After 6th Grade, Things Got More Interesting!

Partly Hormonal and Another Part Ability Grouping — Yay!!!

I already talked about my early school years as part of the post called How Author Background Affects What They Write. Here I am the summer before I became an 8th grader.

About the time I was starting 7th grade, I was still acting somewhat serious and sane, and my grandfather commented happily that he was glad to see I wasn’t “boy crazy” like so many girls my age. Oops! Something kicked in within months of that conversation, about the same time I got a crush on the guy in “Tammy Tell Me True” with Sandra Dee. My mother told me often that school should be partly about doing well in school and partly about learning how to be social and have friends. Having friends hadn’t been all that easy prior to junior high school. But I as lonely and not very popular in grade school. And I was bored most of the time. But 7th grade was wonderful! And my grades fell. I didn’t even qualify for Junior Honor Society. Oh, horrors.

As the pace and material got more challenging in the later grade levels, I still expected myself to perform as effortlessly as I had in grade school. But as was the case with the old junior high schools, and still today with high schools — and this is where relativity again comes in — I was in classes with others who were smart because classes were…