A wide digital painting of an early-morning school scene: a yellow bus drives along a foggy winding back road toward a bleak brick middle school tucked between two large hills. A lone student silhouette sits by the bus window, while ghostlike images of cafeteria trays, pizza slices, and classroom desks float in the washed-out sky, symbolizing the isolating atmosphere of 2000s public school life.

7 reasons middle school was hell on Earth

ByTC Marti

Middle school was hell on Earth for more than just the fact I had to sit through arguably the most mundane classes of my younger days. 

Some people will do anything to relive their school days. Me? If reincarnation existed, I’d love to be living in a libertarian society with school choice, because there’s no way in hell I’d want to go through public middle school again. Or, public school in general.

How bad did things get in middle school? Here’s a hint: So bad, that I’m only listing snapshots below. If I didn’t, this listicle article would transform into a full-blown memoir. And like most memoirs, it wouldn’t be a pleasant one.

1 – Longest bus rides of my life

This was so bad I wrote an entire longform piece on it. But let’s just say that I spent between two and three hours on the bus A DAY. Do the math, and that’s 10-15 hours a week. All on winding backroads, mind you. Add in the fact we had to transfer buses and it was four years of straight-up complications.

2 – Further from civilization than the Canadian Tire Centre

For those of you not well-versed in NHL lore, the Canadian Tire Centre (home of the Ottawa Senators) is out in the middle of nowhere. As for my old middle school? Yeah, there were houses nearby, but there wasn’t even a corner store or a gas station for at least a few miles. Worse yet, good luck making a break from the place: we were located at the bottom of not one, but two big-ass hills.

3 – School politics

It started in fifth grade, when the athletes got on well with a few of the seventh and eighth-grade teachers. Those were the coaches, and right then and there, my eyes were opened. As in, who was going to be the favorites from now until I graduated high school in 2009.

4 – Cliques, cliques, and more cliques

Once again, it started in fifth grade. And by the end of the year, we knew who’d be the athletes, the band geeks, the no-names, and the weirdos. Hell, the school admin may as well have put a label on our foreheads. Everyone knew who was who.

5 – The absolute worst food of my life

Larry Lawton once talked about how much prison food sucked on his YouTube channel. I believe him, but middle school food, or school food in general, couldn’t have been much better. Their pizza was the worst. Half-cooked, and sauce that tasted more like tomato paste. It got so bad that I ended up settling for Andy Capp’s fries and Pepsi from the vending machines for an entire school year.

6 – Central planning at its absolute worst

Ironically enough, there were times when we were so ravenous, a lot of kids didn’t care what they were fed. In seventh grade, we didn’t eat until noon, a good seven hours since we’d last eaten given the long bus rides and the fact school started at 8:15. In the sixth grade, we had lunch at 10:30 and never got off that damn bus until 4-4:30. And I couldn’t wait to eat until I got home.

7 – A criminal before a student

I can’t remember a single teacher from middle school treating us like people. Instead, they acted as if they owned us. When we stood buzzing in the lunch line (during years when we stomached that awful food), they didn’t mind shouting at us. If I walked to the bathroom, they’d ask what I was up to, as if I was going in there to shoot a needle into my arm.

I remember one time I accidentally bumped into a teacher and mumbled a quick apology. The next thing I knew, another teacher on lunch duty pulled me aside and bitched at me that I didn’t say anything and kept on walking. I told them I did stop and apologize, but try being a sixth grader explaining yourself to an adult who already had their mind made up.

That incident’s worth a deep dive of its own, so I’ll say no more here. But as you could probably decipher, middle school was hell on Earth. So much, that I could elaborate further with each section into their own, full-length blog posts.

Guess whose middle school days also sucked?

The Arcane Prophecy by TC MartiJust about every protagonist of mine hated middle school, if you want the short answer. But I’m thinking about Yote Diamondback, my protagonist from my YA fantasy, Arcane Elemental Academy.

For Yote, traditional schoolwork came easy. But that didn’t make it any less mundane than my own school days. She was often singled out, bullied, and made to feel worthless, thanks to her sister, Jett Diamondback.

While Book I, The Arcane Prophecy, begins after Yote’s middle school days, she still faces Jett’s wrath. Catch them in action with the book’s first three chapters right now, and brace yourself for a sibling rivalry fused with intense duels featuring elemental runic magic.

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