I don't feel alright, in spite of these comforting sounds you make.

Back in Middle School, I was usually in the top 3 or 4 of my class. My reports were always glowing, my parents loved going to Parent's Evening and I was generally touted around the rest of the family as 'The Brainy One".
I found middle school really easy. None of the subjects caused me any grief, although several of my teachers had an issue with my handwriting. I didn't write in joined up letters like everybody else did. My letters stood alone and it was only occasionally that with an extra whip of the pen, I would join onto the next letter. This was as a result of my schooling when we lived in South Africa, where everybody was taught to take care with each and every letter singularly.
I can remember one teacher in particular who disliked my writing so much, she would give me extra work to do. Mostly copying text from books in my own writing. She was a bit of a bitch to be honest, but obviously I was too young to understand the concept of bitches back then.
Most of the kids would refer to her with one of two nicknames; 'The Old Dinosaur', due to her ability to look 150 and not already be dead, or Mrs Germaline*, quite simply because she smelt like she bathed in the stuff.
Anyway, I feel I had the last laugh with her because she really praised one particular piece of 'extra work' that I showed her. It was my bestest joined up writing. Little did she know that I copied the text out in my normal handwriting and then went back through it and carefully joined up the letters. Ha, silly cow!

Middle School was probably my happiest schooling days. I enjoyed most of the lessons, although the structure was nowhere near as rigid as High School, as I found out to my horror. It was a time of sports lessons actually being fun, sex education being pathetically delivered by our science teacher, after school tuition learning to play drums and the strange realisation that girls were actually quite interesting. Of course it was many years later when I realised the word 'interesting' was totally inappropriate.
It was the time in my schooling life where I actually enjoyed getting up in the mornings and making that one mile trek, calling for my friends on the way. My South African accent was different enough to make me somehow quite interesting to the other kids, resulting in me being strangely popular.
I left Middle School with high praise from most of my teachers, with comments that I would excel at High School and go on to bigger and better things.
Just shows what they knew!

* For info purposes, Germaline is (or was?) an antiseptic cream that anybody over the age of 25 thought would cure anything. Didn't matter if it was a wasp sting, a graze on the knee, an ingrowing toe-nail, a poke in the eye, a hangover or a sore bum, as far as they were concerned Germaline would cure it all. I tried for a few minutes to find a decent reference to Germaline on the net, but after finding repeat pages about guys who like to use it as a lube when having anal sex, I thought I'd leave it.