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At the beginning of sixth grade year, my mother let me know that she
had made sure to only move us to a town that went to the same school
district as the one I had been in thus, while I might be away from
the original home, I would still see all my friends at school. She
told me she would never be the type of mother that would take her
kids from their school and friends. But of course she had done this
with my two older brothers when they moved to the bigger house next
to the hayfield a year after I was born. In just a few years, her
actions would point-out that lie to me, personally. I would
conclude upon reflection that the only reason she picked this town
was simply because it was where the branch grocery store was that she
worked at.
The Middle School was just in another wing of the building I had been
going to in the previous five years, but that building was now twenty
miles away, this meant getting up at my not as older brother's high
school time to take a bus all the way from the center of this new
town to the school building. We would gather behind the town hall
where there were two buses, one for the high school building and one
for the Middle School. The branch grocery store was just a small
walk and a street crossing away, so I either rode with my mother to
the store when she went to work, or walk the third mile from the
apartment on my own during better weather days. This was the first
time I'd taken a bus without knowing anyone on it. In the previous
years I'd always had the same bus driver so at the very least I'd
have her as a familiar face, but this time I kind of had to guess
which bus to take. It was pretty easy as the younger kids were
boarding one and the older kids the other. The drive to the school
was up the interstate highway, a ride I'd already become quite
familiar with during the summer drives when my mother was temporarily
working with the night crew at the main grocery store.
Though in the same building, the middle school wing had its own
entrance by the new gymnasium where we would gather on the fold-out
bleachers. In time I would become familiar with some of these new
kids that I rode the bus with and we'd chat, tell jokes, and horse
around as we waited until the first bell rang to signal the start of
the school day. One time a kid was showing another how he couldn't
catch a dollar that was right between his fingers. The kid would
hold the dollar from the end with his thumb and index finger, while
the kid taking the challenge would be allowed to hold his open thumb
and index finger horizontally with the dollar hanging in between.
The first kid would let go and the trick was to close one's thumb and
finger fast enough to catch the bill. And they couldn't. The
story was one's nerves from the eyes to the brain then to the
arm were just too slow to register the bill was falling and then
order the fingers to close in time. After watching other kids fail
at this, I took the challenge... And I caught the bill.
This stunned the couple of kids watching and I feigned keeping the
bill for a moment just to tease, then handed it back and they wanted
to see me catch it again. So I
did. A couple more kids gathered to watch this and then
the bell sounded. In the following mornings those kids would be
trying to make their fingers close faster so they could catch the
bill as I could. I didn't tell them my secret: Rather than watching
for the bill to drop, I watched the holding kid's forearm. The skin
over his muscles would start to move before you could see his fingers
loosen so as I saw the skin of his arm shift, I would then close my
fingers, grasping the bill a tiny moment after his fingers let go. I
was pretty good at Rock/Paper/Scissors, too, which I learned at the
same time using the same method. Needless to say, if the challenging
kid wore a long sleeved shirt or jacket, I was out of luck.
Sixth grade presented multiple teachers instead of one, each with
their own subject matter. To make things easy
they called class periods 'mods,' short for modules, and decided to
rotate daily when the classes met. So your first class on your first
day became your second class on the second day and the last class of
the day before was your first class that morning. This was
supposedly setup because sixth period -- I'm sorry, mod six
-- was an hour and fifteen minutes long, not the fifty minutes long
as the other mods. Thus with rotating, each class would have the
extended period to teach with on a regular basis. But I just
suspected they were screwing with our minds for this first year of
Middle School as, by seventh grade, time periods were once again
called 'periods' and classes stayed at the same time each day.
Of the seven mods per day, five were for the core classes of 'Social
Studies', 'Science', 'English', 'Reading' and 'Math'. The two time
periods that didn't rotate were the 'Specials' mod and lunch
time/study period mod. Specials were Gym most of the time and Home
Economics or Wood Shop. Effectively, to even out the load of sixth
graders, half the kids would have Gym Monday, Wednesday, Friday one
week, then Tuesday and Thursday the next, while the other half of the
kids had the other days for Gym. For 'Home Ec' and 'Shop', the half
not going to Gym would be divided again with one quarter of the kids
at 'Shop', while the others had 'Home Ec'.
As the school had gotten into trouble in past years by shuffling off
the girls to 'Home Ec' and the boys to 'Shop', they now had mixed sex
classes which swapped at the half year mark, so I had 'Home Ec' for
the first two quarters, then Shop for the last two quarters. While
'Shop' was a natural for me as I had grown up using wood tools at
home, 'Home Ec' turned out to be my favorite of the two as it was
something new and I got to learn how to cook and sew. For our sewing
final project, I decided to make a bean bag chair, but rather than a
ball, I was going to make mine a cube to be different... And
sewing a cube was a hell of a lot easier to plan out than cutting and
sewing the pattern for a sphere. Cooking was a handy skill to
learn because, as it turned out, without a family to cook for my
mother no longer made dinner once we lived at the apartment, I had to
come-up to speed on how to cook for myself.
'Gym' class was with a parent of a classmate, a girl I had known for
years and had a play date or two during our Elementary School years.
Elementary 'Gym' had been run by our regular teachers over the years,
but with middle school gym class we had a professional teacher who
would shape us up and expose us to various activities, not just
those games played
with a dodge ball.
Also with this gym class came locker rooms and showers. As the
school had gotten into trouble the year before, using the showers now
needed the written permission of your parent. As it was biting nails
to get my parents to sign anything, it was really easy not
to get the written permission to use the showers and so I didn't.
Besides, the whole showering with your friends concept seemed kind of
weird. So our assigned gym lockers effectively ended-up being used
for the pair of shorts we would wear during gym class, then put back
once class was over.
Lunch time/study period was just that, a mod that was divided in half
with the first half being lunch time and then we'd go to our
homerooms for a study period until the next regular class started.
Study period could also be used for library time, but we had to
sign-out for that so they'd know where we were.
Of course, with Middle School, we got to have our first hallway
lockers. While for sixth and seventh grade we had to share, by
eighth grade we got to have one to ourselves. For a deposit, you
could get a combination lock from the office as our 'lockers' didn't
come with 'locks,' but as money was harder to get out of my parents
than a permission slip, I just brought a spare lock from home.
Anything I've missed?
impatient? Paper, eBook
help me break even: Shop
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