8th grade was one of my favorite years of school. My 3 best friends and I were all in the same homeroom which meant we had all of our major classes together as well as lunch. However we had two of the toughest teachers ever for English who pushed all four of us to our limits.

They were very intimidating to me and I'm sure to the rest of the class as well. They yelled a lot and they weren't afraid to give the class lunch detention if we were talking too much. They took the class extremely seriously and talked about assignments as if they were life or death. To make matters worse, we had them for two periods in a row 3 times a week so it felt like we were in there forever.

Each one of my friends as well as myself seemed to have different experiences with them but they were all negative experiences which I will go through them friend-by-friend with the experiences getting worse as I go along.

From what I remember my friend Dennis, although I'm pretty sure he really got on the teachers' nerves at times, had one major issue with these teachers. It was the beginning of the second semester and our first writing piece was due which was our poetry anthology.

Dennis had his poetry anthology done but on the night before it was due his little brother took crayons and drew pictures all over it and Dennis told me that he was too afraid to tell the teachers or his parents about what his brother did so he just told the teachers that he didn't do it. One of them yelled at him in from of the whole class "Well Dennis You're lucky we're giving you a 55 because you really should be getting a 0". And Dennis just stood there and didn't say a word and just took it.

My friend Matthew had two major problems with these teachers and they both had to do with grades on assignments. Our 2nd to last writing piece of the year (but it ended up being our last graded writing piece) was a fantasy book. Matthew got a 65 on it and he was crying in speech about it. I kept asking him what did they say was so bad about it but he never answered me.

He was crying so much in speech that his speech teacher ended up calling one of the English teachers and she ended up giving him and extra credit assignment that brought his grade up to an 80. This really pissed me off because when I was crying because of a bad grade in the class she never offered me extra credit.

The next assignment that affected Matthew actually had an effect on everyone in all of their 3 classes but for some of us it was a positive effect, especially me, I made out like a king and felt on top of the world.

We were doing a critical reading on a short story called the monkey's paw for what felt like a month. It was the only critical reading that we did for the fourth quarter of the year. Anyway we were going to have a 20 question multiple choice test, and an essay on it. Of those two it was the multiple choice that gave everyone a problem.

Th other two classes that they had took the multiple choice already and the day before we were to take the test one of our teachers yelled to us as we were leaving class "For the monkey's paw test tomorrow study, study, study. The highest score from the other two classes was an 85, the average was a 50".

When taking the test I found it pretty difficult. The last 5 questions were vocabulary words and I remember guessing on all of them. I just answered everything to the best of my ability and hoped for the best.

The test scores ended up being so bad that the teachers had to curve it, making this test the first test that I ever took that had to be curved. One class got a 15 point curve since the highest grade was an 85, and the other got a 25 point curve since the highest grade was a 75.

Pretty soon the results came out and I was afraid to check my grade. But my insatiable curiosity when it came to grades was too much for me to hold off so I braced for impact as I pulled it up. It said that I got an 100 an I freaked out with joy. This meant that at the very least I got or tied for the highest grade in the class.

My friends however weren't so lucky. Brian got a 70, Dennis got a 65, and Matthew a 55. When they gave the tests back I saw that without the curve I would've gotten a 90 on the test which is higher than all of the grades in the other two classes so I thought that it was likely that I got the highest grade in the class.

To me this meant that I potentially single-handedly lowered the curve for my friends and that felt awesome to me. Matt was very salty about this grade too and a few years later when he found the test and his fantasy book with all of his old school papers he ripped them up and threw it away. I was very mad at him for that because one day I wanted to read his fantasy book to see if it was really that bad. But no, of course I'm the only person who cares about the past.

Brian also had some pretty bad memories with these teachers. The first one was when we had to do a literary analysis on one of the readings we did in class. Brian ended up getting a 55 on the essay. But what made this so bad was that one of the teachers was sitting with him being overly critical and rude about his essay to the point where he was crying.

I was having plenty of problems of my own with these teachers at the time and upon seeing this I told all my everyone when we got to our next class that these teachers were pure evil.

The next bad experience that Brian had with these teachers was the day that he got 6 lunch detentions in one class. He had a major attendance problem and missed an entire week of school on two occasions that semester.

So on this day he came into class late and the teacher said "That's it Brian you have lunch detention please sit down". And he walked over all disheveled and took his seat next to me. He also had a supplies problem so he asked me for a piece of looseleaf and the teacher said "Talking in class that's more lunch detention". "But why" Brian whined and the teacher said "Talking back there's another reason why you have lunch detention. Why aren't you taking notes?".

"Because I don't have a pencil" Brian said. "Not prepared for class another lunch detention" the teacher said. I lent Brian a pencil as I always did and class continued. The came time for collecting homework and Brian didn't have his because he was absent the previous day and he thought that being absent was a good excuse for not getting homework on time.

And of course the teacher didn't like that and she said lunch detention once again. As the class went on Brian asked a lot of questions as he always did and then this is where the teacher snapped. "Now you're being disruptive by asking too many questions. Do you need more reasons why you have lunch detention? This is now the 6th reason why?". Ah that was a memorable class.

Now on to my many problems with these teachers. As I started middle school my perception of a good grade changed. In elementary school I was fine with just passing. I was pretty misbehaved in elementary school and I didn't really pay attention so I thought just passing was okay.

I got so much anxiety over the transition to middle school that I totally changed when I got there and became more studious. I struggled a little with getting good grades in the beginning since I didn't study much but I started off with a 90 average in the 1st quarter of 6th grade and my average slowly rose through 6th and 7th grade until I had about a 95.

At this point I was obsessed with getting the highest grades possible and my expectations were through the roof but unfortunately in the first marking period I was in for a nasty surprise.

When I got my report card I got an 85 in English. I had no idea why my grade was so low. I was expecting at least a 93. The 85 was the lowest grade that I have gotten in middle school by maybe 2 or 3 points but what made it so bad was that I wasn't expecting it. Additionally, Brian got a 69 and Matthew got a 79 which were their lowest grades of middle school also.

I totally freaked out at this grade and I cried and threw my report card on the ground and my mom had to pull me away from one of the teachers when I confronted her about the grade. It was a total tantrum and a really bad day.

But that wasn't the end of me totally underperforming in terms of grades. We were a week or two into the second marking period and only grade was in which was a 75 on an essay. We were going to have a test on a JFK reading that we were analyzing in class.

My mom wanted me to study the night before but I felt that I was good for the test. The test was 4 multiple choice questions and 3 short answer questions. Cockiness kills.

When they were giving the tests back I wasn't sure how I did but I saw that all of the kids around me got horrible grades so I was a little nervous. When I saw the grade 20 on the top of my paper I felt like I got shot. I couldn't believe it. To make matters worse. On the 3 multiple choice questions I got wrong I was stuck between two choices and for all of them I picked the wrong answer.

With this I had a tantrum as I always did when things didn't go my way in middle school and earlier. For the first time in my life I was failing a class. My average stood at 51.43%. And with this my mom made me go to after school tutoring. This was really embarrassing because I was very snobby. I thought I was too good for after school tutoring because I was smart and that after school tutoring was for dumb kids. Not to mention I would be with those teachers for an extra 37.5 minutes.

But eventually my grades soared and I even got a 90 average for the 2nd marking period even though I got a 20 and a 75 and that average was still 5 points higher than last marking period. How did that happen? My grades continued to soar and in the 3rd marking period I got a 97 and the 4th a 95.

However that wasn't the last of our experiences. I saved the most entertaining for last and I really defined our struggle with those teachers.

One day before class Matt, Brian, Dennis, and I were all having a great conversation when we realized that we were going to be late for English class. We were afraid of how much trouble we would get in if we were late. The hallways were already empty and we had to book it across a hall to get there on time.

We were running in 2x2 rows and when my legs tripped over Dennis' and I fell hard to the group and my right ankle smashed against the doorway. I couldn't feel my leg and I wasn't able to move it for a while. I thought I finally broke a bone.

they had to bring a wheel chair up and wheel me to the nurse's office. Eventually I got feeling back in my leg and I was able to put weight on it. It really hurt for the rest of the day and there was a little pain for the days following.

But in the end we all survived the bad grades, lunch detentions, yelling, crying, belittlement, anxiety, and nearly breaking bones and this whole experience gave us something that we could laugh about and be happy that we got through and I am actually really glad that we had those teachers together.