Tenth Grade Quotes

I drive well! Says who your mom? No actually, she won't even get in the car with me.

Janie: Did you ever sell drugs? Cabel: Yes. Pot. Ninth and tenth grade. I was, uh...rather troubled back then. Janie: Why did you stop? Cabel: Got busted, and Captain made me a better deal. Janie: So you've been a narc since then? Cabel: I cringe at your terminology.

She's in tenth grade,' he said. 'I hear she's been homeschooled till now.' Maybe that explains it,' I said.

i was raped, too sexually assaulted in seventh grade, tenth grade. the summer after graduation, at a party i was 16 i was 14 i was 5 and he did it for three years i loved him i didn't even know him he was my best friend's brother, my grandfather, father, mommy's boyfriend, my date, my cousin, my coach i met him for the first time that night and- 4 guys took turns, and- i'm a boy and this happened to me, and- ...i got pregnant i gave up my daughter for adoption... did it happen to you, too?

That better not be what I think it is," Joe mumbled in the dark. It was. "It's not. Jeez, woman, someone's paranoid. It's my pocket light," he said, wincing. Ah, he was only human after all. It wasn't the first time she got him hard nor would it be the last time. The physical discomfort was a small price to pay to have her in his arms. "Well, then your flashlight is growing. Jeez, Eric, put a leash on that thing before it stabs me!" she teased. "But it likes you," he pouted. She giggled. "I seem to remember a certain tenth grade math class where it liked standing up in front of the entire class." He sucked in a breath. "Hey, that traumatized me!

Present company excluded, this looked to be the most pleasant detention ever experienced by mankind. Further proof that librarians should run the world-or a least be in charge of detention at Bathory High.

A long pause. Long pauses are never good. One day, I would write a thesis on the history of long pauses, and the hurt feelings that followed them 200 percent of the time. This was just like the time in tenth grade, when I shaved one side of my head and asked Ryan how it looked at school the next day. Except this long pause was lasting longer, and oh God, this was going to really stab, wasn’t it? Fuck long pauses. Motion to ban them from social interactions, please.

But remember in tenth grade, when I wanted to go out with that junior and you said, ‘Eh. I don’t think she’s the right girl for you’?” “She wasn’t.” “Because she was setting things on fire!” Ric announced loudly, making Gwen burst out laughing and Lock roll his eyes. “I’m serious, Gwen.” Ric went on. “And when I say setting things on fire, I mean entire buildings. Mostly schools. She’d been setting them on fire or trying to, for weeks. I didn’t find out until the cops came and arrested her during gym class. But does he say to me, ‘She’s setting things on fire! She’s crazy! Stay away from her!’ No. He says, ‘Eh. I don’t think she’s the right girl for you.’ And he’s all calm about it over our chocolate pudding in the cafeteria.” “I don’t see the point of getting hysterical.

I came into the world with two priceless advantages: good health and a love of learning. When I left school at the age of fifteen I was halfway through the tenth grade. I left for two reasons, economic necessity being the first of them. More important was that school was interfering with my education.

She and I went to school with Shay Mitchell and Hayden Panettiere, Megan Fox was prom queen, Chris Hemsworth was prom king." I make a clicking noise with my tongue. "And there was Natalie's worst enemy, a cheerleader who tried to steal Damon away from her in tenth grade; Natalie said she was the slutty version of Nina Dobrev - none of these people really looked like them, not really anyway. Natalie is just...odd

Cheerleading? That totally just blew your little work outfit out of the water. I pressed my lips together to keep from giggling. It was only ninth and tenth grade. I did it because my mom wanted me to. I dropped out, it wasn’t for me. And yet my fantasy lives.

Because all endings have a certain a certain amount of pain, just as all beginnings contain a certain amount of joy.

IT STARTED THE WAY a lot of things in tenth grade started, with Itzy Wolcraft shrieking across the cafeteria.

And that’s it. Tenth grade is over. The parking lot is all primal cheers and tires screeching. But I don’t have it, that sense of progress. Instead, I feel stuck, waiting for my own life to happen.

As you work to become a better student, remember that learning is far more important than the numbers on your transcript. I know it can be hard sometimes to remember what you're in school for. In some places, students go crazy over a tenth of a point - but this is an unhealthy and unsustainable way to manage your education. The real reason you're in school is to grow as a person and fulfill your potential.

Sometimes I fantasize about getting my hands on my library records. . . my recurring bookworm dream is to peruse my personal library history like it's a historical document. My bookshelves show me the books I've bought or been given. . . But my library books come into my house and go out again, leaving behind only memories and a jotted line in a journal (if I'm lucky). I long for a list that captures these ephemeral reads - all the books I've borrowed in a lifetime of reading, from last week's armful spanning back to when I was a seven-year-old kid with my first library card. I don't need many details - just the titles and dates would be fine - but oh, how I'd love to see them. Those records preserve what my memory has not. I remember the highlights of my grade-school checkouts, but much is lost to time. How I'd love to see the complete list of what I chose to read in second grade, or sixth, or tenth.

Your soul may be more evolved than you are right now. If a kid fails tenth grade, do you make him repeat grades K through nine?” “No, I guess not.” “No, you just make him start over at the beginning of tenth grade. Well, it’s the same with souls. They only ascend. A person gets a soul when they can carry it to the next level, when they are ready to learn the next lesson.

When the three of them stepped inside, they were greeted by the Muzak version of "Teenagers" by My Chemical Romance. Vlad and Henry exchanged looks of horror, and Vlad sighed. "Is nothing sacred?

I was so scared it was all going to be gone by the time I got there. Ninth grade, tenth grade - can't this thing go any faster? In the magazine, there were funny people with funny names like John Sex, who had wild white hair and a snake!-and didn't that just open up a kaleidoscope of new possibilities? And how long the years are-endless! And the minutae of your daily life! So tedious, when there are BIG THINGS happening a thousand miles away. And when you go to bed at night, it's hard to believe those people, those fabulous, daunting people, are out there right now! So we wait, and we endure, and someday we will be there, and we will make it.

Because all endings have a certain amount of pain, just as all beginnings contain a certain amount of joy.

I don't know whether to punch you or hug you.

This is it, dawgs”, I say. “From boys to men. Tenth grade is the year we tag all the bases. First, second, third and then we slide into home.

Think When did it go wrong? The break-in? No, before that. The party? That was part of it, but that wasn't when it started. Zack? Of course, yeah, it would be easy to say it was Zack. But that's not it, is it? Before Zack. Before Ryan. Before Max and Derrick or that whole thing with the wallet. Before Ashley. Before tenth grade even began. And you're thinking, this can't be it.

But later on, having met in childhood can turn out to have been the worst thing, because you and your friends might have nothing to say to each other anymore, except, ‘Wasn’t it funny that time in tenth grade

Henry dropped his voice to a horrifed, but confused, whisper. "A knife? Or a dagger?" ... Vlad wrinkled his forehead in uncertainty. "What's the difference?"Henry shrugged as if it were obvious. "One's for eating; one's for stabbing.

If being forced to read Pride and Prejudice in the tenth grade had taught me anything, it's that I actually needed two guys: a stolid, mildly rude one—Aakash—and a dangerous-but-charming one. In the end, I'd go for the former, of course.

Chase grabbed Joey’s neck and hauled him into a kiss. Oh shit. Not again. It didn’t matter how many times it had been wrong, he still wanted to believe it. Wanted to believe it when he kissed a guy and everything inside said him. It had been wrong about Mark and Noah and Jorge and Tom and the whole list going right back to kissing Eduardo under the bleachers in tenth grade. Or maybe before. When he’d been three and told his mom he was going to marry his best friend Cody.

Look, nobody's trying to kill me right now and that's just fine. If they don't like me, that's just how it goes. I got over needing people to LIKE me in tenth grade, when I spied the captain of the cheerleading squad on her knees in front of the offensive line of the football team under the bleachers, one day after school. I figured that wasn't the life for me.

Vlad's feet slowed to a stop. "But I'm not goth." Both Snow and October stopped in their tracks and stared at him. "Wow, Vlad!" Snow shouted. "You're so goth you don't even know you're goth.

Punishment for acting above your station was a central principal in Harriet's interpretation of the world. In the hospital, Elwood wondered if the viciousness of his beating owed something to his request for harder classes...Now he worked on a new theory: There was no higher system guiding Nickel's brutality, merely an indiscriminate spite, one that had nothing to do with people. A figment from tenth-grade science struck him: a Perpetual Misery Machine, one that operated by itself without human agency. Also, Archimedes, one of his first encyclopedia finds. Violence is the only lever big enough to move the world

A figment from tenth-grade science struck him: a Perpetual Misery Machine, one that operated by itself without human agency. Also, Archimedes, one of his first encyclopedia finds. Violence is the only lever big enough to move the world.

In October of 1973, when the Arab sneak attack almost drove us into the Mediterranean, we had all the intelligence in front of us, all the warning signs, and we had simply “dropped the ball.” We never considered the possibility of an all-out, coordinated, conventional assault from several nations, certainly not on our holiest of holidays. Call it stagnation, call it rigidity, call it an unforgivable herd mentality. Imagine a group of people all staring at writing on a wall, everyone congratulating one another on reading the words correctly. But behind that group is a mirror whose image shows the writing’s true message. No one looks at the mirror. No one thinks it’s necessary. Well, after almost allowing the Arabs to finish what Hitler started, we realized that not only was that mirror image necessary, but it must forever be our national policy. From 1973 onward, if nine intelligence analysts came to the same conclusion, it was the duty of the tenth to disagree. No matter how unlikely or far-fetched a possibility might be, one must always dig deeper. If a neighbor’s nuclear power plant might be used to make weapons-grade plutonium, you dig; if a dictator was rumored to be building a cannon so big it could fire anthrax shells across whole countries, you dig; and if there was even the slightest chance that dead bodies were being reanimated as ravenous killing machines, you dig and dig until you stike the absolute truth.

FAILURE CAN BE A GREAT TEACHER “When I was in tenth grade I decided to take an AP computer science class. I ended up failing the AP exam. But I would not accept the failure, so I took the class and the test again the following year. Somehow, staying away from programming for nearly a year and then coming back to it made me realize how much I truly enjoyed it. I passed the test easily on the second try. If I had been too afraid of failure to take the computer science class the first time, and then a second time, I would certainly not be what I am today, a passionate and happy computer scientist.

When I arrived at St. Louis Park High in September 1968, I took journalism as a sophomore from our then legendary high school journalism teacher, Hattie M. Steinberg. People often speak about the teachers who changed their lives. Hattie changed mine. I took her introductory journalism course in tenth grade, in room 313, and have never needed, or taken, another course in journalism since. It was not that I was that good. It was that she was that good. As I wrote in a column about her after she died, Hattie was a woman who believed that the secret of success in life was getting the fundamentals right.

The lapels of Sprat's many-buckled jacket were covered with buttons. Most of them belonged to bands, but a few were pretty funny. Like the one that read 'MY FAMILY'S A FREAKSHOW WITHOUT A TENT' and the one that boldly proclaimed 'I (HEART) BEING AWESOME'. Vlad pointed to the one that read 'I'M SO GOTH PEOPLE ASK ME TO AUTOGRAPH BOXES OF COUNT CHOCULA' and smirked.

But you don’t really think wearing a low-cut top to the boys’ party will solve all your problems, do you?” she asked. “Of course not. I think wearing a low-cut top to the boys’ part will show Sean I’m ready for him.” “Lori, no girl is ever ready for a boy like Sean. How were finals?” Clearly she wanted to change the subject to impress upon me that boys were not all there was to a teenage girl’s life. As if. “Finals?” I asked. “Yes, finals. To graduate from the tenth grade? You took them yesterday.” Wow, it was hard to believe I’d played hopscotch with the quadratic equation only twenty-seven hours ago. Thinking back, it seemed like I’d sleepwalked through the past nine months of school, compared with everything that had happened today. Time flew when you were having Sean.

Now he worked on a new theory: There was no higher system guiding Nickel’s brutality, merely an indiscriminate spite, one that had nothing to do with people. A figment from tenth-grade science struck him: a Perpetual Misery Machine, one that operated by itself without human agency. Also, Archimedes, one of his first encyclopedia finds. Violence is the only lever big enough to move the world.

On the SB5 Stanford-Binet intelligence test Isaiah’s reasoning scores were near genius levels. His abilities came naturally but were honed in his math classes. He was formally introduced to inductive reasoning in geometry, a tenth-grade subject he took in the eighth. His teacher, Mrs. Washington, was a severe woman who looked to be all gristle underneath her brightly colored pantsuits. Lavender, Kelly green, peach. She talked to the class like somebody had tricked her into it. “All

Daniel had been inside the Bethel police station only once, when he'd chaperoned Trixie's second-grade class there on a field trip. He remembered the quilt that hung in the lobby, stars sewn to spell out "PROTECT AND SERVE" and the booking room where the whole class had taken a collective grinning mug shot. He had not seen the conference room until this morning-a small, gray cubicle with a reverse mirrored window that some idiot contractor had put in backward so that from inside, Daniel could see the traffic of cops in the hallway checking their reflections.

How often do I get to forget my body? My body is too much with me. “Late and soon,” as Wordsworth has it, though of course he’s complaining about the world. “Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers,” etc. Thanks to Mrs. Smith, my tenth-grade English teacher, I still have that poem memorized. But Wordsworth and I do not agree on our difficulties. The world I can more or less get away from, as I think I’ve proven, and there’s so much of nature around me I’d be hard-pressed to long for more. Sometimes I wish the birds would shut the hell up. It’s not the world I can’t escape but my body. Not its demands so much at this stage, but its complaints and limitations. Its resistance and its pain.

Eh? How 'bout that?" Bill nudged her. "Did I promise to show you love or did I promise to show you love?" "Sure,they seem like they're in love." Luce shrugged. "But-" "But what?Do you have any idea how painful that is? Look at that guy. He makes getting inked look like being caressed by a soft breeze." Luce squirmed on the branch. "Is that the lesson here? Pain equals love?" "You tell me," Bill said. "It may surprise you to hear this,but the ladies aren't exactly banging down Bill's door." "I mean,if I tattooed Daniel's same on my body would that mean I loved him more than I already do?" "It's a symbol,Luce." Bill let out a raspy sigh. "You're being too literal. Think about it this way: Daniel is the first good-looking boy LuLu has ever seen. Until he washed ashore a few months ago, this girl's whole world was her father and a few fat natives." "She's Miranda," Luce said, remembering the love story from The Tempest, which she'd read in her tenth-grade Shakespeare seminar. "How very civilized of you!" Bill pursed his lips with approval. "They are liek Ferdinand and Miranda: The handsome foreigner shipwrecks on her shores-" "So,of course it was love at first sight for LuLu," Luce murmured. This was what she was afraid of: the same thoughtless,automatic love that had bothered her in Helston. "Right," Bill said. "She didn't have a choice but to fall for him.But what's interesting here is Daniel. You see, he didn't have to teach her to craft a woven sail, or gain her father's trust by producing a season's worth of fish to cure,or exhibit C"-Bill pointed at the lovers on the beach-"agree to tattoo his whole body according to her local custom.It would have been enough if Daniel had just shown up.LuLu would have loved him anyway." "He's doing it because-" Luce thought aloud. "Because he wants to earn her love.Because otherwise,he would just be taking advantage of their curse. Because no matter what kind of cycle they're bound to,his love for her is...true.

The 'Vestiges of Creation' appeared in 1844. In the tenth and much improved edition (1853) the anonymous author [Robert Chambers] says (p. 155): ---'The proposition determined on after much consideration is, that the several series of animated beings, from the simplest and oldest up to the highest and most recent, are, under the providence of God, the results, first, of an impulse {teleologic] which has been imparted to the forms of life, advancing them, in definite times, by generation, through grades of organisation terminating in the highest dicotyledons and vertebrata, these grades being few in number, and generally marked by intervals of organic character, which we find to be a practical difficulty in ascertaining affinities; second, of another impulse [teleonomic] connected with the vital forces, tending, in the course of generations, to modify organic structures in accordance with external circumstances, as food, the nature of the habitat, and the meteoric [n.b.] agencies, these being the 'adaptations' of the natural theologian." The author apparently believes that organisation progresses by sudden [quantum] leaps, but the effects produced by the conditions of life are gradual.

It only takes a tenth grade course on evolution to know that the prostate g-spot’s existence alone is proof that ass play has been done for a very, very long time.

When we write nowadays that six million perished during the Holocaust, the number is awesome, abstract; it is hard for the mind to comprehend that number, yet each one was a world. Can we fathom what we lost, what the world lost? NOTE: For years only her small group of friends knew about the existence of the poems. Her two close friends, who kept the manuscripts, and her former mathematics teacher from tenth grade, Hersh Segal, got together and published the Anthology - Blütenlese in Rechovot, Israel, in 1976. This privately financed publication reached a larger public and her name and fame spread, but very slowly. A second edition was published by the Diaspora Research Institute, Tel Aviv University, in 1979.

I finished tenth grade. I was sixteen. I

Payne sought clarification. “Vertical or horizontal?” “Horizontal, of course.” “Sorry but I can’t help you.” “Will you pipe down for a minute? Naturally she was dead since I work at a cemetery. Her face struck a chord though. So, I rummaged around in the old Rory memory bank, and Emily is what rings a bell. Didn’t we go to school with an Emily? Tenth or eleventh grade, if I recall it correctly.

The truth is I like having this connection with you. I like that you can call on me for help without either of us realizing it. I like that we have each other's backs - whether it's reading the minds of random girls of fighting off ruthless vampires. I like that we're a team. And I'd be an idiot to give that up.

As part of it, some teachers created a behavioral checklist for her in tenth grade. It was a prescription for how to fit in: Don’t talk so much in class; keep it to a sound bite. Don’t be so aggressive. Don’t answer all the questions. Don’t discuss things so much. Tone it down. Don’t challenge the classroom status quo.

She will hold this secret on the back shelf of her heart, and no one will suspect anything, not even Grandma, who must have felt the hot touch of Theater when her retrograde father prohibited her from singing opera in Moscow. Sasha will pretend she wants to be an engineer, like Grandpa, or a doctor, like her mother, so no one will suspect anything until she finishes tenth grade and then leaves for Moscow to study acting.

That is, until the tenth grade, when he’d discovered boobs, I mean girls. Of course I’d discovered boys as well; I’d discovered that most of them in my school were crude, boring, or just plain boobs.

You who had not been allowed to finish tenth grade but sent to be a frightened chambermaid, carried home every week armloads of books from the library rummaging them late at night, insomniac, riffling the books like boxes of chocolates searching for the candied cherries, the nuts, hunting for the secrets, the formulae, the knowledge those others learned that made them shine and never ache.

At first, I got bused to a junior high in Culver City—a mostly white school—but for tenth grade, I decided I wanted to walk to Crenshaw High. Man, talk about culture shock. Crenshaw was where I first got introduced to the

When I was eighteen, I got my girlfriend pregnant—she was still in the tenth grade—and, looking for a way to support my daughter, trying to do the responsible thing

From Human Institutions, by Prade (Text-book, tenth and eleventh grades): Interchange is another of the strange accommodations necessary to the functioning of what we have termed ‘the total mechanism’. It is a fact that kidnapping for ransom is a common crime, owing to the ease by which escape via spaceship can be effected. In the past the system for paying ransom often broke down, owing to the hatreds and suspicions inevitably generated, and many boys and girls were never returned to their homes. Hence the necessity for Interchange, which is to be found on Sasani, a planet in the near Beyond, and functions as a broker between kidnapper and those paying ransom. Interchange guarantees good faith in the transaction. The kidnapper receives his money minus the Interchange fee; the victim is restored safely to his home … Interchange is officially denounced but practically tolerated; since it is believed that conditions would be far worse in its absence. Occasionally certain groups discuss the feasibility of commissioning the IPCC to stage a raid upon Interchange; somehow nothing ever comes of it.

It was a wordless song Mouse sang. Alicia’s formal musical education extended to a single music appreciation class taken in the tenth grade. Despite that, she knew the hitchhiker’s range was extraordinary. The soprano that flowed from Mouse’s throat was pure as spring ice, and just as clear. In actuality Mouse’s voice was effortlessly spanning six octaves. This was quite impossible, but no one in the motor home knew enough about music to realize it.

tenth-grade biology

In high school, my friends and I made fun of the hilltoppers’ pretentious clothes and sweet-sixteen convertibles that were invariably crashed and replaced within a month. I felt comfortable in my little house, in my faded jeans, where I knew exactly what to expect. But not Penny. She wanted to be up that hill. Starting in middle school, she emulated the hilltop girls and the way they put themselves together. When they bought new skinny jeans, Penny spent the weekend on my mom’s sewing machine tapering the legs of her Levi’s. When they cut bangs, Penny followed suit. This never would have gotten her anywhere, but in the tenth grade Penny tried out for the spring musical and landed a leading role along with a handful of the hilltop girls. After prolonged exposure to Penny’s giant heart and passion for fun, they became her real friends. The transition was seamless, making me think that Penny had always been a hilltopper just biding her time in our twelve-hundred-square-foot ranch.

Anybody remember Shakespeare from tenth grade? “Be true to yourself” is a quote from his play Hamlet. The original version was “This above all: to thine own self be true.”21 Anybody remember who said that line? If not, don’t feel bad; I had to look it up. It was Polonius, the fool.

That idea is a survival from conditions which are rapidly being altered. A few centuries ago, war did not operate in the way you describe. A large agricultural population was essential; and war destroyed types which were then still useful. But every advance in industry and agriculture reduces the number of work-people who are required. A large, unintelligent population is now becoming a deadweight. The real importance of scientific war is that scientists have to be reserved. It was not the great technocrats of Koenigsberg or Moscow who supplied the casualties in the siege of Stalingrad: it was superstitious Bavarian peasants and low-grade Russian agricultural workers. The effect of modern war is to eliminate retrogressive types, while sparing the technocracy and increasing its hold upon public affairs. In the new age, what has hitherto been merely the intellectual nucleus of the race is to become, by gradual stages, the race itself. You are to conceive the species as an animal which has discovered how to simplify nutrition and locomotion to such a point that the old complex organs and the large body which contained them are no longer necessary. That large body is therefore to disappear. Only a tenth part of it will now be needed to support the brain. The individual is to become all head. The human race is to become all Technocracy.

So I waited and drifted further, through slumber parties I’d attended and books I had read. Conversations I’d had. The feeling of being tucked into bed and even the dreams I’d had while I slept at night. My first kiss. Learning to tie my shoes. Journal entries. Breaking my arm at summer camp in the sixth grade. Sneaking out of my second-story bedroom to meet up with Nolan, my first boyfriend, in tenth grade. The week my grandma Rosie—or “Bubbie Rosie”—had come to stay for a week when my mom was in the hospital for back surgery.

While I was getting boogers wiped in my hair during Biology, he was being spit on in Social Studies. A common story. But there was a day, a sunny day in May, I’m sure, when at exactly 2 P.M., we both looked out of the window of our different schools and … What? We didn’t wish—wishes are wasted … We didn’t hope—because our future was inevitable … And we didn’t pray—we were on our own. So we sent out energy bullets: “This is for New York.” “This is for when I get there.” Little pockets of energy, to be saved and accumulated and used upon arrival. I was so scared it was all going to be gone by the time I got there. Ninth grade, tenth grade—can’t this thing go any faster? In the magazine, there were funny people with funny names like John Sex, who had wild white hair and a snake!—and didn’t that just open up a kaleidoscope of new possibilities? And how long the years are—endless! And the minutiae of your daily life! So tedious, when there are BIG THINGS happening a thousand miles away. And when you go to bed at night, it’s hard to believe those people, those fabulous, daunting people, are out there right now! So we wait, and we endure, and someday we will be there, and we will make it. And, by golly, we did.

High schools routinely classified students who quit high school as transferring to another school, returning to their native country, or leaving to pursue a General Equivalency Diploma (GED)—none of which count as dropping out in the official statistics. Houston reported a citywide dropout rate of 1.5 percent in the year that was examined; 60 Minutes calculated that the true dropout rate was between 25 and 50 percent. The statistical chicanery with test scores was every bit as impressive. One way to improve test scores (in Houston or anywhere else) is to improve the quality of education so that students learn more and test better. This is a good thing. Another (less virtuous) way to improve test scores is to prevent the worst students from taking the test. If the scores of the lowest-performing students are eliminated, the average test score for the school or district will go up, even if all the rest of the students show no improvement at all. In Texas, the statewide achievement test is given in tenth grade. There was evidence that Houston schools were trying to keep the weakest students from reaching tenth grade. In one particularly egregious example, a student spent three years in ninth grade and then was promoted straight to eleventh grade—a deviously clever way of keeping a weak student from taking a tenth-grade benchmark exam without forcing him to drop out (which would have showed up on a different statistic).

In any event, Socrates’ proof of prenatal immortality is that one of Meno’s uneducated slave boys actually comes up with the Pythagorean theorem without ever having studied geometry! Therefore, he must be remembering it. You recall that theorem: in a right triangle, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. Huh? We can barely remember that from tenth grade, let alone from before we were born.

May tenth.

The first hints of this emerged in the early and mid-1990s, at the tail end of the crack epidemic. Suniya Luthar is now sixty-two, with an infectious smile, bright brown eyes, and short snow-white hair. Back then, she was a fledgling psychologist working as an assistant professor and researcher in the department of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. She was studying resiliency among teenagers in low-income urban communities, and one of her early findings was that the most popular kids were also among the most destructive and aggressive at school. Was this a demographic phenomenon, she wondered, or merely an adolescent one, this tendency to look up to peers who acted out? To find out, she needed a comparison group. A research assistant suggested they recruit students from his former high school in an affluent suburb. Luthar’s team ultimately enlisted 488 tenth graders—about half from her assistant’s high school and half from a scruffy urban high school. The affluent community’s median household income was 80 percent higher than the national median, and more than twice that of the low-income community. The rich community also had far fewer families on food stamps (0.3 percent vs. 19 percent) and fewer kids getting free or reduced-price school lunches (1 percent vs. 86 percent). The suburban teens were 82 percent white, while the urban teens were 87 percent nonwhite. Luthar surveyed the kids, asking a series of questions related to depression and anxiety, drug use ranging from alcohol and nicotine to LSD and cocaine, and participation in delinquent acts at home, at school, and in the community. Also examined were grades, “social competence,” and teachers’ assessments of each student. After crunching the numbers, she was floored. The affluent teens fared poorly relative to the low-income teens on “all indicators of substance use, including hard drugs.” This flipped the conventional wisdom on its head. “I was quite taken aback,” Luthar recalls.

D’aron the Daring, Derring, Derring-do, stealing base, christened D’aron Little May Davenport, DD to Nana, initials smothered in Southern-fried kisses, dat Wigga D who like Jay Z aw-ite, who’s down, Scots-Irish it is, D’aron because you’re brave says Dad, No, D’aron because you’re daddy’s daddy was David and then there was mines who was named Aaron, Doo-doo after cousin Quint blew thirty-six months in vo-tech on a straight-arm bid and they cruised out to Little Gorge glugging Green Grenades and read three years’ worth of birthday cards, Little Mays when he hit those three homers in the Pee Wee playoff, Dookie according to his aunt Boo (spiteful she was, misery indeed loves company), Mr. Hanky when they discovered he TIVOed ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ Faggot when he hugged John Meer in third grade, Faggot again when he drew hearts on everyone’s Valentine’s Day cards in fourth grade, Dim Dong-Dong when he undressed in the wrong dressing room because he daren’t venture into the dark end of the gym, Philadelphia Freedom when he was caught clicking heels to that song (Tony thought he was clever with that one), Mr. Davenport when he won the school’s debate contest in eighth grade, Faggot again when he won the school’s debate contest in eighth grade, Faggot again more times than he cared to remember, especially the summer he returned from Chicago sporting a new Midwest accent, harder on the vowels and consonants alike, but sociable, played well with others that accent did, Faggot again when he cried at the end of ‘WALL-E,’ Donut Hole when he started to swell in ninth grade, Donut Black Hole when he continued to put on weight in tenth grade (Tony thought he was really clever with that one), Buttercup when they caught him gardening, Hippie when he stopped hunting, Faggot again when he became a vegetarian and started wearing a MEAT IS MURDER pin (Oh yeah, why you craving mine then?), Faggot again when he broke down in class over being called Faggot, Sissy after that, whispered, smothered in sniggers almost hidden, Ron-Ron by the high school debate team coach because he danced like a cross between Morrissey and some fat old black guy (WTF?) in some old-ass show called ‘What’s Happening!!’, Brainiac when he aced the PSATs for his region, Turd Nerd when he hung with Jo-Jo and the Black Bruiser, D’ron Da’ron, D’aron, sweet simple Daron the first few minutes of the first class of the first day of college.

It’s not mine. 2. I don’t have her permission. 3. She’s told us we can’t. 4. No living fourth-grader has ever dared to look in there before. 5. I might see one of her cooties walking across the page. 6. The cootie could attack me and bite me, and I’d turn into a grumpy, gray-faced fourth-grade teacher with lint on my skirt. 7. What if Ms. Adolf set a finger trap in there that would snap onto my fingers and never come off? 8. I need all my fingers, in case one day I decide to play keyboards in a rock band. 9. Come on, Hank. Who are you kidding???? You know you’re going to do it! P.S. I know, I know. You don’t have to remind me that there are only nine reasons on the list. I couldn’t come up with the tenth. As soon as I do, I’ll let you know. But don’t hold your breath.

When my dad became an adult, he had to decide if he would repeat the sins of his father or break the cycle. He really wanted to break the cycle,” Pat recalls. “So when Dad had four boys of his own, our family joined a church for help. Unfortunately, our church had a vision to put my dad to work, but no vision to disciple him to be a godly man, husband, and father. As a result, my dad became successful as a worker, but as a disciple he got left behind. So, at the age of forty, when my dad was the top lay leader in the church (I was in the tenth grade, my younger brothers were in the seventh, fifth, and third grades), he and my mother just got burned out and we left the church.

We started working on science fair projects around fourth grade, and did them every year up until tenth grade.

The psychologists on the review panel, which included Baumeister, sifted through thousands of studies looking for the ones that met high standards of research quality. The panel found several hundred, like the one that tracked high school students for several years in order to understand the correlation between self-esteem and good grades. Yes, students with higher self-esteem did have higher grades. But which came first? Did students’ self-esteem lead to good grades, or did good grades lead to self-esteem? It turned out that grades in tenth grade predicted self-esteem in twelfth grade, but self-esteem in tenth grade failed to predict grades in twelfth grade. Thus, it

I smiled and we both just stood there. Neither one of us made a move to go, even though it was late. A mischievous grin crept across her face. “Are you tired?” I liked the glint in her eye and I had no intention of ending this night if she didn’t want to, no matter how tired I was. “No.” “Do you want to go TP Sloan and Brandon’s house?” My laugh made her eyes dance. “I know it’s a little tenth-grade retro,” she said. “But I’ve always wanted to do it. And you can’t TP a house alone—it’s a rule.” “We’ll have to show up there tomorrow and help them clean it up. Pretend it’s just a lucky coincidence,” I said. “Can you borrow a tool from Brandon? I can text Sloan in the morning to tell her we’re going to pick it up. She’ll cook if she knows we’re coming. Then we’ll get breakfast and atone for our sins.” She grinned. A half an hour later I was crouched behind my truck two houses down from Brandon’s, game-planning with Kristen. She still hadn’t taken out her curlers. “If they wake up,” she whispered, “we scatter and reconvene at the donut place on Vanowen.” “Got it. If you’re captured, no matter what they do to you, don’t break under interrogation.” She scoffed quietly. “As if. I can’t be broken.” She snatched her roll and darted from behind the truck. We made short work of it. Operation TP Sloan and Brandon’s was completed in less than five minutes. No casualties. We got back into the truck laughing so hard it took me three tries to get the key in the ignition. Then I noticed she’d lost a curler. I got unbuckled. “No curlers left behind. It’s Marine Corps policy.” We got out for a recon mission on Brandon’s lawn. I located the fallen curler under a pile of TP by the mailbox. “Hey,” I whispered, holding it up. “Found it.” She beamed and jogged across the toilet-papered grass, but when she reached for the curler, I palmed it. “You’re injured,” I whispered. “You’ve lost a curler. The medics can reattach it, but I’ll need to carry you out. Get on my back.” I was only about 50 percent sure she would go for this. I banked on her not wanting to break character. She didn’t skip a beat. “You’re right,” she whispered. “Man down. Good call.” She jumped up and I piggybacked her to the truck, laughing the whole way. Those thirty seconds of her arms around my neck made my entire night.

To allow for the varied learning rates of the children, the classes were combined into what were called "neighborhoods," where children of different ages would progress at their own rates. The early plans envisioned classrooms broken down into fairly narrow age ranges: kindergarten through second grade in one neighborhood, another sixth and seventh together, eighth and ninth in another, and tenth to twelfth grades together.

From then on the disorder became her secret friend. She became not only an anorexic-bulimic, but the absolute best anorexic-bulimic she could be. She was strategic, clean, informed. She knew, for example, that the worst kind of vomit is the kind that isn’t properly chewed up. Lobes of steak that rise up your throat like Lincoln Logs. Ice cream is also a problem. It’s too soft and comes back up like liquid; it doesn’t feel like expelling anything at all and you can’t be sure it didn’t stick to the walls of your stomach. Then of course there is the question of timing. Everything in life is timing and with vomiting it’s no different. Too soon after you eat, and nothing comes up. You wreck your throat trying to regurgitate. Too late, and only the tail end of the meal comes; your finger is slicked in fawn fluid for nothing. You do it too soon or too early and you make too much noise because your body isn’t prepared. With vomiting, you have to work with your body. There is no working against it. You have to respect the process. The hope each morning was that she would barely eat—a pan-cooked chicken breast, an orange, lemon water. But if she failed—peanut M&M’s, a bite of someone’s birthday cake—then she would accept the failure at the same time that she would not accept the failure. She would go to the bathroom. Flush twice. Clean up. And reenter the conversation. It worked, for the most part. Field hockey suffered. In the ninth grade she had been a pretty serious athlete, but by the spring of tenth grade she was so skinny she could barely make varsity. School, in general, suffered. She stopped doing homework and stopped paying attention in class. Her family didn’t question her new body or her new habit. The closest her mother came to Why are you trying to kill yourself? was Why do you flush the toilet so many times?