As Luck Would Have It by Mark Goldstein Read Free Book Online

among us, middle school was a difficult place to steer through; a stormy and potentially dangerous place where I didn’t want to be.  I suspect, though I have nothing to back this up with, that this was even more the case in the 1970s than it is today.  Never having children of my own to watch suffer through these dreadful years, I'm basing this conclusion on the assumption that educators and administrators are more enlightened these days, or at least have learned some lessons from their own experiences or those of their now aging baby boomer colleagues.
    But we should resist the urge to jump ahead to the next century to ease our consciences for what we ignored or neglected to see forty some odd years earlier, or worse, to refer to them nostalgically as the wonder years, for if you are defining wonder as something marvelous or extraordinary, then you probably already know, or you will as you read on, that middle school was anything but that.  Or perhaps you were thinking of the term as a verb, meaning to speculate about something or being amazed at something; in which case these middle school years were indeed wonder years and you can now stop speculating and share in my amazement that we somehow managed to get through them relatively intact and to eventually become, in the majority of cases anyway , more or less fully functioning human beings.  But if you must reminisce for a simpler, more innocent time, then know with certainty what we knew to be perfectly clear from the first day we entered the halls of what would become our seventh grade; this was going to be much, much worse than elementary school.
    In middle school I was to discover two groups of people that I had little or no experience with in grade school. The first group consisted of teachers who hate d children.  I know what you're thinking, come on Clifford, why would someone who hates children pursue a career as a middle school teacher?  That's like a dentist who hates inflicting pain.  I can't tell you why they do it anymore than why people who hate children continue to have their own, except that they do have them and make a lot of people miserable in the process.  Maybe these teachers were better at parenting then they were at teaching, or maybe they didn't hate children as a prerequisite, but setting aside their possible motivations, I've considered the likelihood that at least part of the reason they hate them is because of their experience with the second group of people that I have made reference to but have yet to describe , that being the bullies.  The bullies had somehow morphed from the minor brats and harmless pranksters they were in grade school into the fully grown demons who roamed our hallways, our bathrooms and our playgrounds.
    While these two groups may seem quite dissimilar at first, you begin to understand over time that they actually have a lot in common, not the least of which is their total contempt for one another ; for I am certain that they made each other's lives even more miserable than our own.  It is fortunate for us then that so much of their energies are consumed battling each other, so that they are often sufficiently depleted and weary as to be more easily avoided.  But not totally.  Their mean-spirited cores are readily recharged and one has to keep a watch out for them, especially those of us in the seventh grade, easy targets for both of these predators.
    The reality of the bad teachers would seep in over time, as would my defenses and strategies for dealing with them.  But the existence and the menace of the bullies, or greasers as we referred to them, was almost immediate; by the end of our first week many of us had been intimidated by them and I'd heard rumors of a couple of kids that had been bloodied enough to necessitate a visit to the school nurse.  No one had warned me of this; no older brother to sit me down and explain what the deal was.  My parents, bless them, had no clue about what the school was