New Beginnings

A Story by Sam

Just something I wrote from experience as to try to improve my writing.

    September 7th, or a date around that time, that's when your adult life really starts. Your first day of high school. All those horror stories you hear from older siblings or friends have you scared out of your mind. A great author once wrote "fear of a name increases fear of the thing itself." In this case, that name is high school.

    For some people, high school is greatly anticipated, and for others it's dreaded. I guess that depends on your experience in middle school, and also what you've heard about high school. I don't know about other schools, but at the school I go to we have Rookie Week. It's the second week of school where a grad pairs up with a grade 9 and they do different activities every day. There's Twin Day, where the grade 9 has to dress up like the grad, Pudding Day, where the grad feeds pudding to the grade 9...blindfolded. But the all-time favorite at our school is Dress-Up Day. Grads get to dress up their rookies as anything they want, as long as it is school appropriate of course. You get the common costumes like grapes, bananas, pirates and clowns, but you also get to see those poor kids who get dressed up as garbage cans, or my personal favorite, painted blue and called a smurf. Rookie Week is a week that helps the grade 9's to adjust to the differences between middle and high school. Those kids go from being the oldest in their school to the youngest.

   A lot of people say that grade 9 is the year that the kids realise they are no longer children, but young adults. They say that compared to the rest of the high school students they are immature, and that by grade 10 they finally get it in their heads that they no longer should be acting like 10-year olds. When i was in grade 9, only 2 and a half years ago, I didn't beleive that. I thought I was extremely mature. But then when I reached grade 10, I realised that I matured over the duration of my grade 9 year, and now I notice the same thing in the grade 9's now.

   Grade 9 is a year filled with childish fun, fear of really tall grade 12's, and eventually growing up. It is the year that most people realise that they are adults, and they won't be babied any longer. It is the year that they start making serious plans about their futures, and it is the year that they finally get treated with the respect and dignity of an adult.