Middle School Sucks

Does anyone actually look back fondly on middle school?  I mean, I have a few good memories of that time.  It wasn't all bad.  Overwhelmingly though, my middle school years sucked.  I didn't really realize that until I peer tutored over at the public middle school during my senior year of high school.  (I'd attended a Catholic school until high school, so it wasn't the middle school I had attended.)  I watched everything the kids were getting up to, and I realized just how horrible some of the stuff that happened during my middle school years was.

One of my biggest memories from when I was peer tutoring involved this girl having a crush on a boy in the class.  I peer tutored special needs kids, and it was a small class of roughly five students.  That meant word got around quickly.  Every kid in there knew that she liked this boy in the class, and I watched them, including the boy in question, openly make fun of her for it.  That was basically the biggest moment where I sat there and was like, "Did this really happen when I was in middle school?"  And I realized that, yes, it did.

As I said before, my middle school years weren't entirely horrible, but I realized that kids are extremely cruel at that age.  I can think of so much drama amongst my class during those three years.  It's when people started dating, and let me tell you, in a small class of less than twenty students, when two kids in the class were dating it was kind of a big deal.  There was a ton of drama amongst friend groups.  The most awesome thing?  My friends and I formed a huge about of that friend drama.  In fact, for the last semester of eighth grade, we were horrible to each other, and I'm pretty sure the entire class knew everything that was going on.

In the past I would blame everything on the other girls, but I've moved past it enough now to realize there were quite a few things I should have handled differently at the time.  The problem is middle schoolers are extremely immature and have no clue how to handle that stuff.  It's why middle school sucks so much.  You're throwing a group of kids together who are going through puberty, are probably really confused, and have no idea how to process or handle their emotions.  Of course they're going to be horrible to each other, and of course it's going to be a miserable few years for almost all (if not just all) of them.

If there was one period of time that I absolutely never want to relieve, that's it.  Those years were horrible.  Now, it's not as if I went off to high school and things got magically better.  Freshmen year really isn't all that different from middle school in a lot of ways.  Still, once you can look back on it, you realize that you actually matured quite a lot after middle school.  And thank God for that because no one wants to be who they were in middle school.