Junior high memories revisited in Daydreaming on the Porch

Years ago, as part of outreach duties at my job, I found myself in a local middle school at a rescheduled career-day presentation that morphed into “social studies night” for parents coming to pick up their kids’ report cards. I had been asked to talk about miy job and how it impacted students.

I ended up not having much to do, so I pulled out some scrap paper and wrote down a few recollections of my own junior high experience. And, since middle schools are what junior highs came to be called, minus the 9th grade and with the addition of 6th grade, I was in the perfect place. Timeless, it was, as my surroundings, including long hallways with lockers, conjured up some vivid memories, mostly not so good. I didn’t like junior high.

To re-iterate, the middle school where I found myself that evening many years ago reminded me exactly of the New Orleans Public Schools junior high where I spent part of 7th and all of 8th and 9th grades. The school was brand new when we moved in sometime during my 7th grade year. I think it was 1963. For the first half of 7th grade, we were in portable, temporary classrooms until construction on the new junior high was completed. It was located just two blocks further up the street from my elementary school, which was only one long block from where I lived. Thus, from 5th grade through 9th, I walked to school. When I entered high school in 10th grade, I took the bus.

I remember I often felt very isolated and stuck for interminable hours each day in a vast, impersonal facility, with endlessly long concrete-block-walled hallways lined with rows of lockers, each with a Master combination lock. I am sure you remember fumbling with those contraptions between classes.

I can recall those times now — the clanging, horrible, rapid-fire bell to change classes; taking books out of my locker and quickly slamming the door shut, as time to get to class was of the essence. Then I hurriedly walked to English, history or science class through a packed hall full of chattering, babbling students letting off pent-up energy before their next period of confinement within four walls, presided over by teachers of various levels of competence and commitment to the profession.

The junior high experience was not one of the finest and most enjoyable chapters of my young life. I was never one for teeming crowds, students or otherwise. I was very tall and gangly — 6 ft. 1 in. — and thin. Although I liked to play basketball, I always had an aversion to organized sports, yet I had to endure a period of time (punishment for something, apparently) on the junior varsity team in 9th grade, where I warmed the bench during games. I hated that.

Then there were the awkward and nerve-wracking school dances in the cafeteria which I attended on a couple of occasions, both times feeling very out-of-place and foolish. Why did I even go? Partly out of parental coaxing, and partly from that silent, ominously dark and hovering cloud known as peer pressure, which in adolescence, as we all know now, is not merely dark clouds of conformity, but savage storms with wind and fire that could make or break social standing. Why else would my awkward, gangly early-teenage self show up for one of those parent-teacher corralled, adolescent rites of passage? And in 8th grade back in the early 1960s I sure didn’t want to dance with “girls.” And gen here was the sweaty anxiety soaking your shirt under a not and miserable blue blazer coat and tie. Was the Right Guard spray deodorant working? What would the girls think? What would be whispered the following week at school?

School dances. Can you even imagine the authorities putting up with the risks and chancery of such mass teen gatherings today? Can anyone enlighten me? Do they still have middle school dances anywhere?

I don’t think I was alone in believing that junior high was a very awkward and even scary stage of adolescence. I was such a serious student, and everything had to be just right: homework done on time, tests thoroughly studied for to the point of overkill, attention paid in class. I don’t remember having a lot of fun during those years. However, I was considered a model student by my teachers, one of whom let me grade quizzes in her class and another, the most feared teacher in the school, taking very kindly to me since I was such a well-behaved youngster, eagerly listening to everything she said. It wasn’t that I was trying to be some “teacher’s pet.” I was just extremely conscientious and worried about everything, and I tried to please my teachers. I guess I was just brought up that way. I think I was that way since birth, trying to please my mother, but having the opposite effect on my father.

There were incidents I will never forget such as being taunted by a bully in 8th grade and lashing out at him finally, only the second time in my life that I was in a fight. I am a very peaceable, non-violent person. But I couldn’t take it any longer when he kept taunting me one afternoon in P.E. “You’re so stupid,” he kept saying when he and I, and a group of several others, were playing basketball in the gym. He never bothered me again after I decided to try to “fight” him, although I was hopelessly out-maneuvered, and he was embarrassed that I was such a tall, wimpy guy, flailing my arms around and trying to land a punch as he danced around me. None of the other kids thought it was funny, and they felt bad for me. I was not an unpopular student. The bully humiliated himself that day.

I have a theory about why he despised me so much. It was a classic case of a kid from a less privileged, working class background, smart enough to know I represented everything he might not ever have: respect of teachers, college education, and being in the academically gifted tracks. Regardless, you never forget a bully. The scars are lifelong because it’s such a vulnerable age.

By 9th grade, I was ready for high school. I was older and more mature, although I was always much more mature than my chronological age. I did have a very good grounding in grammar and English compositiion skills in both 7th and 8th grades, and this was invaluable in preparing me for my later writing career and encouraging my love of writing. It was something that came naturally to me, but I was so fortunate also to have had excellent English teachers throughout both junior and senior high school

When we got report cards at the end of 9th grade, I felt that a chapter in my life had ended and I awaited, with nervousness and expectation over the summer, my entrance into the hallowed halls of high school.

Last updated June 22, 2024