Seventh Grade

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The three years that I spent in Junior High were pretty much the most miserable of my life. It's a pity that they coincided with me being 13 - 15 years old. There was so much misery. I won't use teacher's real names here because I'm going to be pretty negative about them. In fact with few exceptions I don't remember the names of many at all. I will use some of the derogatory names that we dreamed up or inherited from those before us.
Anyway I did three years in the hell of Northside Junior High School and seldom had anything to smile about.

Seventh Grade English - Ms. R___ was of the old school. She ran her classroom with an iron gauntleted fist and she and I knocked heads from the beginning. Do you recall parsing (or diagramming) sentences? This word underlined, these words written on downward sloping lines; nouns, verbs, adverbs, prepositions, participles, adjectives, etc.,etc!! So much garbage. It is like having to remember the name of the firing pin retaining pin in the M-16 bolt carrier group. You just know what it is, you know where it goes and you know that your weapon won't work right without it. I hated parsing sentences. I hated having to identify the different nomenclatures of words. I hated seventh grade English and I definitely hated Ms. R___. One particular day in the spring I remember her gripping and squeezing my upper arm to the point that I almost cried. As I left the room for my next class I said loudly, "I hope she has a heart attack and dies!!" During the next class some 9th graders were playing outside and they began to pester Ms. R___ through the open windows. She yelled at them for a while and when that didn't work, she went outside to chase them down. The heart attack wasn't fatal, but we never saw the old biddy again. Of course I gained some notoriety because my wish came true - and I have always been VERY careful about what I wish for since - but that was one of the best days in 7th grade.


Of course there are more vignettes where this one came from and you'll be seeing some of them soon. Did I mention that junior high was the nadir of my whole life?