6th Grade Reflection
Transitioning from elementary to middle school, I was overjoyed because I believed that I was finally grown. By the first day of school, the 2019-2020 school year had already made a horrible impression. That year was the first time Galena Park ISD had begun block scheduling. With staff being unprepared, the next two and a half months were complete chaos. In that time. I struggled to keep Band, Encounters, Pre-Athletics, or the same Math teacher every day. My schedule changed at least two times a week, so I had memorized the location of almost every classroom in the school. Every year, all of the bands would perform a Christmas Concert, but since not everyone with an instrument was in a class, no one had learned to play music yet. I was playing percussion, and we finally learned the right form to play on our drum pads, but the wind instruments had yet to learn anything except how to make a sound out of their mouthpieces. When the usual concert time was here, the sections of the 6th-grade band shared the time to display all that we knew so far.
Luckily, I managed to have Encounters after the first month of mayhem. To start, we spent our time doing Study Sync assignments. Multiple choice questions with a series of short-answer responses. Eventually, we started our Middle Ages research projects. For our papers, we were to write around one thousand-word essay on three topics. My topics were Health, Homes, and Feudalism. Because we had just begun our middle school experience, we were given the resources to form our paper. Whilst doing my research, I started doing my diorama, a shoebox transformed into a specific scene from the middle ages. My diorama was centered around lords and peasants during The Black Death. With a castle and a knight in the back, and a field, creek, ridge, and someone collecting all the diseased victims from the plague. After Christmas Break, I was finishing my paper and began creating my shield. For the shield, we had to mold clay into a shield, then carve things that represent ourselves inside that clay. We made these to be much like heraldry in The Middle Ages. The only problem was that before we could paint my masterpiece, school became virtual.
When COVID 19 made its first appearance, no one in the U.S was concerned because the virus was nowhere near us. Despite that, the virus had caused the entire world to go into lockdown rather quickly. Everyone spent a few weeks before Spring Break studying for the upcoming assessments. I was expecting to have a Math test the second day back from our break, but the school had unexpectedly given everyone an extra two days before coming back. Many people could confess that they believed the virus would be minor, and the school year would finish a week extra. As soon as everyone opened their eyes, there was a pandemic controlling the world. For the next couple of months, every student was test free. The school work was not mandatory, and the nine weeks were more like extra credit for the kids that were unsatisfied with their grade or were failing. I was not very productive during the time and joined zoom classes just for the teacher to talk with the students. Rest assured EVERYONE was ready for the school year to be over, and we were wishing that 2020 could be over as well. The only good news to come out of this crazy year was that the STAAR test had been canceled! The last day of school was the least eventful in my lifetime, and I had the longest summer possible. I spent the entire month of August sitting on the edge of my seat wondering: Would seventh grade be any better? Would we get to go back to the campus? Would we ever get to learn actual music in a band? Only time would tell...