Cleaning out my parent’s house has been an emotional experience for me. I sometimes get very anxious before I go because to their house because there are so many feelings attached to the items inside of the house for me. That said, unexpectedly, I have also found that there have been the process to also be heart warming. Not only have I been able to spend time with my wonderful sisters and bond with my family, but I have found some forgotten items that have brought me joy to see again.
This past weekend, I found this book that my 6th grade teacher made for our class at the end of 6th grade. She collected an essay from each of us about transitioning from the elementary school (where 6th grade was located) to the junior high school where we would be migrating to in the fall.
I found myself thinking about this book. If you are curious, here is my essay.
Look Out Junior High Here We Come:
Well, sixth grade is almost over. I’m looking forward to seventh grade. I will have a locker. I will not have the same teacher for everything. I will get to eat food from the salad bar.
I am excited because I want a locker. I think a locker will be bigger than my desk. A locker will give me privacy. I can also decorate my locker.
I am also excited that I will not have the same teacher for everything, and I will be able to change classes. I will see a new teacher for every class. I will learn more because the teachers are specialized in a subject. I won’t have the same desk for everything.
I think the salad bar will be a neat privilege. I won’t have to eat a hot lunch everyday. At the salad bar there is a variety of food. I also like to eat salad.
Yes, seventh grade will be fun. It will be different and fun. I not have the same teacher. I will go to the salad bar. I will have a locker. It will be an adventure.
Katie Gaffron May 1991
I read my essay out loud to my family and they all laughed because it kind of does sound like me all these years later. When I read it, I feel like I can see who I was then and who I still am. Then, after, I read my classmates essays and thought about mine, I could see my tendencies even more blatantly.
We can try to convince ourselves that we are much different now than when we are children but sometimes the truth slaps you in the face.
For example, I have always been a stickler for following certain rules when I am writing. I remember being in seventh grade and being assigned to write a myth of my own after reading Greek myths in English class. I remember I got a C+ that assignment because we had to type it and my essay had a lot of typos. I also remember getting annoyed when we read our assignments out loud and some of the other students myths didn’t seem to have follows the formats of myths. I remember thinking to myself, “they didn’t do the assignment that we were assigned.” They didn’t have a moral or explain a natural phenomenon like a Greek myth would.
Historically, my rule following tendencies in life are sometimes to my detriment. I find that at times, these tendencies of mine help to keep me on track. Yet at other times, my adherence to rule following gets in the way of potential joy and fun. For example, I remember how excited one of my close friends was to write her own Greek myth in 7th grade. She made her older sister and her sister’s boyfriend the main characters in the story and had them get married. Contrastingly, I remember my seventh grade self thinking about my myth project in terms of filler characters and place holder plot that untimely resulted in the main character learning a lesson and some natural feature being explained. I kind of thought of it as a fill-in-the-blank Mad Lib.
When I flipped through my sixth grade book, I noticed the joy that some of my classmates seems to exude about their imagined new junior high life. They may not have followed all the writing style rules as rigidly as I did but I found my classmates essays to be interesting to read. Honestly, I found them to be much more interesting to read then my own. Many of the boys in my class were excited to play junior high football. I read other essays from classmates who wanted to make older friends, go to dances, play basketball, be in bigger classrooms, and learn about computers. They came up with possible advantages of seventh grade that weren’t even on my radar.
Suffice to say, my eleven year old brain’s adherence to trying to accomplish what I thought the teacher was looking for jumps out at me and makes me cringe a bit. Yet, when I read my little essay there are other things that make me smile.
I love that I can see the me that I am now, in what I put on paper then. For example, I loved sentence openers like “Well,” and “Yes, seventh grade will be fun” then and I love them now. I love using a clause in the first part of a sentence especially when I am starting a new paragraph. It’s like word confetti! It makes writing and reading something that you wrote more fun.
I also loved that I ended my entry with “seventh grade. . . it will be an adventure.” Adventure! That’s exactly what my brand is still.
Do you ever think to yourself that you might not be the same person in your past that you are now? Do you think about your past and see a stranger at times? We have mostly different cells in our bodies now then we had even seven years ago. Some of our cells regenerate every few weeks. It’s like every seven years we are almost a completely different person. I find that it is always reassuring when I learn something about myself from the past that lines up with who I am now.
Adventure!
In any case, finding and reading this book has been a fun trip down memory lane. Another topic that I haven’t explored yet is that I am finding that I have much more fondness for my classmates when reading these essays now than I had in 6th grade. Perhaps, this will be something I will need to grok further and write about at another time. Until then,
