How did you handle transitioning to high school?

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I was lucky to end up in the same class as an old friend from 5th grade, so at least I had one friendship to pick up easily. The school had over 1000 students and was quite noisy. Back then, I was able to get high marks despite hardly studying. I'd spend the math classes falling asleep or playing games on my calculator, and then I crammed the chapter a few days before the exam. I had already decided on my career path, so I went in solely with the intent of getting the grades necessary to get into uni. The rest of the time I just spent alone, playing games, writing novels, and collecting music.

Happy times. Alone, but without the pressure to provide food and shelter ...

When I started high school, the School Board had just noticed that the Baby Boom was graduating from grade school, and started to build a new high school. So, I was on shifts, getting on the bus in the dark most mornings. I am not a morning person, and, considering that I was in the academic rather than the vocational program, I should have had the later hours. Classes were large, and the teachers were an uneven lot. They were trying out some "new math" that my parents considered OK to ignore.

I remember being given the number of my locker, and choosing the wrong direction to look for it in. I walked the whole school before finding it just before getting back to my home room.

I had been given an allowance for clothing, and should have bought new pants, having grown much taller, but I had also been told, long ago, not to stare at people, so I had not observed how long pants should be. This caused some amusement.

I was only 12, starting gr. 9, which didn't help socially. What really tore it, though, was a question on the Christmas science exam. "If you hear some thunder, and ten seconds later, you see lightning, how far away was it?" Mother had warned me about trick questions, so I answered correctly that since light is faster than sound, the two events were not related, and no answer could be given. It was actually a typo, and I was supposed to have known that I could have asked during the exam. The teacher looked kind of sick giving me a zero for it, since I had the only right answer out of 300, but I just accepted it and quit trying.

I probably came across as handling it well.

Really, I never fit in at any school, so high school was just "still not fitting in, but in a different location". I had no personal connections to the places, the teachers, or any of the other students, so it was mostly just taking a different path to get to the first classroom of the morning and using a locker. The most annoying aspect was the seemingly endless changing of classrooms every hour or two; I have to wonder sometimes how many hundreds or thousands of hours I must have wasted trudging between this and that room, and the related disruptions and noise at the beginning and end of every period.

Knowing what I know now, I think I would have done better (and gotten through the primary and secondary education curricula faster) if I'd done school via remote learning, like the kids out on farms. Send me the paperwork for an entire term in all subjects and let me sit down at home (or a cubicle at the Department of Education) and rip through it. Just cut schools out of the equation entirely; it's not like I was getting any socialization at them anyway. Maybe sign me up for some local science-enthusiast clubs for that. Adult ones, not kiddie ones. I wouldn't have minded talking to people about mechanical engineering, or astronomy, or the rather nascent-at-the-time industry of computing.

It was great. Junior high sucked.