Sixth grade, and the xylophone I never got to play

Sixth grade was my first year of middle school, and it landed right at the turn of the millennium. Everyone was losing their minds about Y2K, half of it the computers-will-fail panic and half of it just the giddy this-is-the-future feeling of the calendar rolling over to 2000. It was a strange, electric time to be eleven.

Band instead of gym

The first real fork of middle school was this: you could take band, or you could take electives and PE. And here is the honest reason I chose band. Up until then I had genuinely liked PE. But suddenly there was all this self-consciousness about changing clothes in front of the other boys, and I wanted to do that as little as humanly possible. Taking band meant PE only every other day. That alone would have sold me. The fact that I had actually liked playing strings in elementary school was a bonus.

The xylophone I never got to play

What I wanted was percussion. I had been a casual piano player for years, my mom had bought me a keyboard or two over time, and although I never took a single lesson, I could pick things out by ear well enough that the xylophone felt like a natural next step.

That year the band had a brand new teacher who, as far as I could tell, had no plan whatsoever for the incoming sixth graders. At an open house my mom and I went into the band room and asked about me playing the xylophone. No sixth grader had touched an instrument yet, the whole thing was day zero, but he decided to give me a trial right there on the spot. He gestured at the xylophone and said, okay, play it. I told him, I cannot play it, I want to learn how to play it. He said just try. I stood there and said, again, I do not know how. And he said, well, I do not think you can play it, so you will have to pick one of the basic instruments.

I was crushed. And because he had no plan, no sixth grader got to do percussion at all that year. So I picked clarinet, more or less at random, and I played it badly. I lived in the last chairs.

Stanley

But the last chairs are exactly where I met Stanley. She played clarinet too, and she was right in my tier of not-very-good, so we always ended up sitting next to each other, year after year. That is one of those friendships that just kept going, long past middle school. I will have more to say about Stanley down the road. For now, know that the clarinet I did not want is how I found her, so it was worth it.

The machinery of middle school

So much was new. It was the first time I had a locker. Each grade was split into teams, and each team got its own hallway. My locker was all the way at the end of mine, which happened to also be the band hallway, and looking back I am sure that was not a coincidence.

It was also the first time I had a different teacher for every single subject. No homeroom, no seminar, just moving from one room to the next all day: history, then math, then English, then lunch, then science, and finally electives at the end of the day.

And there was Mike again. My best friend since fourth grade, and once again on a different team, in a different hallway. Every single year I quietly hoped we would finally land on the same team, share a hallway, share a class. Every single year it did not happen. I just had not figured out yet that it was never going to.

The electives carousel

Electives rotated. You would spend part of the year in one, then get cycled to the next. Mine that year were a computer class, home economics, and shop.

The computer class that broke my heart a little

It was another room full of all-in-one Macs, the same beige education machines we had in elementary school: Power Macintosh 5400 and 5500-class all-in-ones, the heavy ones with the 15-inch CRT built right in, CD-ROM, the works. They were networked, and the teacher could sit at his own machine and take over every screen in the room at once, which I am now fairly sure was Apple Network Assistant running over AppleTalk. He had the dream setup at the front: a sleek desktop Mac instead of an all-in-one, a flatbed Apple scanner, a proper Apple laser printer, and the entire “Think Different” poster wall, Picasso and Amelia Earhart and Kermit the Frog and all the rest.

I will not name him, because he was genuinely a nice person and also, somehow, an incredibly strict and not-very-nice one. That room was worth a small fortune and it was bursting with potential, and almost none of it got used. The machines were locked down behind At Ease, the tile-and-folder cage I have mentioned before. The rules were constant: today we use only this one program, and if I glance at your screen and see anything else open, I will take over your computer, shut it down, and you are done for the day.

What we actually did was Logo, the turtle graphics language, except drained of everything fun about it. You would follow these big color spiral notebooks lesson by lesson: make the turtle red, move it six spaces, turn it, and check whether your drawing matched the picture in the book. No thinking required, just transcription. Later it was HyperCard, built the same rote way, copying steps out of a notebook. And in between, movies, like Pirates of Silicon Valley, some of it genuinely interesting, a lot of it killing time. You walked in every day not knowing whether you would even be allowed to touch a computer. Never a game, never the internet, never any room to poke at something and let it break. For a kid who already had real skills and was dying to use them, sitting in that lab was maddening.

Home ec and shop

Home economics was cooking and “families” and budgeting, and it mostly felt like a joke class. I spent it missing the computers. Shop was engines and motorcycles and one project I still remember: you got a piece of plastic cut to size and melted your name into it. I made my mom a little clear nameplate.

A band that could not play

Our concerts were rough. The new teacher was perpetually disappointed in how we sounded, which was a little rich considering he was the one running the room. Here is the spoiler for the seventh grade post I will write eventually: they let him go, and brought in a director who turned the whole thing completely around. He still runs bands in the district as far as I know, so I will leave him unnamed for now, but he is a big part of the next chapter.

Lunch, a principal, and the bus

Lunch was a different planet from the elementary line with its PIN pads. Here it was a full a la carte free-for-all: pizza by the slice, fries, cosmic brownies, rice krispie treats, a meal assembled out of whatever you felt like. Plenty of kids just ate fries.

We had a brand new principal that year, an ex-military guy, and the thing everyone knew him for was his Chevy Avalanche. Nobody had ever seen one of those truck-SUV things before, so if you spotted the Avalanche in the lot, you knew he was in the building.

And the bus changed completely. The high school was right around the corner, so the route picked up the high schoolers first and then swung by for us, which meant middle and high school kids all mixed together. That combination produced a steady supply of drama, and I came to genuinely hate that bus. Which, as it happens, is a good place to leave a story I owe the fourth grade, about a much better bus, and a much older driver, and a piece of candy.