When I arrived back in the halls of Westridge I expected a year not too different from the last.
I couldn’t have been more wrong. Seventh grade turned out to be the craziest year I have ever experienced, and I’ve learned a lot other than just math, reading, science, and history.

School is so much more than sitting in classroom desks in seventh grade. In passing periods and at lunch I learned that people can be very odd. VERY odd. One day in October I opened my locker to find blood-covered notecards with symbols written all over them fall out. It was, of course, my friend Rory. But people other than my friends found it hilarious to act like complete hooligans all the time, like playing hot potato with a hard boiled egg in the track locker room and play find the toenail in each other’s lunches.

The only class where I could get a chance to rest was band, which to be honest without the class I would have gone insane by the second semester. After school was also the best part of the day because once all of my homework was finished I could hang out with my friends and have free time to myself. I have to admit that sometimes I was too tired after the school day to do anything productive, but the time to myself was also crucial to my mental well-being.

So to any incoming seventh graders, my advice to you is to make sure you always have something fun to do outside of school, because life would, I’m going to say it now, pretty much suck if school was it’s only aspect.

We’ve all been forced to read books in school before, and the teachers have always told us to think about the ‘hidden meanings’ the author supposedly put in the book. But did the author always really mean to put those meanings in the book? Or are the teachers just over analyzing it?

Why would the author put hidden meanings in a book? When he or she writes, the writer isn’t composing the book for an English class, but more for any reader that picks it up off a book store shelf. Chances are, when the owner of the book is reading it, they aren’t looking for hidden meanings, they’re just reading the book for fun. And of course the author knows that. So what’s the point of putting them in anyway?

All we know is that this is a case of our English teachers preparing us for high school, and we may never even know if the authors meant for these hidden meanings to be in their books.