One other aspect of my new school, that was totally foreign to me, was having split classes. All of the fifth and sixth graders were in the same room together, pretty much all the time. In certain subjects we studied the same curriculum, so every other grade level was experiencing it "out of order." But subjects that are designed to be articulated, like Math and English, would have separate lectures, while the other half of the class was working on their assignments. The benefit of that was that I heard the entire sixth grade lecture while I was "working" and followed most of it, even without the right workbook.
This of course leaves you with a very boring and redundant situation the next year, but they let me jump into certain "Jr. High" classes to keep me challenged. (And I knew the seventh graders anyway, since they had been in class with me the year before.) This catches up with you by eighth grade when there is nowhere to go, but they let me work on my own at that point with High School books for certain subjects. So there are benefits of going to a small school with a wide degree of flexibility.
As a side note on the challenges of interacting with the opposite gender, there were only three females in my class when I switched schools, which further decreased my level of contact with the alien gender. That ratio eventually balanced out from 4:1 to nearly equal over the next four years.
In sixth grade, we also spent an entire month putting on a play, building sets and everything. Pretty much all regular studies were paused during that time, which was pretty cool from a kid's perspective. My two minor roles in the production were Israelite palace guard, and King of Syria, with a total of two lines. (Seems like there would be a conflict of interest there;) My acting skills weren't much better then than they are now.
Another big change that happened about the same time I entered fifth grade, was that I moved up into Boy Scouts. My previous experience in Cub Scouts was kind of a joke by comparison, we never even went camping. But Boy Scouts led to all sorts of interesting adventures, from basic camping and backpacking trips, to rappelling in caves and small boat sailing. There were a whole variety of merit badges that I did over the next few years, including things like swimming, cycling, and horsemanship. At age twelve, I even spent a night in a make-shift shelter that I built.
One side effect of being involved with Scouts, was that Troop meetings were on Wednesday nights, preventing me from going to the youth group type events at my school. I didn't realize until years later how much not going to church there or being involved in those activities probably had an impact on the social aspect of that situation. I was the one who "only went to school" there, and our family wasn't really part of that community, since we were still attending Catholic Church. I got along with the kids in my class, but was not particularly close with any of them, there was definitely always a distance there. I usually related better to the students a year ahead of me, but I wasn't "one of them." I still talk with my fifth and sixth grade teacher on a regular basis, although that is probably the only relationship that I still have from that time period.
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