Personal Narrative: How The Middle School Has Changed My Life

Before the first grade, we moved around a few times before ending up here in Sylvania. As a child, both my parents worked full time jobs and I was always at after school day cares or at my grandparents houses, never really got to spend a lot of time with friends or was able to socialize with many people. So growing up most of my time was spent with my brother and I thought nothing of it. As I grew up I began to realize that I had become stuck in some bad habits. My brother and I weren't asked to help around the house much but when we were we never listened. But to my surprise there were no consequences for our disobedience. At the time I thought I had it good. Around the time I got too middle school I began to realize the problem. I began

I was never the type of kid to standout in school especially not in the hallway. I was never too tall, never too short, not too scrawny, but the one thing I like to do is make people laugh. Yet even though that was very fun and all I still leave my legacy behind, which as weird, as this sounds, I was the one kid teachers never took seriously, but for the most part I never got that bad of a grade, in middle school(except when it came to 7th grade language arts class).

Memories can last a life time, so we tend to only remember the extraordinary ones. Extraordinary like the essay “The Yellow Ribbon” by Pete Hamill, in which he talks about how a person named Vingo, was riding on a, bus recently released from jail, to this oak tree explaining to some passengers that he had told his wife to leave him if she wanted, since he went to jail or to go to this oak tree and tie a yellow ribbon around it to see if she wants him to stick around and he will go and check it out. In the end, he saw hundreds of ribbons tied on to the tree. Not only is this an amazing story, but also very unforgettable one as well, because he finds out that after four years in jail his wife has enough love for him to go to this tree and tie hundreds of ribbons just to show the type of love the women had for Vingo. I have to say that, I believe this story is truly unforgettable, but I also got a story that is very extraordinary, like the time that I got my very first car. Furthermore, I didn’t just get a car, I got the love of two truly loving parents.

From my experience, surviving middle school takes a mixture of luck, naive fearlessness, and an aggressive number of colorful plastic binders. I started my first day of fifth grade a jumbled mess of nerves, anxious about making friends and doing well in class, and inexplicably dressed head-to-toe in red, white, and blue swag my mom got when the Summer Olympics were in Atlanta. I mean, my backpack matched my shoelaces, which matched my pants and my shirt. I might have even had a hat. A hat. A precisely matching hat. That I wore all day. Needless to say, I was not a particularly cool child. I studied hard, had a core group of equally nerdy friends, and constantly worried about whether I was doing the right thing or, perhaps more accurately, becoming the right thing. Was I not studying hard enough to get into college? Or maybe studying too hard, missing out on my youth? Would I grow into my teeth one day? Would my skin eventually stop looking like greasy peanut brittle?

Once again I found myself at the bottom of the food chain entering 5th grade. I had just moved back to Eureka as my mom realized she wanted to be closer to family, and I remember how scared I was. I came in the middle of the school year yet again, so there I sat in the library as I waited for my teacher to come grab me. I remember seeing familiar faces from the prior year pass by me on their way to first hour. I waited patiently, still no teacher had come to claim me for their homeroom. I realized I had been forgotten. What a great way to start off the new year... not. Finally a teacher came and got me and laughed about the fact that I was forgotten, which I failed to find as funny as she did but oh well. Looking around my homeroom I anticipated seeing all the same faces, quickly I noticed that there were A LOT of new faces,

As I went through 1-9 grade school I finally found grit. Going to St. Mary’s during 1-6 grade school getting up at 6:30 every morning just wanting to hit the snooze button so I could get that extra hour of sleep in. After getting ready for school, I would get on the bus, three stops later we would pick up these annoying foster kids that gave me a headache every day because they would shut their mouths that I would have to push through school with. Then building up all the energy sitting in 1-2 classrooms the whole day waiting for recess so I could let it all out. Since I pushed through those challenges, I was able to move on to middle school. During my two years of middle school three out of the five days of school, I would get up at 5:30 and

When I hear the word “survival”, I think of someone who has made it through the impossible or conquered a near death experience; but that isn't all that it means. According to the the Merriam Webster dictionary, “A survivor is a person who copes well with difficulties in their life.” Moving from elementary school to middle school taught me many new characteristics such as how to be more independent, responsible, and more open to changes.

Choices. Regardless if the choice is good or bad, everybody makes them. There are times where the choices people make can alter their lives forever; this was one of those times. It was April 26, 2013, a normal friday for me attending West Middle School in my sixth grade year. At the time, I was the definition of an attention freak; I always wanted the spotlight on me. For a reason still not known to this day, I wanted people to feel bad for me. I thought that by gaining sympathy, I would be able to make friends and be the talk of the school. What I didn’t realize is that not all attention is good; some can be devastating. Unfortunately for me, I was not thinking about the effects of the choice that I was about to make. I couldn’t have possibly

I remember when it was time to go from being a 12 year old 6th grader, to a 12 year old middle schooler with a lot more responsibilities than I was used to having. I had to make sure all my homework was done on time (It took me awhile to get the idea of no late homework hammered into my head), asked for help when I needed it the teacher wasn’t going to help as much as the elementary teachers would do unless I asked, with asking for help was a lot harder than I thought it would be everyone was confused too, after awhile the teacher finally got tired of running around the room jumping from student to student, marched up to the front of the class and wrote on the board of how to do a certain assignment.

If I were to build a new middle school in San Marcos, CA where I live, I would power and heat the building by clean energy such as solar and wind power. I prefer to use solar and wind energy because it is cleaner source of energy and is less costly than the current way of powering buildings which is by electricity.

Harry Potter, Junie B. Jones, Narnia, Lemony Snicket, Hunger Games, Lord of the Rings, Goosebumps, Magic Tree House, and the Boxcar Children: Popular book series that most kids get into. I never did. Ever since school required mandatory reading, I perceived books as hassles. School effectively turned me off of reading for pleasure. Going into middle school, where students have regular book reports and summer reading, I faced a challenge. To make it by I had to learn to live with books, as they played an integral part to my career as a student. However, my current state of mind labeled reading a hassle and wanted nothing to do with it, necessitating change. Transitioning from elementary to middle school, I matured both physically and intellectually.

Middle school is kinda weird, especially if it's your first year. Your meeting new teachers, students so it will be awkward at first, but then you get to know everyone in your class. I was a different kid before I Entered middle school, I was really immature, quite short

In November, the air is cool and burns my face. The wind passes through my nose and it feels as if I am breathing in a thousand miniature razors. My finger tips and ears are numb. My right side aches where I had been elbowed in the ribs and my ankle from where I tripped just up the field. I hear my mom in the crowd, “Go, baby, go!” Even though, every muscle in my body screams for me to stop, I go. The pain does not bother me, neither does the cold. I am just happy to be here.

For the most part, I have rarely experienced deindividuation, as I have never really done anything out of my character; however, there is one specific moment I can recall from middle school. If you had good grades at the time when your advisory teacher checked every monday, you were given a free pass to spend the rest of the weeks advisory periods playing games. I don’t think there was time when I didn’t have good grades, so I got to mess around every week during this time period. One day, my friends and I discovered one of the rooms wasn’t being watched by a teacher, so, of course, we started going to that room everyday. It didn’t take long for us to completely lose our normal morals around each other, due to the group anonymity and that we

Last year, I was shy of speaking English because I didn’t know a lot. I was afraid that the people would laugh about me If I said something wrong. But the last day of school, my English ESL (English Second Language) told me, “Saul, come”, so I went, “I just wanted to tell you that you have developed your English a lot, and next year you are not going to be in the ESL program anymore, I don’t want you to be afraid of talking English. Good luck.” I thought she was right, so this year I’m not scared of talking English anymore.