When you are in sixth grade everything seems scary, socializing, meeting your new teachers, having six teachers, having over 30 kids shoved into one class, and also having over six hundred kids in your grade instead of ninety. But looking back I realize that I should have taken advantage of all these new opportunities because I was able to make new friends that I still have today. Also, at the time I didn’t know it but this was my favorite year of school so far and I wish I had cherished it more.

Since I was put into advanced math in fourth grade I got the opportunity to sit in with the fifth graders and do math with them instead of going to my fourth grade class. Can you imagine how scary that was for a fourth grader to be in a class and everyone is older than them? When I stepped in the first day I froze, all their heads turned and looked at me, as the teacher introduced me. “Hi, this must be Lucas how are you?” She sounded very nice and understood that I was going to be frightened and eased me into the class way smoother than I thought she would.

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As scary as that was for a fourth grader, in fifth grade I was again it into advanced math but instead of walking down the hall to get to my class, me and two other fifth graders were told to walk with a teacher all the way over to the middle school. On the first day we were told to go down to the office and I was so nervous I didn’t know what to do with myself. “What if they don’t like me, what if they make fun of me, is this going to be as bad as I think it will, I don’t think I want to go, do I have to?” These thoughts kept running through my head but there was nothing we could do about it now because we were already on our way to the school.

Walking into the sixth grade class was just as I had thought it would be. Horrible. On this particular day the teacher had forgot that we were coming so when we walked in everyone including the teacher turned and looked at us wondering “who are they?” There was not a moment during this first day that I wasn’t wanting to leave because things were so awkward and as a fifth grader I was not that confident because all this stuff was new to me. “Oh! Hi, you three must be the 5th graders from North Sashabaw am I correct?” I was hoping she wasn’t. “Yes, sorry we are late getting here was pretty weird today.” our teacher from our school finally answers.  “Come on in!” she replies. As we walk in, there are wandering eyes everywhere and nobody knows who I am or why I am there.

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Sixth grade was just the same except the one comforting thing was that everyone was experiencing the same thing. Here, nobody knew where to go, how to read a schedule, knew how to get to their classes, how to even get in their lockers. That thing right there kept me going through the day, the fact that nobody had any idea what they were doing and I was ahead of them because I had already been coming here for a year. This year was very eye opening because they had offered many more class options and advanced classes and I was put into some I had never been in before like Advanced Language Arts, and Accelerated Science. I hadn’t expected this or prepared myself so I struggled in those classes for a little bit but after a month or two I got that hang of it and continued getting straight A’s.

The one thing that I took out of fourth, fifth, and sixth grade is that no matter what classes you are in or how smart you are. When you are trying something new or going someplace you had never been, don’t be afraid and just be confident because if you act like you know what you are doing sometimes even if you don’t people will think you do. Also parents need to understand that their kid understands how proud you are of them but they need to ask if this is what they want because in fourth grade I know it is not what I wanted. But looking at where I am now makes me think that I was overreacting and as a fourth grader I had no idea what was best for me.