Welcome to 6th Grade

We got the news from the county a couple of months ago. My application to get into a county middle school magnet program was reviewed and I was accepted to 6th grade, the first of three years of learning how to run a TV studio and also three years of possible torture.

All the accepted applicants were invited to an open house meeting, where the parents drooled during all the teacher presentations and the kids rolled their eyes because they had seen it before in the fall while the parents were talking about bus service cuts.

The news came in a heavy orange envelope with a butterfly pin where you press the tabs in. Inside it was an endless stack of green copies where you checked this, listed that and filled in the other thing, regarding after school activities, a form called a PONY that your math teacher filled out and decided which math class you were in, and a large packet that we all had to sign off on.

Lucky for me the news hasn't spread around school yet. Still just the usual "What's the answer to question 6?" and my answer of "Imadoofus." This still produces a laugh from the other kids, who go bother their other friends with their text question problems.

My week will now look a lot like this:

Monday- 8 AM to 2:45 PM (A lot less time to shake off Monday morning grouchiness)

Tuesday-8 AM to 4:05 PM (Band after school, walk home, homework till dinner and from dinner to breakfast)

Wednesday- " "

Thursday-" "

Friday- 8 AM to 2:45 PM (Early start to the weekend? Or start a new report? )

Stay up gluing things to poster-board over the weekend. Dad gets to watch cartoons, but probably ESPN news.

It now looks like this:

Monday- 9 AM to 3:30 PM (Plus an hour for food fights and arguments over goals at recess, not that I play soccer)

Repeat four more times, watch cartoons or related on weekends.

Let's just hope I don't run screaming off to the elementary school begging to be let back in to Kindergarten.

But in elementary school they don't teach us how to direct a game show, they teach us how to drill holes in our skulls because they pound grammar into your brain so hard that's the only thing you can do. We spend, at the moment, 90 minutes at LEAST a day correcting the worksheet companies' "errors," and no one in the education business is that dumb in real life. We kids know that, but the teachers sometimes appear to view us as if we didn't know what their racket was.

Ari Charles, Private E=-1, Signing Off.

See you tomorrow- if I make it to then.