I was actually always really self-conscious about my gap. In middle school, this group of girls were always trying to beat me up – they called my gap a parking lot. It was a really awkward time.
As a child, I walked with my friends to Rosa Parks Elementary and then to Ben Franklin Middle School. I rode Muni to Galileo High School. And thanks to amazing teachers who believed in me and supported me along the way, I was able to matriculate to another public school: the University of California at Davis.
My high school experience was pretty good, but my middle school experience was god awful. It was horrible. I got picked on like no tomorrow.
I went to school for singing, middle school at LaGuardia High School. Followed by Berkeley College of Music and afterwards I went to acting school at the Neighborhood Playhouse for Theater.
I learned Spanish as my second language from middle school through high school. I grew up volunteering at homeless shelters and tutoring kids of Latin immigrants in Atlanta, who didn’t speak any English. That prepared me for when I traveled.
My dad dropped out of school in middle school, but he reads five or six books a week, and my mom reads about two.
In the village where I grew up, a lot of girls didn’t have a choice of whether to go to middle school. They would get engaged or married and spend their entire life in that village.
It’s always a tough process when you’re always the best guy on your team, in high school, in middle school, AAU and things like that. Then you come together, and you may not be the best guy on the team. You may have to adjust. You may not be a go to scorer. You may have to be a picker. You may have to be a rebounder.
Middle school was probably my hardest time. I was trying to fit in for so long, until about junior year of high school when I realized that trying to fit into this one image of perfection was never going to make me happy.
Middle school left some scars, as I’m sure it did for many of us. When my body started to change, I felt a bit like I was living inside a stranger. People began responding to me differently, which was confusing.
When I grew up on the south side of Chicago, it was kind of a rough neighborhood, and when my parents saw the prospect of my older sister going to middle school, high school, they decided that we would move to the north side of Chicago, Highland Park, and for me, that was a whole new ballgame.
Once your kid reaches middle school, parents are really supposed to fade out of the social picture. Kids are supposed to make their own plans, keep up with sophisticatedly crude discussions, and be able to go out on their own without supervision.
In 2011, at least a third of middle school and high school students who smoked cigars used flavored little cigars. Six states – Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Wisconsin – already have youth cigar smoking rates that are the same or higher than youth cigarette smoking.
It’s well known that many girls have a tendency to dumb down when they’re in middle school.
I moved to Queens, New York, when I was seven and a half. I went to middle school in a foreign country, but I had so many different kinds of Americans push me along and encourage me. I was very odd. I didn’t talk very well. We were poor, and we didn’t have any connections, but people showed up and pushed me along.
I coach a high school wrestling team and a middle school team. I consider myself a coach and an activist, so I’m really involved in the community.
When I was in middle school, and teachers lectured about World War II, the conflict seemed impossibly distant and irrelevant. And it had only happened 15 years earlier.
To change the media, you’re gonna have to totally throw out every journalism school and get rid of everybody in every newsroom, and then you’re gonna have to change the grade school and middle school and high school curriculum.
I haven’t watched Miss America since I was in middle school, and I was incredulous even then.
I thought that I wanted to be a cheerleader because I was one in middle school.
I started playing this game in the backyard, I started playing this game in middle school and going to go practice without any fans, without any sounds.
Middle school is when I got super obsessed with battle rapping.
My mom and I have always been really close. She’s always been the friend that was always there. There were times when, in middle school and junior high, I didn’t have a lot of friends. But my mom was always my friend. Always.
What I’m really addicted to is getting people to understand that if their kids aren’t competent readers coming out of middle school, it’s really going to be hard for them in high school.
I played one year of competitive basketball, actually. I don’t remember what grade I was in, maybe middle school or something. I was the point guard – I was the smallest one always. I did my best; I thought I did pretty good. I was always a little bit better at soccer, so I had to make the decision.
I was born in San Francisco’s Chinatown in 1948 but grew up in a black neighborhood. During elementary and middle school, I commuted to a bilingual school in Chinatown. So I did not confront white American culture until high school.
When I was about 12, I came home from middle school and told my parents I wanted to be an actor. My father didn’t say it to me, but he told my mom, ‘No. I’m not going to allow that. He’ll starve to death.’ I grew up in a small town in Illinois where being an actor was not something people did.
I didn’t even get a computer till I was 16, so I didn’t have Internet when I was in middle school and beginning of high school. I didn’t think to be looking things up and looking at message boards saying whether people liked me or not.
I really had a rough time in middle school. Middle school to me was the way most people explain high school. Then in high school I had a blast. I basically did everything that you would do in high school or in college, so it really wasn’t a difficult thing to pull out.
If you had known me in middle school, I was definitely not what someone would think of as Brad Pitt. That was not me. I was kind of a dork.
I was feeling like a real misfit in middle school, but when I saw ‘Wicked,’ it made me feel really cool for being different… and you can carve that in stone!
I grew up in Dutch Harbor, Alaska – a place so tiny, we got only one channel on TV. The high school and middle school had 50 kids total!
I remember throughout middle school and high school how excited my mom, sister and I would be when a UNC game was on TV. It was required viewing.
I definitely tried to skateboard in middle school, and being from San Diego, surf and skate culture is a big, prevalent thing. But I was not that good – I was kind of a chubby kid and didn’t totally master skating.
I was always an actor, starting in middle school. I was in all the plays and all that. But dancing didn’t come into my life until late into high school.
I first was introduced to really, I guess, underground electronic music when I was in middle school.
Childhood is generally far too early to know what we want to be when we grow up. Longitudinal studies following thousands of people across time have shown that most people only begin to gravitate toward certain vocational interests, and away from others, around middle school.
High school was interesting, because I went from a public school middle school to an academy where the first year we were doing Latin, chemistry, biology. I mean, I was woefully unprepared for the type of study.
My first dunk ever was in middle school. We were playing, me and my church friends, and I dunked it, and I swear I could not sleep that night.
I was bullied in elementary to middle school. It messed with my self esteem.
I read ’13 Reasons Why’ in middle school, and the message of the book stuck with me: to treat people better because you never know what they’re going through.
I grew up in a conservative New England town and showed up to my middle school orientation dressed like ‘Clueless’ while everyone else was wearing J. Crew and lacrosse uniforms. I never really fit into that preppy look.
I did poorly in math for a couple of years in middle school; I was just not interested in thinking about it.
I was convinced in middle school that I invented tight-rolling your pants, because I would get hand-me-downs from my brothers, and of course they were bell-bottoms from the ’70s. So I would fold and fold over the bells. I like to think I started the trend. But I didn’t.
Growing up in the ’80s in central New Jersey as a weird kid with a blue mohawk listening to the Sex Pistols and dressing really funky, I was bullied pretty badly. It was every single day in elementary school and kept going into middle school, too. I felt totally alone, without a single person there for me.
I was in middle school right around the time the Bloods and the Crips started taking root in Compton and a lot of the other neighborhoods around me. I saw way too many of my peers – smart, kind, good kids – who got drawn into gangs and violence, and their futures were going to be forever scarred by that.
My first taste of theater was my middle school play. We did ‘The Jungle Book.’ I auditioned for Mowgli, which I didn’t get. I ended up playing a part as one of the monkeys.
If anything, we should feel sorry for the people who want us to feel bad about ourselves, because they are the ones struggling for approval. In middle school, bullies tortured other kids because they thought it would make people like them more.
