Whenever someone brings up the good old days of Pollard Middle School here at Needham High, they are always met with cheers, recounts of fond memories, and sighs of nostalgia. In particular, the class of 2025 is so grateful for our middle school years, one and a half of which were spent in online “advisory zooms' ' and receiving close contact emails every other week whenever the lovely people who wore their masks under their noses contracted Covid. But Covid wasn’t the only defining aspect of the middle school experience! Practical locators such as “the MODs”, the gumball machine, and the bridge, the forced use of MasterLocks because “they were the ONLY locks that fit”, the eighth grade elective rotation that literally nobody could explain, and the epidemic of cliqueness made it oh-so-easy for students to navigate Pollard. Why exactly do us proud Pollard graduates look back with such fondness? Let’s dive into how the Needham Middle School experience…shaped us into the people we are today.
The main reason most of us have such positive emotions when looking back on our Pollard days is because of the way our social lives were able to flourish in that environment. Forget the friends you made the year before; if they weren’t in your cluster, you literally never got to see them! By the end of the year, though, it didn’t matter, because each cluster was such a loving, tight-knit community of cliques that walked to every class together, had designated lunch tables, and left during advisory to go hang out in the hallways together. If you were like me and wise enough (enough of a loser?) to stay out of these friend groups, you were also wise enough (or enough of a loser) to stay off of your phone during the school day, as instructed. This meant your best bet for not going absolutely insane was to email your friends throughout the day. Me and my friends would often email with the subject heading “TEA🍵” if we had gossip to share or “🙄” emojis when we got fed up with teachers. One of my favorite email exchanges from 7th grade consists of me telling my best friend that I felt neglected because she didn’t join an after-school club with me as she promised she would, and her responding “Neglected?? Tell that to the children that are starving, Lily.” Nevertheless, I’m sure we can all agree that not a single one of our friendship dynamics has shifted since our Pollard days, as the relationships formed in clusters 1-5 were never forced, but built off so much genuine trust in and love for one another.
Another reason Pollard served as such a safe space for us was the beautiful building. I remember getting lost on my first day of seventh grade and being told “just go the MODs!” and I thought “what on earth have I gotten myself into?”.But by the end of eighth grade, I TOTALLY knew my way around! And once I got to the MODs, I was greeted with walls that had holes in them! I know classrooms were supposedly organized by grade, but within that not-at-all-vague split, one could spend hours wandering aimlessly from science classroom to math classroom to….engineering classroom (?) trying to find their way. Good times! Those of us that took strings (or ate lunch in the lecture hall due to the fantabulous lunch plan that was in place during COVID) recall floors that were somehow always wet and squishy and assigned seats that were never socially distant, but we were still reprimanded if we didn’t sit according to them. Anyone who participated in the Pollard Theater department probably recalls that the auditorium was so well-designed that one of the curtains broke halfway through a performance. And it’s likely that only the Class of 2025 was here for this, but forever ingrained in our memories are the hand sanitizer dispensers that lined many of the hallways and entrances. If you even so much as gestured underneath it, hand sanitizer would be squirted onto your shoes, elbow, or shoulders. What a smart way to keep us safe from COVID-19! The CDC should be taking notes.
The rigorousness of high school classes came as no shock to me after experiencing the high academic expectations of Pollard. For the brief period of time that I was fully in-person last year, I always had to work hard, and I totally was never able to receive good grades without effort simply because I was a quiet and easy-to-manage student. And all of the louder students or those struggling to keep up with classwork for whatever reason were consistently met with so much compassion and understanding. I never once came close to yelling at a teacher because he made it a policy to dock 2 points from students’ grades every time we asked to charge our iPads during class. And to zoom in on English class for a moment, I think some of us need a few years to recover from some of the short stories we read. Between “The Lottery,” where all of the villagers throw rocks at each other, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” where the protagonist hides the body of a man he killed in his floorboards, and “The Veldt,” where the children send lions to eat their parents, I definitely learned some valuable life lessons from these stories. It wasn’t as though I was planning on starting a dystopian society, hiding a body in my floorboards, or sending lions after my family, but now I know for sure that they are completely out of the question. I’m probably better off moving to Baltimore County and investigating the murder of Hae Min Lee *cue Serial*.
If you had a better Pollard experience than I did, well, I applaud you! Despite the tried-and-true expression of “middle school is the worst years of your life,” you managed to see the silver lining. I’m usually the type of person that demands change whenever I see something that is being poorly managed. So, will I be heading back to Pollard and doing everything in my power to assure that future generations have a better experience? Nope! I never want to walk those hallowed hallways again. The most I will be doing is reassuring my eighth grade friends that things will get better and preventing my little brother from becoming a classic “middle school boy” as he enters High Rock in September. And, class of 2029, you are welcome for that.