Reschool Yourself

This week I’m revisiting my schools in reverse order to record descriptive details that I couldn’t focus on while participating: students’ hair color, teachers’ vocal inflections, and so on. I went back to high school on Tuesday, middle school today, and am finishing up at elementary school tomorrow. The timing just happened to work out [...]

Although I’m in high school now, I’ll still be catching up on a couple of middle school posts.
It felt appropriate to close my time in middle school on Halloween. I always loved celebrating holidays in school, because everyone spent the day sugared up and in a good mood, and we didn’t get any work done [...]

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Here are some middle school memories you may not have thought about in a while. Do you remember….
1) Being asked out by the friends of a kid in your class?

During lunch last week, a 7th grade boy approached me on the blacktop.
Boy: Jack wants to know if you’ll go out with him.
Me: Does Jack know [...]

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The use of technology at Altimira is one of the biggest changes I noticed upon return. In math class, I couldn’t get over the digital overhead projectors, which display 3-D color images. I’m not sure how they work, I kept staring in wonder at the image of the teacher’s hands in full color, instead of [...]

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Sixth-grade outdoor education stands as one of my all-time best school experiences. Visiting Mendocino Woodlands, which is located about three hours north of Sonoma, was my first meaningful connection with nature, and with my peers. Singing around a campfire and nervously hiking in dark woods together bonded us in a way that no activity on [...]

I expected 8th grade to be as emotionally turbulent as I’d remembered it, with kids constantly eye-rolling, scoffing, teasing, and just generally being too cool to talk to you. I admit to being one of  the worst offenders. The current 8th graders at Altimira are nice. Let me repeat that: They’re nice! The ones I’ve [...]

As much as I’ve gone out dancing in the past few years, at clubs like Blondie’s, Vertigo, and Double Dutch, I still felt apprehensive about attending a middle school dance. Since I didn’t learn to love freestyle dancing until college, I’d only been to one dance while at Altimira: the 8th grade graduation dance, where [...]