52 Week Challenge: 14

52 Week Challenge: Question 14

Where did you go to Junior High or Middle School? What was it like for you?

Junior high was a mixed bag for me. Some parts were good, some parts were bad, and some parts were just okay. I went to two different junior high schools in Orem, Utah. The first one sucked and the second one was a lot of fun.

Junior High:

I had a little bit of the same situation that occurred in 6th grade. A new junior high was being built and while it was being built the school district crammed everyone into Orem Junior High. The next year when the new junior high was complete...half of the kids stayed at Orem Junior High and the other half (me included) went to Canyon View Junior High. They were two very different schools and I had two very different experiences at them.

Orem Junior High

In 7th grade I attended Orem Junior High. The transition from elementary school to junior high was a difficult one for me. I had a crappy schedule and the wrong lunch...all of my friends from elementary school had a different lunch than I did that entire year. I had to make a whole new set of friends and I quickly learned that making friends in junior high was very different from making friends in elementary school. The cliques!! They were awful and unlike in elementary school people didn't just automatically want to be my friend. They already had friends. I can be a fairly reserved and shy person until you get to know me and then I am very out going but in a new school and at the age of twelve I was not out going. I had to really put myself out there to get to know people.

Luckily on the first day of school, in my history class, when the teacher was calling the roll I heard the name of Britney (the best friend of my friends in Springville ...the one who had moved away when I moved in) called. I literally froze. What?! She's in this class!! When my name was called I saw her head whip around and we stared at each other in horror. That was the class right before lunch and it turned out that none of her friends were in our lunch either. I remember her coming up to me and begrudgingly saying hi and begrudgingly asking me if I wanted to eat with her and I begrudgingly said okay. The rest is history folks! A great friendship was formed. We were two little newbies finding our way in 7th grade and we became best friends in the process.

I had a particularly rough start that year because I had broken my arm right before school started playing "Olympics" on the monkey bars in the dell and I had a cast on my right hand so I couldn't open my lockers (hall or gym) and I could barely write. It was a nightmare. I was also mortified to have to take a shower in PE. Yes, we actually had to shower and come and show our gym teacher that we were wet and then she would put a check by our name and we could go get dressed. I was always late to class and getting stuck behind slow movers. The school was extremely over crowded and my teachers didn't seem to care about that and I got many tardy slips. My grades went down because I was so overwhelmed. I was also forced by my mom to take band and to play the french horn. Ugh...I hated it so much and I was terrible. My mom had been in band when she was in school and she loved it and so it was forced upon me. I was extra annoyed because I was already taking piano lessons which I loved. So I was already playing an instrument!! But she was VERY insistent. (It's so funny that after saying that my kids will NEVER have to be in band...I have a son who absolutely LOVES BAND and is super talented!!)

I really hated going to school that year. I remember thinking that I literally hated every single class that I had with one exception...Honors English. That particular class and teacher I loved. The first book that we were assigned to read was The Outsiders and since I had been reading and rereading that book since the 4th grade I was an expert. :) My teacher, Mr. Christensen, was super nice and thought that I was really smart...due to my extensive Outsiders knowledge. Ha ha! His confidence in me gave me the boost that I needed to get through the first part of 7th grade. I was also lucky enough to have Mr. C for 8th grade Honors English too. (I ran into Mr. Christensen at the mall when I was in college once and it was really nice to be able to tell him how much I appreciated him as a teacher!)

Despite a rather rough start to 7th grade I eventually found my way and ended the year on a pretty good note. Britney and I became great friends and our circle began to expand. Also, not only did I have school friends, I also had fantastic friends in Springdell, and good grades.

Canyon View Junior High

In 8th grade the new junior high was completed and I attended Canyon View Junior High also in Orem, Utah. I loved it! 8th grade was a really fun year! Britney and I were best friends and we had a big group of guys and girls that we hung out with. I felt like I was hitting my stride in 8th grade. I had great grades and good friends...both at school and at home. Britney and I both liked boys that were in high school and we both had older friends so we spent quite a bit of time at Orem High hanging out with them. I liked most of my classes with the exception of PE, Math and Band. Yes, I was still being forced to play the french horn and I still hated it and was still terrible. My favorite classes were my Honors English (Mythology!) and foreign language. I was in my second year of German in 8th grade. I remember being really happy. Such a welcome relief! The year that Canyon View Junior High opened, the school district decided to have 9th grade remain in junior high. I was very disappointed because I was really looking forward to going to Orem High with my friends from the dell in 9th grade.

For 9th grade I spent the first part of the year at Canyon View Junior High and loving life. The second half of my 9th grade year was spent at Center High School in Kansas City, Missouri and it was sheer hell. I will comment on that in my post about high school.

The first part of 9th grade was amazing! I had great grades, a great social life, amazing friends, a cute older boyfriend, Rex, (who was also my next door neighbor). I felt like I was on top of the world!! My very best friends have always been my friends from the dell... Naomi, Kyle, Chris, Rex, Matthew. I am not going to go into detail here about all of them because I have talked about them in great detail on the blog already. I am going to focus mainly on school and school friends in this post. Because we lived up the canyon we were pretty isolated from the kids that lived in town. When the weekends rolled around we always just hung out with each other. Then we had school friends that we hung out with during the week. But I think all of us would agree that we wanted to and would rather hang out with the kids from the dell than with anyone else but sometimes school friends mixed in and hung out with our dell group and it was extra fun. That year because most of my older friends could drive and so we had a bigger combined group of dell kids and school friends. Britney often hung out with all of us and we had an absolute blast!! My social life was going great! I had gone on my first date! I went to see Pretty in Pink with Rex. No waiting until I was 16 for me!!  I was counting down the minutes until high school!!

I finally got to quit playing the french horn...hallelujah!! I also got to work in the school office as an aid (I had extra room in my schedule because I didn't go to seminary) and I loved bustling around in the office, answering the phone, running errands, and taking attendance. (I used to have to walk to the seminary building to get the attendance and would feel so sorry for all the little Mormon kids who not only had to go to school but also had to go to church during the day!! Ha ha!!)

Then my parents dropped the bomb that we were moving to Kansas City and life as I knew it was over. It took me years to recover from the blow. High school was rough...certainly not the glory days that many people experience. You couldn't pay me a million dollars to experience high school again for even one day. Those three and half years were very tough...at school and at home. It was a difficult time for me.