Expecting the Hogwarts letter any day now

[charliesmum]

Charlie had his Middle School orientation this morning. I just called him to find out how it went, but he 'doesn't remember' what he did. It's not that he doesn't remember, really; he just has a hard time verbalizing things. I think he enjoyed it, though.

When I started this blog, in 2004, Charlie was 6 years old, going on 7. In just a few weeks he will be 11. And in Middle School.

He is still making up Doctor Who episode titles. The latest, which I thought was rather clever, is "The Accidental Wedding". In it the Doctor falls in love with a Cyberman 'accidently'.

So, question...

What do you remember best about 6th grade? I had an awesome teacher, and had my first sleep-over that year, and I invited the 'cool kids' and they came.

I also remember having to do an oral report I'd totally forgotten about, but fortunately I'd done the written report on the legends of the Pine Barrens, and all I had to do is re-tell the tales, and I remember the entire class hanging on my every word. It was great.

So...go...what's your best memories of the 6th grade (or whatever the UK equalivant is - 1st year, if I go by Harry Potter, I guess)

Comments

[wolfgangmozart.livejournal.com]

Haha, lucky, you got to hang out with the cool kids. I was a card-carrying loser who got mocked mercilessly. I fell in a muddy patch one day and received endless ribbing.

That was also the year of all the girls having to find buddies to "walk behind them." You know how that is: oops! There's a red spot on your jeans! Quick, so-and-so, walk behind me until I can get to a phone and call my mom to bring spare jeans!

[charliesmum.livejournal.com]

I said good memories!

I was pretty much a 'card-carrying loser' too. Mostly because I had no self confidence. The girls who were 'popular' liked me, for the most part, with a few exceptions, and if I'd trusted in myself more, I might have done better in the popularity thing.

When I was in 6th grade big combs in your back pocket were all the rage.

[mabfan.livejournal.com]

In 6th grade, my homeroom teacher allowed me and my friends (Garo, Norbert, and two other kids named Michael) to share a table. (We sat at desks arranged into four large tables.) As the five of us liked to play Dungeons and Dragons, it gave us a space to do that during free time.

[charliesmum.livejournal.com]

Our desks were like that, too!

[chavvah.livejournal.com]

I wasn't around for most of Grade Six (which is what we call it up in the great white north ;)). I had bronchitis for about six weeks before Christmas holidays, and then in February I was in a skiing accident while on a school trip, which put me out of commission for much of the spring.

One thing I do remember is that on the first day of school, the teacher gave us all hardbound journals to write in. The neat thing about it was that she called each one of us up to her desk and said something special to you before she gave you your journal notebook. When it was my turn, she said to me, "I heard from Mme C. that you're a really talented writer. I hope you'll write me some funny stories."

I use the same kind of notebook now to take notes at work. Occasionally it still brings me back.

[charliesmum.livejournal.com]

Wow...sick and broken leg? Yikes.

That is so nice about that teacher. What a good thing to say that another teacher said something nice about you.

[chavvah.livejournal.com]

Nope, not broken leg--broken head. :P I still have a big scar on my head, but I've gotten pretty good at hiding it over the years.

What that teacher said stayed with me for a long time. It's a good reminder to me, now, as a supervisor of young adults, that casual comments I make could be things that will stick with them for the rest of their lives.

[nam-jai.livejournal.com]

You know, I don't even know -- what grades are covered by middle school? Because it wasn't a term I heard growing up. When I was a kid, it was grades 1-6 were grade school, 7-8 (sometimes 9) were junior high, and the rest was high school.

Good memories of 6th grade are kind of hard to come by for me. Not a good year! I transferred to a different school and took a rather precipitous slide down the social ladder as a result. I went from being a fairly confident, well-liked kid in my grade school to being scorned and ignored in the new one. Quite a shock to my self-esteem, just as I was coming up on puberty.

But I did make friends from among those at the bottom of the social heap with me -- they were the ones who were kind enough and decent enough to reach out to the new kid, so they made for good friends. Sleepovers with them are actually my strongest memories of that time. In particular, my new friend Debbie's family really embraced me -- I spent lots of time over at her house. I even went square-dancing with them once or twice (that was their family hobby).

I remember the big combs in back pockets from that time too!

[charliesmum.livejournal.com]

When I was in 6th grade, that was still in grade school. In fact, until this year, that is how it was in Collingswood, too. This whole '6th grade in middle-schhool' is new to me!

Remember those Koala Bear clip things?

[nam-jai.livejournal.com]

Don't know why it's taken me so long to reply, but yes, I do remember those koala bear clips! I even had one myself.

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

I remember having a decent teacher, Mister Welch, who was good at teaching English and telling stories.

The rest of it...I was still in elementary school, not middle school. I was just waiting till seventh grade (the first year of junior high) when I could get away from the bullies that had plagued my existence for the past six years.

[charliesmum.livejournal.com]

I'm hoping you did get away from the bullies, but I'm going to guess you didn't. They are everywhere.

[gehayi.livejournal.com]

No, not for a long time. Not till college, in fact.

[jeffxandra.livejournal.com]

Sixth grade I recall some book in Reading that had to do with an emotionally disturbed girl and the teenage boy who fell in love with her. There was a metaphor with a model (balsa-wood) plane if I recall correctly.

[charliesmum.livejournal.com]

Oh, was it "I never Promised You a Rose Garden"? I'll bet it was. I remember that being an Important Book once upon a time.

[cactus-wren.livejournal.com]

Ugh. Best part of sixth grade was when it was over. My school didn't have enough students to make up a third sixth grade class, so my class was half fifth grade and half sixth grade. It was a pain in the butt. I don't remember the teacher's name, but I do remember her face (probably partially because she had a big mole on her face) and she was Not Nice. At all. One of the other sixth grade classes that we switched with was taught by Mr. Bogzovich, and I do remember him as being the coolest and always looking forward to his class.

[ciara-belle.livejournal.com]

Sadly, I don't think I have any good memories from sixth grade. That was my last year at Catholic school, before my parents finally got me the hell out of there. I had the worst teacher ever, who hated me, I missed 35 days of school, and on several occasions, my mother had to physically drag me from my bed and dress me in order to get me on the schoolbus.

[kirathaune.livejournal.com]

In sixth grade my class discovered chess, so there was a flaming chess war for most of the year. I was champ a few times!

We had a cool history teacher that when we spent a marking period studying Rome, we came to class in togas! (Actually bed sheets, but no one cared.)

Sixth grade also marked me starting my three-year saga with Braces, and the start of being called "Metalmouth", "Braceface" and "Long John Silver". (I guess they wanted to combine my braces with my long-leggedness for that one!)

[placeboweek.livejournal.com]

oh man, sixth grade was a bad year for me. I transferred to a 'gifted' magnet school program but didn't have the emotional maturity to handle it. It was baaaad.

But! I do have fond memories of drawing lots of comic strips involving frogs, and also going to a farm and getting to feed a goat named Abraham.

[wolfma.livejournal.com]

My best memory of 6th grade is no longer having to go to Elementary School. My classmates weren't mean to me because they hadn't known me for five years, except on the bus, where they had known me, and where they wouldn't let me sit down.

[bookgrrrl.livejournal.com]

Oooh, sixth grade was awesome. One of my very favorite teachers, Mrs. Soldner was my "homeroom" teacher. We switched classes (you know, walked across the hall 2x per day) and had lockers for the first time.

6th grade had the beginnings of boyfriends and girlfriends (I didn't have my first until 7th grade). We also got sex education that year- DON'T DO IT KIDS.

I do remember that the teacher who taught it always made the shy girl read the paragraphs with "penis" in them. Poor thing.

[susanthecurious.livejournal.com]

Sixth grade was the last year of elementry school here also. We were out in little portable buildings and changed classes, which was amusing in the rain. It is the year I remember Nikes first showing up on new kids who had transfered in from the 'city'. One of my favorite things was one of my best friends was legally blind and had a machine that magnified the page for her and we would sit together and read comics on it when we could. Recess was probably my favorite part of the day and we would hang from the bars and flip off, I remember them being called penny drops. I think I'd be terrified if I saw a kid doing it now. If I remember also, it was the last year of tight legged jeans before 'Designer' jeans hit in Junior High to then be replaced by Levi 501's.

6th Grade Memories

[purplemer3.livejournal.com]

Sixth grade... Hmmm... It was 1994-1995 (!) and my last year of elementary school. I remember that ours was the first classroom in the school to have its blackboard replaced with one of those new-fangled whiteboards! ;-)

I had my last really good school picture before hitting that awkward teenage stage that would plague my school pictures right through high school.

My teacher read the class the book The Giver by Lois Lowry, which to this day is one of my favourite books of all time.

[femaelstrom27.livejournal.com]

Hmmm...

6th grade was probably my best middle school year. (My middle school was 5th through 8th grade -- weird, right?) To be honest, pretty much all of middle school SUCKED for me, but 6th grade was the most bearable. I had an awesome teacher named Ms. Hill who, I realize in retrospect, was probably a lesbian. I was just getting hardcore into Lord of the Rings.

My friends and I had gotten over our fifth grade problems (being incredibly nervous about starting a new school and thus being really desperate, fake, and cruel), but hadn't hit yet puberty which would bring issues in 7th and 8th grade. So I had a good group.

Obviously I don't really know and am not really qualified to say, but this might be a tough year for Charlie. Starting a new school, and at such an awkward age, can make everyone jittery and desperate and mean, like I said. Not to scare you with horror stories, but starting middle school was a lot of stress for me -- I lost a lot of my possessions and would subsequently panic about losing them...I had a lot of really bad panic attacks that year. My best friend was worse; she would screw up and then lie and cheat to cover it up, and she got so panicky she developed asthma and threw up in the middle of the hall one day.

I hope Charlie escapes absolutely everything I went through, but if he's having a tough time he can always call me :)

[charliesmum.livejournal.com]

I hope Charlie escapes absolutely everything I went through, but if he's having a tough time he can always call me Awww...you know what? That is really nice. I think he'd like to have someone to talk to that isn't his mom.

Middle school was pretty sucky for me, too. If I could somehow skip Charlie past it, I probably would. But puberty is hard, I guess, and a building full of kids going through it is never gonna be pretty.

[sphinxvictorian.livejournal.com]

The second half of my 6th grade year was in 1976, so we were doing a lot of Bicentennial studies. So this was the year I fell in love with John Adams. I did reports on him, including a 15 page biography of him. I saw a local production of 1776. I basically immersed myself in the Revolutionary War. We almost did a scene from 1776, but none of the other girls who were doing it with me really wanted to and they got bored with it, and it never happened.

My homeroom teacher was also the school's art teacher, and she was really beautiful. She wore long flowy dresses and she had those big eyeglasses that were (literally) rose-tinted. She had amazing handwriting too. I had just learned from my dad how to make my handwriting better, and it was still kind of messy, but I was getting better. My best friend was named Jenny and her parents had a beautiful house up on the Santa Barbara "Riviera" and it had a huge family room in the basement where we used to dance around to

I think I also had tennis lessons after school that year, but I was a lousy tennis player, the racket was a little too heavy for me. Although I remember doing a great backhand.

It was a good year, other than being tortured by one of my classmates, who hated me, and used to kick me in between classes in the hallways. But I was used to abuse, and as I later came to understand, she was the product of a very strange hippie household and her parents basically neglected her, in that way that rich hippies could.

I think I liked seventh grade better, which was also at the same school, a private school called Marymount that had been a Catholic girls school complete with nuns. But it had gone downhill a bit and the diocese was going to get rid of it, so the parents ended up taking over. It was still Catholic, in that there were still religion classes, and the students had to go to mass. But it had gone co-ed, and most of the nuns had left. Also, you didn't have to be Catholic to go there, but unless you were definitively from another religion, like my Jewish friend Jenny, you had to go to mass. My dad hated that (he had an extreme dislike of Catholicism), but I had picked the school and he and Mom had let me go there, so he had no real say in the matter. He did refuse to let me give up anything for Lent though, which I was most disappointed about, I remember!

Anyway, I went there through ninth grade, and then went to a public high school. But Marymount had my heart, I loved the teachers, I loved the academic rigor of it, and I wished it had gone on through high school (it did later).

[sphinxvictorian.livejournal.com]

OMG. I kind of went overboard on my reminiscing! Sorry! ;)