Blogging Through The Years: Seventh Grade

When I first started thinking about seventh grade, it seemed like this big empty space in my memory.  It seemed to bleed into other years and have little character of its own. Seventh and eighth grade were not the best years of my life (at least in retrospect).  I didn’t have a lot of friends, but what really makes them different from other years is that I didn’t have a best friend.  I’ve never been that person with a ton of friends, but through almost all of my life, I’ve had that one person I talk to all the time.  I was basically a girl without a group, so I spent my time with one of my good friends from middle school and this other girl she was friends with who I didn’t like.  The rest of the time, I was alone, and I started to grow more reserved.

I’ve always been kind of obsessed with self-transformation (not uncommon in this culture) and disappointed with the reality that you cannot magically change who you are over night.  But, when I look back at seventh grade, it’s amazing how quickly I transformed into this super student.  The seed had been planted in sixth grade, but seventh grade was when I made the final slide into nerdom.  Before, I wasn’t this smart girl who just didn’t try hard; I had tried and I just wasn’t very good at school.  So, it was really weird to me less than a year later to be getting comments from teachers and other students about how I was the smart girl in class.

I was uncomfortable with that, because it came with a lot of pressure to keep performing at a high level. I guess I’m still uncomfortable with it.

I also enjoyed the attention and I think I sometimes even played it up.  One instance stands out.  First, I should say that I am not a BSer.¹  I don’t even have the level of ability in BSing that would just be helpful from time to time.  Either I know what I’m talking about or I don’t.  But, there was this one time in all of my life where I pulled off an amazing feat of BSing, and it happened in seventh grade.  My math teacher would occasionally put a really challenging problem on the board, and we would all try to solve it.  The first person to get the right answer and explain how they got it won a prize and, most importantly, got  the glory.  I often finished in the top 5 or so, but I had never been first.  This time, I just threw something together and went up to the teacher (if you got it wrong, then could go back and try again).  I didn’t have the right answer, but I must have done something that looked kind of right, because he asked me about one part and I started BSing until I somehow got him to tell me the right answer, so that it came off like I’d almost had it myself.  My name went up on the board and everyone thought I was so smart, but, really, I still didn’t understand the problem at all.

This same teacher taught another session of the class earlier in the day.  He would give them the same tests, grade them right then, and then hand them back.  The people in that class would then tell us the answers and all of us big cheaters would get 100% on the tests.  My friends and I copied each other’s homework throughout high school, but this was probably the worst cheating I ever did.  It’s weird to think about it now, because I have never cheated in college;  I wouldn’t even know how.

It went hand in hand with both becoming a good student and not having a lot of friends that this was when I finally got into reading.  Most of the writers and people I know now have always loved reading, but for me it didn’t happen until seventh grade.  I started reading everything.  I read books from the Baby-sitter’s Club and then also Steven King.  I remember very clearly the first ever adult novel I read.  It was John Grisham’s The Rainmaker.  John Grisham is my Dad’s favorite author.  I didn’t tell him I was reading The Rainmaker until I finished it.  It was a point of pride to be sure I could do it.  I swear I read that book constantly, yet it still took me three weeks to get through.  I would read in the morning before going to school, on the bus to school, during free time in class, on the bus ride home, all afternoon until dinner, and then at night before going to bed.  It was a new way of life.

1. In case BSing isn’t universal, I mean bullshitting–making it seem like I know more than I do. [↩]

Related posts:

1. Blogging Through The Years: Sixth Grade
2. Blogging Through The Years: Second Grade
3. Blogging Through The Years: First Grade
4. Blogging Through The Years: Third Grade
5. Blogging Through The Years: Fifth Grade