Preface To The Middle: Middle School

(My old middle school is no longer a middle school. Image from Gurple Marps.)

Memorial Middle School was my middle school, which I attended for three grades, 6th, 7th, & 8th, from I think 1979 to 1982.  I've talked about some of my experiences previously on this blog, I think you can search "middle school" to find those posts if you want.  I know you don't want.  I also don't want to link to those posts.

When I was in high school, I was sort of friends with my American History teacher sort of.  Ultimately I don't think he liked me much, nor understood me, & he definitely hated lots of aspects of my personality.  He took a couple other students under his wing & changed their lives - mostly I think in religious thought - but he never tried that with me.  Around the time I started at Memorial, it had recently changed the nature of the grades there.  According to this historical report:

In the 1970s the educational trend to combine grades sixth, seventh, & eighth into a middle school was instrumental in the first name change for Memorial. As a result, ninth grade students were moved to the high schools, & grade six was moved away from elementary schools. Subsequently, the name for the school became Memorial Middle School.

The reason I brought up my old American History teacher is that he hated that decision.  He felt that ninth graders - you know, fourteen years olds - should emphatically not be in high school.  They were too immature.  They were still being tossed & turned by their hormones.  I guess he was happiest when middle schools were grades seven through nine.

My own memories are that seventh grade was a particularly awful year for me.  But on the whole I don't know if I had any really good years at Memorial.  I know only one thing: teachers who choose to teach at middle schools seem to me either incredibly brave or incredibly masochistic.  We were awful, all of us.  To a child.  Our bodies were changing, no one was explaining anything to us, & even if someone had, most of us couldn't have really understood it.

When I have met middle school teachers, I always ask them, right away, "Are you okay?"  I assume they're suffering from PTSD or something.

There will be middle school songs I think on the show tomorrow.  But it won't be my focus.  It was just that the first "middle" I thought of was school - when really, you know, it should be "middle age."