Eighth grade was one of the happier years in my adolescence. I was in a class with a lot of good people, and my homeroom teacher was nice, too. He gave us something called the "T-Option." Basically, if you printed a writing assignment on the computer, you got an extra day! Those of us with spiffy Apple IIes were way ahead of the game. Others could still go to the computer lab. Procrastinators like me loved it. My parents hated the dot matrix printer whizzing along around 9 PM.

And for this, and because he was Mr. T. Brown, we gave him the respectful yet playful nickname "T-Bone." Many other teachers had much worse.

His discussions with alleged gum chewers were the stuff of legend, too. "X, you got gum? Fifteen." Meaning minutes after school. Some people argued, but Mr. Brown always had the smackdown. You also didn't get a detention if you threw paper at a waste basket but missed. Someone the previous year goaltended to give others detention. And those who missed layups as a joke?

"Fifteen."

Mr. Brown brought the censorship smackdown once, when we had to write poems. The class funny-guy wrote "Six foot four 245, don't give him no lip, don't give him no jive...MMMIIISSSTTTEEERRR BBBRRROOOWWWNNN." Guess which word. It was one of those jokes people saw coming but was still funny. Mr. Brown's other class had a fellow who wrote "You don't mess with me, 'cause my name's Robert Lee."

I also remember the boys vs girls current events games. After getting some tough answers right, I got the last question in a tie game. Go for a one pointer, everyone said. Make it easy. I chose weather for the question--I liked learning from Tom Skilling, who is rightfully a Chicago legend. The question: WCF was an abbreviation for...what?

I missed it. Wind Chill Factor is the answer, but I'd never heard that explicitly. I could've guessed it, but I didn't understand how it could be an abbreviation as it had one more syllable than what it abbreviated.

The girls got it. And I still got a titty twister later that day in gym class. But those were good days.

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	zippdementia - July 10, 2009 (11:35 AM) My middle school experience was filled with rage and ire and was the one time in my life I tried to make myself fit into the "cool" crowd. Most of which are now heroine addicts. God I hated middle school.
	aschultz - July 10, 2009 (11:49 AM) It was high school that sucked for me. The people at the top of the class making fun of drug addicts were just as grating as the drug addicts. Some memories took 10+ years to be funny, in an ironic dystopian sort of way.
	honestgamer - July 10, 2009 (12:41 PM) I was in the only one in my grade in 7th grade, as I went to the local elementary school and it was a one-room affair with students from grades K-7 all combined. For 8th and 9th grades, I went to a private school where there were two others in my grade. Onward from that, I was in a small town high school with around 30 people in my class. My class was made up of mostly academic stars--by state testing standards and college admittance requirements and so forth--but I still managed to graduate third in my class without particularly applying myself. At graduation, I had no idea what my honor cords were for.
	bluberry - July 11, 2009 (03:39 PM) I don't remember much of high school. I remember calling one teacher out on his comb-over, something about 2πr, and smoking lots of weed. I might have been in the National Honor Society. but I'm not sure.