|
Last night, my wife and I had the pleasure of dining at a friend's house as their 2 sons were preparing for their first days of school. One of them was preparing for the start of what's generally thought of as the worst period for schooling and childhood/adolescence (at least in America): Middle School, specifically 6th through 8th grades (ages 12 to 14 roughly). Since he's going to be in band and play the same instrument I played through college (trumpet), I came over, lent him my old trumpet, and gave him a few pointers/taught him how to clean and care for the thing. Of course, since he's already chosen to be a band nerd during these years, I can only assume he'll suffer in much the same way I did: constantly having your instrument case stolen, getting shoved down stairs while trying to maneuver the unwieldy thing (I was scrawny), and having kids call you gay because you didn't take wood shop with all the other mongoloids. We all tried not to scare him about the next 3 years, but we did drop in some nuggets of wisdom that will likely mean nothing once he's confronted by mean kids. Stuff like "you don't need expensive clothing, you're just paying for a label" or "no one will care what did at 12 when you get to college." Of course, he ended up having his shoes made fun of by some kid wearing LeBron James shoes today and he already hates middle school. Maybe it's time for us to break out our own stories for him and give him an "It Gets Better" session. So what were your worst Middle Grades Horror stories?
|
#
?
Aug 12, 2015 00:25
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 19, 2024 20:37 |
|
|
Our middle school runs from 4-6, then 7-9 is called junior high and that's the really lovely one. Everyone was a complete rear end in a top hat to each other constantly, and there's poo poo I look back on and just wonder what the gently caress we were all thinking. I think probably the worst thing that happened is when this one kid got shut under a giant, hollow box in drama class for the entire period when there was a substitute teacher. I wasn't directly involved, but everyone in the class knew exactly what was going on and none of us did anything to stop it, so I think we all shared some of the blame. The really bad part was that he got marked absent, and everyone blamed him for "hiding under the box" when the normal teacher came back. Of course, this was the kid who came up to my friend when he was on crutches, called him a "loving cripple" and stole one of the crutches. As it turned out, my friend could very accurately throw his remaining crutch, so he didn't get too far before having his legs taken out by a spinning crutch. Both crutches were recovered shortly thereafter without further incident. In Grade 6, I mainly remember getting into a bunch of stupid fights about dumb poo poo. I never really got into actual fights before or after that year, but I guess I was just full of piss and vinegar for that grade.
|
|
#
?
Aug 12, 2015 00:38
|
|
|
Some dude loving pushed me while I was taking a piss. WTF?! I didn't even loving know him. I smacked my head against the wall while trying not to spray pee everywhere. So I acted meek, finished up, pretended to leave, snuck back and pushed him while HE pissed. Bwahahaha. Then there was a short fistfight. Later during the day I was taken to the office. Despite being a big scary bully, the pantywaste ratted me out. Again, WTF. He didn't even know me. He had to point me out during lunch. Other kids started poo poo with me sometimes, but he was the biggest fuckin pussy about it. He sucked rear end at fighting but I remember this attack pissing me off most. It offended my sense of fair play and middle school valor. I was like 90 pounds sopping wet so I had a lot more literal fights. Makes you kinda a target and I never stood for people giving me poo poo. But my folks had my back as long as I didn't strike first, and I was a martial arts kid so I was physically safe. Got a few bruises, head locked once... Kids that age don't know how to fight real anyway. The biggest frustration was the admin's response to my self-defense. They kept giving me detention for it. It felt like they wanted me to take poo poo from other kids like a little wuss and there was no way in hell I could do that. In retrospect, it was good training for dealing with giant, uncaring retarded institutions later in life. Now I'm a corporate drone and dealing with my upper tier bosses is exactly like dealing with a middle school principal. Advice for the kid: have it worked out with your folks how you are expected to respond to attempted bullying. Then, when poo poo does go down, you'll have the comfort of knowing that you reacted properly, in what your folks agree is the ultimately correct and necessary way. Try not to stress too much over the idiots and jerks. Tough advice to take in middle school to be sure, but try anyway. None of those people is ultimately meaningful in your life except for maybe as a seed of a personal anecdote. Besides everyone chills out by high school. Just try not to kill anybody till then and you'll be fine.
|
|
#
?
Aug 12, 2015 01:24
|
|
|
PT6A posted:In Grade 6, I mainly remember getting into a bunch of stupid fights about dumb poo poo. I never really got into actual fights before or after that year, but I guess I was just full of piss and vinegar for that grade. That's what makes it obnoxious, everyone is in that same lovely awkward phase of life which apparently just makes humans super salty. And goddamn, you care so much about that meaningless bs. Looking at it from the outside its laughable, but from ground level its deadly serious.
|
|
#
?
Aug 12, 2015 01:31
|
|
|
Middle school is horrible because everyone is super awkward and it's a race to be the least awkward, so the quiet and nerdier kids get bullied mercilessly. I went to a very small school from K-8 and we had 12 people in my class and I was by far the geekiest. There was no escape and I can honestly say those were some of the worst years of my life. I was the only girl in my glass who wasn't into makeup and boys and was a giant huge nerd so of course I was the target of so much abuse. Things got better in high school, partially from people growing out of that poo poo and partially because having a larger and new group of kids around meant I could start fresh find my fellow nerds and we could all be ostracized together. We were super nerds but we had fun and we're still all good friends today years later. This article might be a good thing to show him if he starts getting down on himself for not being one of the cool kids. I've personally witnessed what they describe in the article, all but a few of the "cool kids" I went to school with dropped out of school and many are drug addicts and can't hold down even a minimum wage job.
|
|
#
?
Aug 12, 2015 02:46
|
|
|
There's a lot of truth to that article, but my school must've been the exception. The two biggest bullies I had are a lawyer who married into a prominent family in a large city in the SE US and a petroleum engineer who served in Iraq and they'd probably both make perfect Republican candidates for office. At least the kid that stole my bike and threw it in the garbage is working at Little Caesars.
|
|
#
?
Aug 12, 2015 16:04
|
|
|
The main thing I recall about middle school (also grades 6-8 for me) is not any one or few specific horrible incidents, but rather this general, constant state of low-grade terror - the feeling that at any moment, out of nowhere, someone could just start loving with you and there was nothing you could do about it. It seems that in middle school, if you are small, quiet, or awkward (and I was all 3), you were prone to becoming a target at any point, so you just tried to get through each day hoping that it was someone else and not you. I survived middle school mostly by learning to be invisible, essentially scrubbing myself clean of any visible signifier or personality trait that could possibly be latched onto as a target of ridicule. For the most part it worked, I was probably picked on less than most kids equally scrawny and socially inept as I was simply because I was so anonymous. Unfortunately, it became a bad habit that I carried with me into high school, college and my adult life, and has possibly cost me friends and professional opportunities throughout my life. So my only advice to anyone going into middle school now is not to let the specter of occasional bullying or ridicule completely shut you down, try to develop a personality and hobbies even if they sometimes make you a target.
|
|
#
?
Aug 13, 2015 02:18
|
|
|
letthereberock posted:The main thing I recall about middle school (also grades 6-8 for me) is not any one or few specific horrible incidents, but rather this general, constant state of low-grade terror - the feeling that at any moment, out of nowhere, someone could just start loving with you and there was nothing you could do about it. It seems that in middle school, if you are small, quiet, or awkward (and I was all 3), you were prone to becoming a target at any point, so you just tried to get through each day hoping that it was someone else and not you. As much as there are certain things that will make you more of a target, part of the problem as I see it is that there's no way to avoid being a target. It's just too volatile. Hormones are strong poo poo. Imagine a building with a few hundred people in it all being introduced to a mixture of alcohol and cocaine, all of whom have no experience with it before. Of course it's going to be hosed up, and no one involved gains the self awareness to understand why they're doing these things until much later.
|
|
#
?
Aug 13, 2015 03:30
|
|
|
When I was in middle school "pantsing" was all the rage. That is: sneaking up behind someone and pulling their pants down in front of a large group of peers. I lived in constant fear of pantsing, dodged a couple of attempts on my pants, but ultimately never got pantsed. The other pastime of middle school children was having your buddy get on his hands and knees behind someone while you shoved that someone backwards over your buddy. I swear, between that and pantsing, my head was on a constant loving swivel. I probably have excellent situational awareness to this day. Also, a girl my age (who I didn't know all that well) got knocked up in 7th grade and had the kid. She was 13 loving years old. I have a young daughter now, and that's just insanely terrifying. Other than that I just remember a lot of fighting, a ton of posturing, and copious amounts of bullshit revolving around being "in the know"... like "oh man, you don't know what a rusty trombone is? Hell, I do it like three times a day! Look at this loving baby!" edit: oh yeah, and everyone starts drinking and doing drugs, which doesn't exactly help
|
|
#
?
Aug 13, 2015 04:38
|
|
|
I got in a fight with a kid who stole my cellphone and got suspended for "instigating". A couple days later he brought Brass Knuckles to school and beat the poo poo out of his girlfriend and was sent to juvie. I think the school administrator hated me because I got suspended multiple times because people would bully me and then I would hit them/say something really mean etc. and I would get suspended.
|
|
#
?
Aug 13, 2015 08:41
|
|
|
Am I the only person in the world who didn't have a horrible middle school experience? I mean it wasn't perfect or anything but I didn't get into any literal fights involving actual violence.
|
|
#
?
Aug 13, 2015 08:54
|
|
|
M.C. McMic posted:The other pastime of middle school children was having your buddy get on his hands and knees behind someone while you shoved that someone backwards over your buddy. I swear, between that and pantsing, my head was on a constant loving swivel. I probably have excellent situational awareness to this day. people actually do this in real life lol did your class also push the big hoop around with a stick during gym class IIRC middle school was the prime era for having one of your buddies barricade some kid in the bathroom stall when he went to take a poo poo while the rest of you hung over the divider and spit on him. If you got a cold maybe wait until the wierd kid left his soda unattended then spit in that too. A lot of rock throwing and hitting each other with sticks though I don't recall anyone getting too seriously banged up. This was all before my class matured a bit into rubbing their nuts on each other under the classroom tables/just doing a ton of drugs and kicking the living poo poo out of each other. Personally I was just angry all the time and really liked hitting people, I don't know how much of that was adolescent hormones and how much of that was having to spend all day around these other psychos. A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 10:02 on Aug 13, 2015 |
|
#
?
Aug 13, 2015 09:55
|
|
|
Kids in middle school are definitely hosed up. i remember everyone (including myself) always bullying this mentally retarded kid from iran for years, when suddenly someone from the school across the park punched him and everyone rallies to his defense and then treats him like a king for the rest of the week until the status quo is re-established. Looking back there's so many times where kids who at the time I thought were just "weird" or dumb were actually mentally disabled or had autism. You just assumed they're like everyone else, I don't think it was ever explained to us otherwise. A Wizard of Goatse posted:people actually do this in real life lol It had a short lived run through my school until one kid with some poor positioning got kicked in the nose while acting as the "stool" half of the gag.
|
|
#
?
Aug 13, 2015 10:49
|
|
|
what the gently caress middle schools did you people go to? everyone was chill as hell in my day except for the polish or slavic or whatever the fucks who would laugh in broken english at you if you didnt wear jncos every day of the year.
|
|
#
?
Aug 13, 2015 11:13
|
|
|
zVxTeflon posted:what the gently caress middle schools did you people go to? everyone was chill as hell in my day except for the polish or slavic or whatever the fucks who would laugh in broken english at you if you didnt wear jncos every day of the year. Yeah, holy poo poo. I was a giant dork and got messed with, made fun of, etc, but nothing got to the level of some of the stuff here. Granted, though I was awkward as gently caress, I certainly wasn't timid. Also, I was kinda oblivious. I had one kid in highschool apologize for bullying me in middle school and to this day I have no idea what he was talking about.  Only remotely serious incident I can remember was a guy in the gym locker room who took my calculator and was going to put it in the toilet. I got mad and punched him in the kidney. My noodle arms didn't do poo poo, but it surprised him enough he threw it at me. Didn't even occur to me at the time he could have just kicked my rear end, because he was way bigger than me.
|
|
#
?
Aug 13, 2015 15:43
|
|
|
Reading this thread, I was like... wow... did everybody get picked on in junior high school? Somebody must have been the rear end in a top hat, doing the bullying! Then...A Wizard of Goatse posted:IIRC middle school was the prime era for having one of your buddies barricade some kid in the bathroom stall when he went to take a poo poo while the rest of you hung over the divider and spit on him. If you got a cold maybe wait until the wierd kid left his soda unattended then spit in that too. A lot of rock throwing and hitting each other with sticks though I don't recall anyone getting too seriously banged up. This was all before my class matured a bit into rubbing their nuts on each other under the classroom tables/just doing a ton of drugs and kicking the living poo poo out of each other. Personally I was just angry all the time and really liked hitting people, I don't know how much of that was adolescent hormones and how much of that was having to spend all day around these other psychos. photomikey fucked around with this message at 20:30 on Aug 13, 2015 |
|
#
?
Aug 13, 2015 19:05
|
|
|
There was a kid in my 8th grade class who was addicted to Vicodin. That was pretty hosed up. Otherwise, the worst part was the racial segregation. As a white kid, once I accidentally stepped on the foot of a black girl and I was harassed all week by her friends. But it definitely went both ways. And both blacks and whites shat on the Asians and "bosnians" (many of whom were from Serbia, Russia, etc) constantly.
|
|
#
?
Aug 13, 2015 19:28
|
|
|
I don't remember middle school being so violent, but that's probably because I'm a girl and girls generally fought with shittalking, rumors, and verbal harassment. It was nasty and difficult to counter if you sucked at mean comebacks (I totally sucked at this). In general though, I don't remember middle school being a bad time - I had a solid group of friends, it was a small K-8 school with ~50 kids in a grade, so we weren't suddenly being placed in a new environment with kids from different schools, so sixth grade was the same old crew in the same old building, just with lockers and class periods. I was also The Artist and had been since kindergarten and I was always nice about drawing cool dragons and whatnot for other kids, so despite being weird and awkward, I rarely had trouble because other kids (and teachers) respected my talent. Furthermore, in my grade, we had a trio of social pariahs, all girls, who attracted like 95% of all the bullying (from both guys and girls). Because these girls took the brunt of the poo poo, anyone less weird and less susceptible to being baited into explosive reactions was spared. In retrospect it was pretty lovely for them - only one of them was truly unlikeable but no one bothered with the other two because then you'd become a bullying target by association. I did have an incident in seventh grade when I got harassed by some eighth grade girls. It ended after they came and teased me in the hallway one time and I charged them with a raised fist (they were NOT expecting that) and chased them off, and my mom called the ringleader's father. The dude must have gone off on her pretty bad because after that, they wouldn't even look at me. Also, my parents were firm believers that if some nasty kid didn't leave you alone after talking to him/her and talking to a teacher and/or parent, you punched the fucker in the jaw - I never hit anyone in middle school (or got hit), but it was nice to know that my parents had my back in the event I got in trouble for fighting back (instead of lying down and taking it like a wuss like I was technically supposed to). Actually I think the bullying I saw at Y camp was worse than at school. Kids didn't know each other well so there was no established pecking order, and there were also homeschooled kids that were easy targets. It's also frighteningly easy to get sucked up into this terrible sort of frenzied lynch mob mentality and add your voice to the laughing and jeering at one poor kid (homeschooled) who said some dumb faux pas things on the camp bus, because it's what everyone's doing, and you're sure as gently caress not going to stand up for the kid because you'd ruin everyone's fun and turn the mob on yourself. In those sorts of situations at camp, it was kind of like be a poo poo or get poo poo on.
|
|
#
?
Aug 13, 2015 21:06
|
|
|
I was bullied relentlessly in junior high back in the late 90s (pre-Columbine for most of it where it seemed bullies got away with a LOT more and "It Gets Better"-style support was non-existant). I was basically a super-nerdy kid (still a bit of a nerd but I've learned proper dress, exercise and a solid career makes a world of difference) that got beat up, teased and ostracized by friends like there was no tomorrow. With guys there truly is a more violent element because that whole macho thing is at play plus the interest in girls means that guys are constantly trying to prove they are men by acting tough. I've theorized in the past that adult meatheads are basically guys that never grew out of that mindset and still think looking and talking tough is solely what women are looking for rather than emotional intelligence and empathy. I can list a bunch of stuff that has happened to me from being grabbed and thrown into lockers from behind, tripped in hallways, called "white trash" "human being" and "garbage", had rumors that I hosed my pet dog spread plus blind tackled on the soccer field and dogpiled on so hard I got winded. I grew to despise the myth that all bullies are this sole person who has it hard and takes it out on other people. This is bull-loving-poo poo. All the bullies I ever encountered had great homes, a circle of friends and were emotionally healthy they just liked to kick the poo poo out of "that human being" in groups. Another myth shot down: there are no "meet me at the flagpole at 3PM" like in the movies: it's a 5-on-1 assault that starts right there and finishes fast. Oh, and the thing that will always enrage me the most is the complete and utter lack of awareness the administration had towards my situation often lumping me with my assailant like we were both at fault. Left me really untrusting of authority figures unless they prove to me they have a good head on their shoulders. My advice? Eh, at the risk of sounding like a "man up" style guy I just got really tough mentally and psychologically and went back to school every day because I didn't want to give up. The trick is to say "gently caress those people" (thanks, Mom, for that bit of advice) and be able to cognitize that I was a good person and they were the ones that were wrong. I found myself shrugging at the insults and talking myself out of situations. High school was like a huge improvement because it's not so much people matured but rather chilled out plus the huge influx of new people dilutes the pool and you don't see those jerks as much anymore. I'm sounding really angsty right now like I can't let something that ended 15 years ago just die. But, it is dead and doesn't bother me at all anymore but this is what I can recall when asked.
|
|
#
?
Aug 13, 2015 21:54
|
|
|
photomikey posted:Reading this thread, I was like... wow... did everybody get picked on in junior high school? Somebody must have been the rear end in a top hat, doing the bullying! Then... tbc while I was into thumping heads when I caught anyone doing it to me I wasn't one of the dudes who was into sharing body fluids with everyone
|
|
#
?
Aug 13, 2015 23:14
|
|
|
I was coming to terms with my homosexuality while dealing with all the baggage Catholic middle school entails. One day my pubescent male peers were talking about hot girls, as many male middle schoolers do. When they asked who I thought the hottest chick in the world was, I immediately tried to think of women who were popular and/or sex symbols. I said Madonna, which was apparently a hilarious answer because she's old or whatever.
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2015 01:47
|
|
|
Justin Godscock posted:I was basically a super-nerdy kid (still a bit of a nerd but I've learned proper dress, exercise and a solid career makes a world of difference) that got beat up, teased and ostracized by friends like there was no tomorrow.
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2015 02:40
|
|
|
cheetah7071 posted:Am I the only person in the world who didn't have a horrible middle school experience? I didn't have a horrible experience either. But my idea of "horrible" is probably different than others. I got into 2 fights total. And all of them were with bullies and involved me getting my butt kicked. But I only got bullied twice.
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2015 02:53
|
|
|
I went from a private elementary school to a public middle school. Didn't know a single person and it loving sucked. I was so miserable by 7th grade I wanted to crawl into a hole somewhere and disappear forever. There wasn't even a whole lot of bullying, though I did hit this other kid pretty hard with a plastic ruler in 6th grade cause he was laughing at me. Got suspended for it. My parents put a lot of pressure on me to do well and would make me do extra work at home to help me study. I couldn't stand it. I just wanted to play smash bros and my dad would be handing me pages of math problems to do. I was also a year younger than almost everyone because some teacher let me skip kindergarten. And to top it off, I was the spitting image of Bobby Hill. That nickname stuck for years. I spent my time playing video games and all of a sudden high school rolls around and I immediately made friends with other video game nerds. In the end things worked out but it was loving bleak for a while.
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2015 03:26
|
|
|
My story is almost the same - I skipped the year before middle school, so I ended up thrown right into it a year younger knowing literally nobody. I didn't get bullied, but I was still a weird video-game shut-in until junior high provided more of the same people. I have horrible memories of middle school, but they're of loneliness, not getting swirlies or someone jamming my cell phone in my butt or whatever kids do these days. Bullying seemed nearly non-existent at my middle school & high school. The administration must have been doing something right, but I certainly didn't have the presence of mind at the time to notice what it was. Maybe OP's friend should send their kids to my (public!) middle school?
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2015 11:57
|
|
|
I went to a rural school, in a sea of other rural schools, so it was all-white, all farmers, all the time. It wasn't so bad, but it was kinda funny how much they trashed city schools. They said schools in the city get constantly vandalized, that they can't keep carpeting as it'd be burned, can't keep chalkboards 'cause they'd be broken, and we all would be raped and murdered if we went there by the merciless killer students. They basically read Chimpout's description of black schools, and scrubbed out the racial slurs. It strained belief even at the time. It didn't help me feel comfortable when I went to college when I had to talk with *gasp* nonwhite people, but luckily my teachers' racism didn't stick too deeply in my mind.
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2015 14:59
|
|
|
I got told off for 'bullying' this arrogant kid who had poo poo long hair and wore socks with sandals (I just kept calling him Jesus). Think I also once punched someone simply because their face pissed me off, idk Both of these people are still pricks/creepy so I have no regrets
|
|
#
?
Aug 14, 2015 15:12
|
|
|
letthereberock posted:It seems that in middle school, if you are small, quiet, or awkward (and I was all 3), you were prone to becoming a target at any point, so you just tried to get through each day hoping that it was someone else and not you. For me in Southern California, Junior High was 7th & 8th grade (Elementary was K-6, High School 9-12) and while I was both quiet and awkward, by the 4th grade I was the tallest kid in school. When I went to Junior High I was still basically the tallest kid in school. The bullies would give me some poo poo (again, quiet and awkward, hung out with the nerds, etc) but would never go very far/try to fight because I towered over them.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2015 00:01
|
|
|
Where did you guys go to school? In my middle school all the security guards were racist, which would have been okay for me except there were no white security guards, just black, hispanic and pinoy. (And I guess the pinoy security guard didn't do jack for anybody; he never said a word and if poo poo were about to go down, he'd walk away.) We were right across the street from one of the worst high schools in the city, so the high schoolers would come over and gently caress with/initiate/push drugs or whatever on the kids. Security guards weren't gonna touch them because they were afraid of getting beaten up, knifed or shot, so I think the guards just made friends with some groups of kids and tried their best with them. Or something; clearly, we didn't have much to do with each other. The head of security was - no poo poo - a convicted multiple child rapist and crack addict, and the administration knew that because he was the Vice Principal's cousin. So yeah, this was a lovely school. Until I found out the magic words "I need to file an assault" the security guards wouldn't do poo poo for me when I told them things like, "Hey, those kids are throwing bricks at my head" or "I just got knocked unconscious from getting hit from behind and my glasses were stolen." After learning the magic mantra and sending some kids to juvy I got a different kind of attention from the thugs of my school. A kid pointed a gun at me. This guy was a lot older than the other middle school kids, so they all worshipped him like an older brother. The security guards didn't mess with him, he had already been with a lot of girls/raped them, and he drove what to a middle schooler was a nice car. Yeah, he drove to middle school. In my memory, this guy was very much the charming psychopath, the kind of leader who likes to hurt his friends just to belittle them. He pointed a gun at me and when I didn't flinch he said I was alright or something and most of the black kids eased off on me. (He was black.) Don't get me wrong, I was never one of the more bullied kids at my school, but after getting cops and guns involved there was less violence in my life. I don't mean this to be gruesome or self-congratulatory or anything, this is just how it happened. My high school went through like a half a dozen principals in the 90's because they kept getting beaten up. So if you went to school later than the 90's and you hear statistics about gang violence and violent crime being down compared to the 90's, this is how it used to be. And this was in Seattle. TwoQuestions posted:I went to a rural school, in a sea of other rural schools, so it was all-white, all farmers, all the time. It wasn't so bad, but it was kinda funny how much they trashed city schools. In my middle school the carpeting was never burned (I think?), there were no chalkboards, only overhead projectors (which worked as well as public school overheads can be expected to), but there was a ton of tagging and a bunch of holes in the walls from kids punching them (I was one of those kids). The graffiti was rarely painted over, with predictable results, and the holes were never, ever fixed. Girls were raped but not like at gunpoint. More like in the super awkward way a kid might, where she doesn't put up much resistance or doesn't know how to say no, and eventually gives in. I don't know of any kids who died in middle school but I remember a few who died in high school. The worst of those was the kid who I used to pick on and beat on: he was recognized eating at Ezell's Chicken (the fried chicken restaurant whose food, legendarily, Oprah has flown to her). He went to a rival high school than the one that claimed Ezell's, so some kids followed him out, chased him down and knifed him in the back. He was scrawny and small and had braces. gently caress, I think I remember him better than any of these other lovely memories I'd rather forget. MartianAgitator fucked around with this message at 06:13 on Aug 15, 2015 |
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2015 05:57
|
|
|
Maybe it's just different countries, but my secondary school (11-16 years) never had rape, drugs to a small extent and the one time someone had a knife they were excluded for two weeks. Exclusion is being sent out the school. Inclusion is being shut for the whole day in small cubicles where your'e meant to get work and have nothing to do. No mobile phones and no books. Aside from 15 minutes to get lunch it's 5 and a half hours of nothing and they wake you up if you try to sleep. I got that on several occasions when the poo poo who brought a knife in kept calling me gay and being 12 years old I cared too much. He always got to sucker punch me and was it the way before I could do anything back. He was quite a bit shorter and smaller than me. He was also the one bully that fit the archetype of being troubled and from a council estate. I see him on my way to college occasionally and have been tempted to get off my bike and start a fight to get him back. I would be arrested, but it is so tempting to try and put him in hospital for the year of hell he gave me before we drop subjects and you aren't set on ability for languages which I was poo poo at. So I was in the bottom set with the hosed up people. In hindsight I wish I'd started a full-blown fight with him in lesson and smashed his head into something. The teacher was a useless NQT and I'd have 3-4 minutes before anyone arrived.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2015 09:56
|
|
|
TwoQuestions posted:I went to a rural school, in a sea of other rural schools, so it was all-white, all farmers, all the time. It wasn't so bad, but it was kinda funny how much they trashed city schools. That was pretty much my middle school and high school, although a lot of the kids were the children of employees of a small liberal arts college. I was too dense to consciously pick up on the dogwhistle racism but everyone assumed that all big cities (defined here as more than maybe 75k people) were all pretty much Mad Max or Robocop. Internet didn't exist in that area at the time so nobody really had any reason to believe otherwise and the nearest actual cities were Flint, Saginaw and Detroit, which really weren't happy places at the time. I don't recall any fights in middle school, and since there were only 200 of us in the entire school I'd probably have heard about it. There were one or two every year in high school but it was always the same two guys.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2015 11:52
|
|
|
I was a fat little boy who wore Hawaiian shirts and greased his hair straight back. I wore enough cologne to gag. I was chronically late for the bus, so I only had time to shower like every other day. Sometimes I just popped a breath mint instead of brushing my teeth.  Somehow I was never bullied. 
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2015 16:34
|
|
|
One of the fads when I was in middle school combined three favorites of 13-year-old boys: shouting, being jerks, and dicks. One person would say "penis" and someone else would have to say it louder then them, and so forth, until we were shouting. This was done at inappropriate times, such as during a Spanish test. The teacher never said anything, so there were just a couple boys in the class shouting "PENIS!" intermittently and giggling, while somehow correctly conjugating verbs. I've wondered if this was a fad anywhere else, but it's certainly not something I'd be able to search for and find.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2015 20:53
|
|
|
Zodijackylite posted:One of the fads when I was in middle school combined three favorites of 13-year-old boys: shouting, being jerks, and dicks. One person would say "penis" and someone else would have to say it louder then them, and so forth, until we were shouting. This was done at inappropriate times, such as during a Spanish test. The teacher never said anything, so there were just a couple boys in the class shouting "PENIS!" intermittently and giggling, while somehow correctly conjugating verbs. Yes, the penis game was everywhere.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2015 21:08
|
|
|
KoB posted:For me in Southern California, Junior High was 7th & 8th grade (Elementary was K-6, High School 9-12) and while I was both quiet and awkward, by the 4th grade I was the tallest kid in school. When I went to Junior High I was still basically the tallest kid in school. The bullies would give me some poo poo (again, quiet and awkward, hung out with the nerds, etc) but would never go very far/try to fight because I towered over them. I had a dude climb me to get at my face; where there's a will there's a way. Zodijackylite posted:One of the fads when I was in middle school combined three favorites of 13-year-old boys: shouting, being jerks, and dicks. One person would say "penis" and someone else would have to say it louder then them, and so forth, until we were shouting. This was done at inappropriate times, such as during a Spanish test. The teacher never said anything, so there were just a couple boys in the class shouting "PENIS!" intermittently and giggling, while somehow correctly conjugating verbs. yyyup
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2015 23:22
|
|
|
Oh yeah, haven't thought about that game in years. If you didn't yell PENIS the loudest your buddies got to punch you, good times. This reminded me of another classic game, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_knuckles.
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2015 23:31
|
|
|
Malcolm posted:Oh yeah, haven't thought about that game in years. If you didn't yell PENIS the loudest your buddies got to punch you, good times. This reminded me of another classic game, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_knuckles. i don't think we ever got that clause because when you're like 14 and someone is doing call-and-response penis why would you not yell out PENIS
|
|
#
?
Aug 15, 2015 23:55
|
|
|
7th and 8th grade don't exist you silly. It's just a horrible nightmare I had in the middle of the rest of the nightmare that was public school.
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2015 00:36
|
|
|
Malcolm posted:Oh yeah, haven't thought about that game in years. If you didn't yell PENIS the loudest your buddies got to punch you, good times. This reminded me of another classic game, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_knuckles. I did witness bloody knuckles on one occasion, when two high school football players got bored one morning. We didn't have the penis game, though we did have one called "shut up, bitch" where the goal was say it as loud and clearly as possible. There was one child who stuck out more than the others for being awful in middle school. He had made his mark by stealing the teacher's calculator. We had a drama class that year, taught by a closeted, but obviously gay male. The teacher attempted to teach us the value of rumors one day by putting us in a circle and whispering something to someone and told them to whisper to the next. The goal was to see what the message was when it came back around. I never knew what the original was or how it had distorted because this one boy had changed it to "Mr. Smith is gay." He later wrote in other boys' yearbooks that year that they should pose for Gayboy. I've Googled him in the past few months; he's a convicted child molester. In homeroom as an 8th grader, I sat near a girl who had matured a bit fast, especially for the 1990s rural south. She would brag about having sex with her boyfriend Bob and later blew up a condom like a balloon in class.
|
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2015 03:41
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 19, 2024 20:37 |
|
|
M.C. McMic posted:When I was in middle school "pantsing" was all the rage. That is: sneaking up behind someone and pulling their pants down in front of a large group of peers. I lived in constant fear of pantsing, dodged a couple of attempts on my pants, but ultimately never got pantsed. Ok, I'm about 95% sure on this, but they referred to this at my school as "shanking." I seem to remember a kid getting his shorts ripped off him in gym and a bunch of kids yelling "you shanked his rear end!" or something. I know that sounds like I mixed it up with "the act of getting stabbed with a sharpened piece of scrap metal or wood in prison," but I didn't make up these terms. A lot of this has to do with where you went to school, I'm sure. There was a big race problem at my school. Ever seen that movie The Principal? My school was just about like that. It might have been an outlier. This wasn't in the inner city either. It was in the rural deep south. Outsiders often seem to think that race is mostly an issue in urban schools, but the rural south is actually very racially stratified as well. You had white families like mine who'd been there since the 1700s as itenerant laborers and the decendants of black slaves and sharecroppers. All the wealthy decedents of the plantations go to private Christian academies. About the only good benefit of this arrangement of corn-fed white and black kids was that we always had state champion football teams. I saw a kid bite a chunk out of a cop's arm at 14. In the cafeteria. De Nomolos fucked around with this message at 18:17 on Aug 16, 2015 |
|
#
?
Aug 16, 2015 18:14
|
|