Word: eighth
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...constant stomach pains to consider; there was the nervousness, the distractibility, the overwhelming need to be alone. And, of course, there was the business of repeatedly checking the locks on the doors. All these things grew, inexplicably, to consume Andrea, until by the time she was through with the eighth grade, she seemed pretty much through with everything else too. "Andrea," said a teacher to her one day, "you look like death...
...problem, though neither Andrea nor her teacher knew it, was that her adolescent brain was being tossed by the neurochemical storms of generalized anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)--a decidedly lousy trifecta. If that was what eighth grade was, ninth was unimaginable...
Feeling different from other kids has never been an issue for me. I just see myself as someone who has to have medicine to concentrate better. I will tell my friends straight off that I am ADHD; if they don't like that, well, then too bad. In eighth grade, we were given nicknames ("most likely's," actually) and mine was Miss Hyper! It didn't bother me. I think it showed my classmates are cool with it. My teachers are very accepting of my condition, but I find it difficult when a teacher does not know I am allowed...
...download drivers. When teachers talk, there's a low, collective clicking sound in the background--the sound of hundreds of fingers taking notes via keyboard. "It was painful for me," admits Elissa Krebs, who heads the English Department at Packer. "Inevitably you would just have lines of seventh- and eighth-graders up against the walls with their energy completely focused on their laptops, en masse. It was just so hard to transition to that image, from seeing kids socializing and putting stuff in their lockers and moving from one group to the next." What the Packer population was learning...
...post opinions about the war in Iraq. Last year the school set up an electronic link with a laptop school on an Indian reservation in Alaska, and the kids swapped poems and pictures of themselves. "I've been sick for the past two days," chirps Annie, a Packer eighth-grader, "but instead of just doing nothing and waiting to get the assignments from my friends, I could get 'em all off the email and catch up without having a ton of homework to do when I get back to school." And kids are picking up computer skills along...