School Days Timelines: Sixth Grade

I’m blogging through my school days.  Fifth grade and the rest can be found here.

I’ve sort of been dreading writing sixth grade because boy, it was just not my year at all.  All of the nice, fun girls I’d gone to school with for years were in a different class; a really cool class with an awesome teacher named Mr. Myers, while I was stuck next door with Mrs. Andrade.  Mrs. Andrade was an older lady who dressed rather…seductively.  Rumor had it that she was a bit of a wild one outside of school, and I can still remember the cloud of perfume that followed her.  My classmates were interesting, though I don’t recall having many friends.  Even among the not-so-cool kids, I was not cool at all.  Also, Jessica, my best friend for the past two years, would be switching to another school mid-year, so her and the rest of the kids transferring to a new school were in a different class before leaving after the first half of the year.

The good things in my life were band, as well as the fact that my parents started getting me piano lessons, which I loved.  I really can’t overstate the fact that music was the biggest solace for me, and the thing that really kept me happy that year.  School was tough, namely because kids were mean to me, and also because I simultaneously excelled in English and struggled with math.  At the end of the first quarter, my teacher realized that I had read all of the books for Language Arts that year, and so she would send me out to go help tutor the Special Education students.  This opportunity definitely cemented the growing suspicion I had that teaching would be the profession for me.  On the other hand, I often had to stay in at lunch because I was terrible in math and needed a significant amount of help.  Decimals befuddled me, and my confidence really took a nosedive and never really recovered.

I also became a pretentious little snot in 6th grade.  I can laugh at this now, but I read the book Here’s To You Rachel Robinson, an offshoot of the Just As Long As We’re Together girls, written by Judy Blume.  Rachel is ridiculously smart, plays the flute, listens to classical music, cleans obsessively and reads Shakespeare while drinking tea.  All at the age of thirteen.  I decided that THIS was the role model I was looking for.  And so, I rejected pop music in favor of classical music and show tunes.  I dressed up as the Phantom of the Opera for Halloween, went to see the Phantom of the Opera for my 12th birthday and tried my best to get into Shakespeare’s sonnets.  My efforts to become Perpetually Precocious were thwarted once I realized that I really, really loved Green Day’s first album, Dookie.  I’d alternate Mozart with Green Day and Offspring.  This still sums up my incredibly vast musical taste.

The most memorable moment came in sixth grade when a girl who was mentally retarded was put into my class.  Her name was Anna, and she was fairly high functioning.  Because I was tutoring in Special Education, my teacher assigned me to be her buddy, something I didn’t mind and actually sort of liked, until it turned in to social suicide.  We all took turns being Person of the Week, and when it was Anna’s turn, someone spitefully asked her who her best friend was.  Anna didn’t want to talk, instead preferring to write her answers on the board.  As she started to write, the small titters of laughter broke out in the room, and as soon as I saw the “A” on the board, I knew what was going to happen.  She finished writing my name, and all the kids in the class laughed at me, calling me horrible names and mocking me incessantly for being friends with her.  As a twelve year old, there was no worse fate.

I ended sixth grade with a super fun day: Jessica’s parents rented a limousine to pick us up and take us around town for lunch and to go swim at Jessica’s house.  I remember being devastatingly sad at the end of elementary school: no more walking to school just around the corner or having my little brother around or visiting my third grade teacher regularly.  I was on to middle school, and I was petrified.