen anywhere near me = instant social stigma.

I've bumped into a few people I used to go to school with from time to time. They have uniformly been lovely people. None have ever apologised, they've just chatted away about what they've been up to, a few memories of teachers and incidents and fellow pupils from our time there, and the fact that they never once talked to me at school - or if they did, it was as part of a mocking chorus - is never mentioned.

if someone who i thought was a cunt at school randomly began chatting to me now, i don't think i'd neglect to mention that i thought they were a cunt. not that individual ppl being huge cunts was often an issue, they were mostly smaller than me and i didn't get called out a lot. you had to be careful not to alienate the large mass of boring ppl with whom it helped to preserve some limited cordiality

a lot of them were just relentlessly dull so i'd be more likely to have one of those dreadfully stilted accidental conversations where you've forgotten the other person's name.

the funny thing is that a lot of the people who were my staunch enemies in middle school burnt out REALLY FAST, even by high school. in fact, the guy I hated the most, the same one I almost started a fight with, got the absolute TAR beat out of him once he got to high school, and as a result, his mother sent him to military school.

I think there was a range of progressions moving from my middle school to high school. Some of the bullies stepped up their game. Some became somewhat invisible. I can think of at least one who moved away, and at least one who became a nice guy. Except I'm not sure now if he was ever actually a bully to begin with--he may have just been perceived that way.

if someone who i thought was a cunt at school randomly began chatting to me now, i don't think i'd neglect to mention that i thought they were a cunt

ymmv, but i'm generally just grateful that it wasn't some longstanding hatred that I'd brought upon myself, and that it was obviously just that they were a cunt 25 years ago, and seemingly aren't now. The really cuntish ones, I haven't seen. And if I did see them, I'd avoid them.

has anybody befriended any of these people post middle/high school? I can't imagine there'd be many cases, but interested to see how many of them atoned for their past behavior.

I really haven't, though that's more because I pretty much didn't keep contact with ANYBODY, friend or foe, after high school (outside of maybe two people).

In elementary school i was pretty quiet and kept to myself, and I remember one year in middle school there were these class clowns i idolized so i suddenly started being a bit of a wise-ass. I never had many friends cos everyone hung out "At youth group" after school and it sounded too cultish for me. I was basically a grunge kid who was too shy to hang out with the cool grunge kids.

ymmv, but i'm generally just grateful that it wasn't some longstanding hatred that I'd brought upon myself, and that it was obviously just that they were a cunt 25 years ago, and seemingly aren't now. The really cuntish ones, I haven't seen. And if I did see them, I'd avoid them.

― ailsa, Sunday, 19 September 2010 13:38 (1 minute ago) Bookmark

yeah i guess i'm not so forgiving. they ought to make some apology for being uncharitable to you at school. it's sometimes difficult not to be a bit of a shit during yr schooldays, but it's not so hard to acknowledge it in adulthood.

San Te: Maybe I'm wrong, but my guess is you're atypical there. Of my four best friends in high school, I'm still good friends with three of them. (More or less--one I don't actually see very often.) I'm still friends with my best friend from grade school, albeit with some help from the internet--there was a long gap where we'd lost touch. It's university where I passed through without taking away much of anything in the way of long-term friendships.

Bullies and atonement; they're all doing community service now. Some voluntarily, some not.

Where I grew up, bullies were TRASH and SCUM. At least one died in a freak accident and I don't feel bad about it.

http://snarkerati.com/movie-news/files/2009/11/oldboy-2.jpg

nakhchivan, yesterday

I got into a huge hassle in the beginning of 7th grade because I sat there with a bunch of A's and told people that 7th-grade work was not at all hard and maybe they were lazy, just a bit? Because they weren't exactly setting us up to fail here. And how could it be difficult to spell words you're surrounded by every day if you don't have dyslexia? Two years before I had a fraught relationship with a teacher who used to single me out in a strange, fixated way and it really impacted on my self-esteem; doing well at the work was part of feeling like everything was actually OK and perhaps I could achieve my way out of this hellhole. But try explaining even part of any of that to wrong-side-of-the-tracks 13-year-old girls and see what happens. Their idea of escape was going to the roller disco and hooking up with someone from a less desirable part of Minneapolis; I didn't get sick of pointing out that it wasn't mine (also I read a fair amount about sex when I was 13 and far from being a prude, I thought 'going with' boys my age just seemed like play-acting).

Lots of my old classmates are distinguished and cool people today and I've never had a problem with any of the people who used to stress me out - they grew up and got real, although I feel like that was something I did five years before they did, while I was still in high school (my friend who was the Veronica to the Heathers said what 'not-clique' people didn't realize was that most of the clique people were each other's frenemies and some of them still relate to each other like that). The funniest thing ever was to find out that one of the scariest bitches from my year, who got really angry at me for my grades/the way I talked about them when asked, straight-up told me that when her 7th-grader came to her complaining about the homework at the very same school, she turned around and told her girl about her classmate that pointed out how easy it was if you just applied yourself, and how right that classmate had been.

I have flat-out pretended not to remember certain people (your basic C-student blowhard type) when faced with them in reunion settings. They grasp at straws to distinguish themselves somehow and fail miserably due to the boring problem mentioned by others itt.

I am not friends with a single person from school. As I say, I have bumped into several twenty years after the event, we've gone for a beer/coffee, exchanged pleasantries, and then said "that was nice" and left it at that.

i keep in touch with one guy, never been to a reunion, never listed my school on facebook. perhaps i should for possible vengeful lolz? not up for forgiving any of the cunts, they didn't have to be horrible, i never did anything to them. the problem with my school is that the nasties have probably turned out to be wealthy accountants and lawyers which kinda puts a dampener on the whole revenge thing

yeah i dunno why anyone wd fuck w/ school reunions. not cuz of h8 so much as...why. if you still give a shit sbout anyone then chances are you still know them or could contact them if needed. the rest?

clemenza: I probably am. I am still friend with my best friend from high school, although we're not really 'best friends' anymore (which is more a recent development), but ultimately I started a minor bout of depression starting my senior year and it caused me to pull away from everyone and I went away to college for one year before returning home to the local one.

I basically 'purged' my old friends and started over. The funny thing is, one of my best friends in middle school, I lost track of in 9th grade, and recently thanks to Facebook, have actually hung out with him again multiple times.

I had my 10 year high school reunion this year. I didn't go. No need to revisit that part of my life.

I hung out with a close friend from middle school during college - boy was that awkward

I attended a very small private school from kindergarten to eighth grade, and we were the school's first graduating class. Since my class never boasted more than nine to twelve students, we were fairly close. Differences became more obvious as we hit puberty, at which point the girls created the usual factions and gossiped about each other while the (four) guys watched with amusement. In retrospect it reminded me of what it must be like when a band's together all these years and its members are thoroughly sick of each other. I remained friends with two of the girls through high school and the first two years of college; one of'em even dated my two high school best friends.

Over Facebook we planned a class reunion for May at a local bar. A few showed with their spouses. A bit awkward, obviously, but a successful evening.

It took a couple of months to adjust to high school though: I suddenly had to deal with two hundred other students in my class. I was picked on in French class because I was the only other freshman in a class of sophomores, but the following year when a chemistry class reunited me with the same bullies they were totally cool ("You're a sophomore now! You get to pick on the freshman").

i'm not on facebook but i went to a class reunion recently. everyone was ridiculously, almost alarmingly friendly. my sk8ter friends that i used to sit at lunch with for years and who mercilessly made fun of everyone weren't in attendance though.

for some reason a bunch of people were like "you're into COMPUTERS, right?" wtf?

and this one guy who was sort of a closet nazi in hs talked about living in micronesia and had all these disturbing stories

I have to say I lovved grammar school and junior high, I got the usual b.s. but they were from scary jealous kids not at my school. I didn't like high school so much but that had to do with the fact that I had a 1 hour bus ride and had to put up with my brother who didn't like sharing friends.

my older brothers were notorious stoners, so teachers would read off my surname and have to disguise their eye-rolling on the first day of class

I went to my first-ever reunion last year, a 50th for my grade school. Because it blanketed so many years, I only saw three or four people who were actually in my grade.

The funniest thing was running into a girl who was in my 1/2 split, and who I would subsequently go to the same schools with till we both graduated from grade 13. (She was actually a grade ahead of me until I skipped from 6 to 8 and rejoined her grade.) She was one of a few dozen girls I had a crush on through high school. So I introduced myself, reminded her that we'd gone to school together forever, that we were in the same 1/2 class and the same graduating class in high school, and she had no recollection of me whatsoever. She had some old class pictures with her, and sure enough she had the 1/2 picture with her. So here's the punchline, and excuse the indulgence of posting a picture: I'm standing directly in front of her.

http://phildellio.tripod.com/1967.jpg

She's top row, second from the left, I'm middle row directly below.

If we'd just been in that one class together, sure, it would have been amazing if she had still remembered me. (Even though, 43 years later, I can still name about 2/3 of the people in the picture.) But we went to school together for 12 more years after that. More than a little humbling.

what happened to the kid w/ suit and handkerchief and quasi-military haircut?

that's H.R. Haldeman.

his ears look like they've been clipped

cast photo for Mad Men Babies

Amazingly enough, I attended his 50th birthday party a few months ago. It was in a pub his wife had rented out, and he was up there playing with the band. He was great, the song selection was terrible.

I'm fairly sure if you showed me the front row of that picture with the board covered up, I could put names (of people in my primary school) to them all. That is quite weird how much several of those kids remind me of people in my class, ten years later, in a different country.

The kid in the back row with the blazer and tie evidently had the same mother as me, who always dressed me supersmart for photo day, when no-one else's parents really bothered.

yeah, i think i can name most everyone in my kindergarten class photo

but what blew my mind was looking at h.s. yearbook a couple years ago with my friend and there were many ppl in my class who were complete mysteries to me, i had no recollection of them whatsoever

We were the nerds who wrote stuff next to the pictures in the yearbook so we wouldn't forget. Kid in the suit looks like he had a military dad!

His dad owned a restaurant, and he's a dentist now. I'm second-guessing myself for posting the picture--everyone's picking on Chris! (Feel free to go after me; that green and blue shirt's an eyesore.)

Did you go to school in Ontario? (Or did they have Gr 13 somewhere else?)

Georgetown, Ontario--Bill Davis era.

Better that than the Mike Harris era, I imagine.

Unfortunately, I taught during the Harris era; I think I'd be okay with a trade there. Before my time, but my understanding is that Davis was the best premier teachers ever had; Harris did whatever he could to make to make the public hate teachers (and, for a while, did a bang-up job of it). Getting back to the thread's subject, Harris was what happens when the grade 7 kid who made your life miserable gets to make education policy.

Ha. (And I'm so sorry.)
(Actually, tbf, I suppose middle school was the Rae era for me and high school/undergrad was Harris.)

this associated press story made me think of this thread. it also broke my heart a little.