Middle School

A good friend from childhood notes that her son now has a locker in what was our middle school. The teachers are mostly all new but do we remember Mr X or Ms Y?

A few of us write back, and of course we are stunned. It's one thing to age, but another to have its progress benchmarked by little ones now big. 

Memories flood back, but they're not sharp at all, which is too bad. Springfield has a middle school (grades 5-8), though we tried to pretend it was like junior high school (6-9) on TVs and in the movies or in Millburn which is a much bigger town with great public schools. It's really just a year difference and there are probably books about which is better or worse for kids. Plus, our school system wasn't bad at all and a lot of us even had family working throughout it.

I don't flinch with bad memories or good.

Just spotty events like a 7th grade trip to Sturbridge, MA (probably a first night away for most) and how the school was right across the street from our Temple so going to Hebrew School on Tuesday and Thursdays was easy. The 8th grade show was the big performance. Our year, the theme was sections of a newspaper. Beth and I appropriately did the Real Estate Section (singing "In a Mountain Greenery" which I remember ruining) plus I also was Charlie Brown for the comics and sang a solo "Happiness," which was fun rather than humiliating.

Middle school was still an innocent time, perhaps the last period of it, before we went to high school combined with another town where friendship would be re-aligned and cliques broken and re-organized. Just like it had been when we combined from two sides of town for middle school. 

But our bodies now were maturing, puberty and spin the bottle and 7 minutes in heaven all over the place, our first lockers to lock, and some classes we actually chose. 

 

Like all periods of my life, I remember my extra-curricular activities much more than my schoolwork:

• I was student council president in 8th grade, and had terrific election posters, handmade and everything. 
  
• I was at least a writer for and maybe an editor of both the Gaudinews and the Gaudineer Guardian; Since there was no way there were two papers simultaneously, I suspect we rebranded the paper half-way through but I'll ask Suzanne who remembers everything
  
• In one of our first big choices academically, I chose French with the eclectic intellectuals rather than Spanish with the popular kids or Italian with kids who were Italian (Had I chosen Spanish, I suspect entire worlds would be different, especially a higher GPA in high school when it got really hard and I stopped listening.)
  

The more I write or talk about it, the more that floods back. There was a Girls' Gym and a Boys' Gym. Plus there's hindsight, like realizing that a few teachers were gay after all, and that there's no difference to care about b/w junior and middle school — if you didn't have both.