For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for August 31, 2017

Michael, Lawrence, you’ve got a long way to go become one of the big kids.

Not worry Mike. Almost all those big kids are silhouettes, so they are no real threat to you, even if they are tall. They know there will never be any stories about them. They know their place. You, Lawrence, Brian, and Gordon rule the school.

Yup. Mike. You’re the little fish in a sea of blue whales. Don’t worry…in a couple of years, you will shoot up, reach your adult height, and be able to look at your dad in the eye.

In a year you’ll be in the older, 8th grade group. The big guys. ………..But then the FOLLOWING year you are a freshman, and back at the bottom of the pecking order………… So you spend 3 more years to reach senior, top-o-the-world at high school! ………..Then you graduate, get a job, and enjoy your trip back to the bottom again as the “new guy” at work. It never ends.

It’s all relative.

I never understood where “Ever neat!” came from. Michael and other kids in FBOFW say it a lot, but I’ve never heard that expression in my life. Was it used anywhere else?

I said “Cool”, back in the 60s. I still say that. And, I must confess, for a VERY SHORT TIME, I actually said “Groovy”. LOL

My older daughter is going from middle school Student Council president to high school freshman next week. She’s owning it; she got yellow tape and put a “rookie stripe” (she’s a NASCAR fan) on all of her school supplies. No worries about ego with her!

Yes, indeed, Mike, you are back to being one of the little kids. Suck it up, buttercup.

Went to a parochial school through Grade 8. Then to Junior High in Grade 9 in the public school district. Then to Senior High in Grade 10 up. The Junior High designation has changed some now, for some reason.

Right on! Ever cool,far out,groovy…naw,never said groovy.I think ever neat must have originated in the 80’s,I heard it but never used it.Junior high,1967,our history teacher was a John A.Macdonald fanatic ( he had at least a hundred pictures of him in the classroom) now the teachers want to take his name off all the schools named after him.Go figure.

There were so many of us baby boomers moving into 7th grade at the time, that we were put into a whole school all by our little 7th grade selves. 1959

I always felt that the boys a year ahead of me in high school looked sooo much older than I did – even when I got to that grade, myself.

Hope he doesn’t buy an “elevator pass”

My school district was realigning the grades when I started junior high. The year I entered as a 7th grader was the same year they moved the 6th grade to junior high. So my first year in junior high did not make me the lowest one on the totem pole. The next year, they moved the 9th graders to senior high which meant I was one of the top dogs after only one year. That part worked out okay.

Neat. Groovy. Radical. Cowabunga. What do kids say today?

It was also intimidating for us guys to return to school to see our female friends have changed. Of course we overcame our fears, but at the time, it was overwhelming to see the girls, for lack of a better term, had “inflated”.

I never considered it a New School unless I actually went to a different School District. After all just going to Elementary, Jr. High, and High School with the same kids that you know isn’t all that strange, it’s just a higher level of education.

I can’t say how sweet this is. My oldest started 7th grade this week. I love having the strip grow along with us. He is in middle school, though, 6th-8th, so it’s not as scary. I did junior high, and it was 7th and 8th. But at least I was always one of the tallest!

I’m so glad I get to be the top of the school this year. Being the littlest stinks.

The phrase that was used in our area was “Fresh Meat!”…..

When I attended school, it was 1-6 for elementary, 7-9 for junior high and 10-12 for high school.

Lynn’s Notes:

I remember so clearly moving from Ridgeway Elementary School to Sutherland Senior Secondary. The girls were all beginning to mature. Our bodies were changing faster than the boys’ were, and suddenly our bodies were on display. This was my impression anyway. We had gone from being almost unisex beings–bumping into each other and roughhousing without too much interest in shape or size, to being physically checked out. Checked out, as in what are you wearing under what you are wearing? It wasn’t just the boys checking out the girls, it was everyone checking out everyone else. We were all changing and we wanted to know who was in the lead and who was lagging.

Michael and Lawrence have another problem. They don’t have any hands!

“Ever neat, man!” It’s just another of Lynn Johnston’s typically bad attempts at “teen-speak”