I remember seventh grade better than the other grades.

That’s not true, actually. I had only five whole school years where I went to school and sat in a desk beside classmates. Five sets of teachers and schedules. Five school pictures and years with both a first and last day of school. So I remember them all pretty well, actually, each with their own distinct smells and colors, voices and odd scraps of trivia that float back to me unbidden.

Sixth grade, I began attending a Christian school in Seattle in March, which is not when people normally begin school. But my father had moved to the city to start a new job, leaving my mother in charge of selling our house in the country and me—academically restless bookwork oldest child—to enroll at this little school. I finished the year, spent the summer barefoot in the dense, damp forest of the Upper Skagit Valley, after which the house properly sold. We spent about four weeks trying to scrabble together a workable homeschooling routine in the city, and then in October all three of us returned to my sixth-grade alma mater, this time for good.

In seventh grade, I was only eleven, and everyone else was twelve. Homeschooled until then, I’d never had classmates to be younger than, and it was the first of about ten consecutive years in which people looked at me squinty-eyed and said “Wait, you’re how old?”

In seventh grade, I wore large, boxy t-shirts with black-and-white photos of children wearing Victorian clothing. I had a Lisa Frank binder with a neon-colored pod of orcas, and had a denim hat with its brim pinned up by a plastic sunflower.

In seventh grade, I starred in a murder mystery play—an odd choice given the generally PG nature of the whole institution—as a Southern baker named Cassie Roll, who (spoiler alert) ended up being the villain.

In seventh grade, I learned to call the interpersonal conflict with which I’d had so prior little experience drama, and I learned that it wasn’t my favorite thing.

In seventh grade, my classmates droned on about Kurt Cobain, Seinfeld and other cultural artifacts I’d never run into “in the mountains,” which is where I always said I was from, like I was Heidi torn from the Alps instead of a girl who’d moved two counties south.

In seventh grade, I began to know how school could make me feel both clever and alien, and to wonder if everyone else felt the same way. I still wonder, most of the time.

In seventh it was always raining, and the world was curiously unsaturated. I don’t remember that changing much until high school, when the dates begin with 2s and the sun began shining.

Yet despite the vivid clarity with which I can transport myself back to 1996, I haven’t thought much about it, seventh grade, for a good while. I went to college and then taught high school for a long time, and raised kids for almost as long, none of them seventh graders.

And then I found myself applying for a job, a few months ago, trying to place on my mental map of Seattle. I looked up the address for this outdoorsy, progressive school and saw it, my own middle school. The painted railings we slid down illicitly and classrooms whose windows were always streaked with rain. It was the school where I learned what school meant, and maybe if I played my cards right I could work there. Well, not there, but at least in the same building.

A few weeks later, I drove my daughter and my friend’s daughter (also my daughter’s friend, through the serendipity of this cyclical season) down to Portland for a choir tour. For three days, they bopped in and out of retirement communities, performing a musical based on David’s decision to fight Goliath and the ensuing battle. My childhood friend drove a bus, and we chatted about the last time we did this, when we were in, yes, seventh grade.

Was I surprised to learn, via an email I opened in the middle of Trader Joe’s, that I would be teaching seventh grade in the fall? A bit.

(The job wasn’t a surprise. I’ve actually known about the job for ages, but the confluence of grad school and parenting and an alluring fiction project have kept me away from blogging for a while. More on that in an upcoming post sometime soon.)

Well, sort of surprised. I knew that I’d be teaching in a middle school, as that’s the highest this particular K-8 school extends. I suspected that I would be teaching some combination of reading and writing, only extending the vaguest of hopes that history would be among my first class assignments.

More surprising were the actual classes: Writing and Washington State history. I haven’t taught writing separate from literature at all, which makes a refreshingly single-minded focus for a course, and history! Not just any history, but the course I’ve most wanted to teach since spending a ridiculous year on a self-guided study. The thought of spending

And the age? Well, it just feels right. Because there’s still a good bit of that seventh-grader about me, after all. Confident that I technically have learned enough to be doing this, the monumental task of returning to classroom teaching, after full time teaching anywhere but there. A brightly-colored binder in the mail, ready to go with me and my highlighters to to my first day of training. About to be surrounded by kids who speak basically a different language than I do. Nervous and a little awkward and aware that I still, really, have a long way to go, just like they do.

It’s just a pity that, at least this year, no one will be wearing a sunflower hat.