I made a High School Experience thread a while back, every one of the stories were hella interesting so now I wanna make another one.
How was your Middle school experience different from your High School exp, and was it better or worse?
In Britain we have Primary, Secondary and Sixth Form
Primary: 4-11
Secondary: 11-16
Sixth Form: 16-18 (some people repeat a year and so leave at 19) and then university.
I guess I'll talk about my secondary school experience.
I came out of primary school obsessed with football (soccer). I'd play 2-3 hours a day. I kept this up in secondary school but I joined a team both inside and outside of school. I was able to play as much as I wanted because academics came naturally to me and I would ace every test in every subject with no effort. In primary school I was dubbed a genius and had won a medal in the national mathematics contest. My school was a very rough place because the surrounding areas were all ghettos. I got in a lot of trouble for the usual stuff like back-chatting teachers, fighting and no homework. When I was 12 I met my first love but that didn't go so well.
When I was 13 I got into the wrong crowd. Initially this was due to playing football with them (the ghetto lot - not trying to offend anyone as this includes myself - are usually better for some reason) and listening to the same music (rap and grime). I was also quite well built for my age and was pretty good at fighting. Perhaps my reason for all of this was because I was abandoned by my dad and sought something like this (ie, finding role models in those gangster rappers). Or maybe because I was bored and never pushed. Or maybe I was just born like a prick.
This continued through to when I was 15. I even got into selling drugs at one point. The school gave me warning after warning about kicking me out but ultimately realised they couldn't because of how well I would do in tests.
Eventually being a (well) prick caught up with me. In my last year, some of the people I'd met turned on me and it spelt bad news for me. They never caught me because I spoke with one of my friends whose brother headed the gang. At the end of secondary school I realised that natural talent also isn't enough to succeed. In my GCSEs (the compulsory exams a British person of age 15 and 16 has to do) I got 7As and 4Bs which was a shock to me because I expected (at the time) to get many A stars. Being a genius saved me from not being able to do anything with my life so for that I thank God for my gift.
At the end of secondary school, I still played football but met new friends and started karate. Through karate I was able to learn a lot of discipline and through my new friends I had people I could express myself with. My life started turning around. I listened to different music, dressed differently, spoke differently, got with more girls and ultimately had a lot more fun. But what I found was that at heart I am a mathematician. So, I entered sixth form far more motivated and disciplined than I had ever been and than my peers. I guess my Sixth Form experience is another story.
TL;DR, secondary school was rough for me. It could have gone better and I did a lot of stuff I'm not proud of but I came out of it more disciplined and more motivated than anyone else.