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'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.