I have always been a perfectionist but it was especially prevalent in middle school. Eighth grade is to this day one of my favorite school years. One of the highlights of that school year was being in the Art 1 class in 8th grade. It was my third year in the art program at Strack and it was an amazing opportunity to be in the Art 1 class because everyone was hand picked by the art teachers based on past performance. As part of the art program that year we had the opportunity to put together a team and build a sculpture of the human skeleton and have a chance to both win a prize and have our sculpture displayed in the Houston Health Museum. This was to be a completely outside of school project but I went for it anyway with some other group members. We decided to create a skeleton of a diver, there were few parameters of how to make the skeleton so you could essentially build whatever you wanted to. We had the daunting task of building the structure of the skeleton but also supporting the sculpture horizontally, in the act of swimming. We were up for the challenge but it was a lot of work, and this is where the perfectionism came in, it both helped and hindered me in my efforts. Helped because I had great attention to detail. Hindered because I had a hard time letting go of things that went unfinished. After about a month of going in every day after school to work on the project it was finally time to submit our entries and wait for the outcome. A few weeks later we received the news that we had not won the grand prize but our sculpture would be displayed at the Health Museum! We were so excited and proud of our efforts. We even took a field trip as an art class to go see the sculpture and another museum of modern art. My best friends throughout middle school were generally in my art classes. A few of them were in choir and several more were in my pre-AP classes. I just always appreciated that my art classroom felt like a safe place to be and took stress and pressure away from my day. At the end of the school year my art class had the opportunity to design the hallway mural for the month. We did this really great design that was a play on The Wizard of Oz because it was a contemporary version. The four main characters were featured but they had modern versions of their outfits and they were following the yellow brick road all the way to high school. The transition from elementary school to middle school was tough because I lost my best friend Emily Magness to Schindewolf (luckily we found each other in high school and are best friends ever after) but I would have to say other than losing friends the transition was actually more exciting than scary. One of my greatest successes in middle school was being awarded the title of 8th Grade Girl runner up, I still go t a trophy and the satisfaction of one of my favorite teachers whispering to me that she voted for me.
Middle School
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