7th grade was not that bad for me, just very tumultuous.
I was in 7th Grade in the fall of 1977 to June 1978. What was bewildering at first was having to go to different classrooms with different teachers for each class instead of one teacher and one class in 6th Grade.
I also had a problem with budding sexuality. I was very much a child at the beginning of 1977, but by that fall, I found myself suddenly afflicted by raging hormones and deep lust after noticing that all the flat-chested girls of the 6th grade had suddenly "blossomed" over the summer. I just didn't know how to handle all those lusty feelings. It didn't help that I had a crush on a cute neighbor girl, who though younger than me, was in the 8th grade.
The time I was there was also one of the peak years of marijuana use in the country and it certainly was entrenched at the school. I would say at least a quarter of the junior high schoolers smoked pot regularly and almost half smoked cigarettes. I would always get a whiff of that sweet-sick smell of pot when walking near that parking garages of some apartments adjacent to the school and was careful to stay away from those 8th grade "burnouts"
They all had long hear and a look of menace in their eyes, quite stressful for this wide-eyed thirteen-year old who had never even heard of pot at the beginning of the year. Fights broke out all the time. Some of these druggies were so tough and scary that even the teachers were afraid to break it up.
Even before school started I was starting to change. I had my first bouts of depression at the end of 1976 when I was 12, because I came to the cold-realization of how crazy the world was (though nothing like now). The summer between 6th and 7th grade was very strange. We were in New England that year and I had a great time visiting places in Vermont, Franconia Notch of New Hampshire and Mt. Desert Isle, but at several points on the trip I would go into bookstores and really get into end-of-the world, dystopian science fiction. It was an odd mix of adventure and melancholy that summer just before 7th grade.
It's also strange that I remember so many songs that came out during the fall of '77. I remember almost all of the Top 40. Whenever I hear Paul Simon's "Slip Slidin' Away", Heatwave's "Boogie Nights", or Rita Coolage's "We're All Alone", it always takes me right back to that narrow sliver of time. Now if I look at a current Top 40 Chart, I don't recognize one song. Nor do I want to.
Looking back, I have fonder memories of 7th grade and the strange summer before. I realize now that I probably had normal feelings like any other 12-13 year old guy, but at the time, it came on so sudden, that it really frightened me how I couldn't stop staring at all these blossoming girls. One druggy in math class would brag about how big his girlfriend's chest was and I yelled "So what!" But that was before I saw her.
Now the 9th grade....you want to talk about an ugly time. I went to an all guys catholic school and kind of forgot that women were half the human race for four years. Ugh
