i'm racking my brain for actual books that i read in grades 7 and 8 - and even 9 - and i'm not able to come up with anything. i remember being given photographed handouts and asked questions around an ability to prove very basic comprehension, or being asked to read short texts and then produce an opinion piece around it. but, i don't think anybody ever handed out books to us and told us to read them.
i went to both elementary school and high school under the rae/peterson curriculum (harris won when i was in high school, and didn't succeed in changing the curriculum until the year after i'd left), and i'm learning just now that it was kind of an experiment. i did not receive any actual marks until grade 10; my high school transcript, which i still have, simply states "completed" for grade 9. i have records of standardized testing where i scored in the 95th-99th percentile, but i don't have grades for these years.
what i remember about the report cards is that they had a long list of criteria, and you'd be evaluated on a points system, with 1 the highest and i think 6 the lowest. this was just the teacher's arbitrary, completely subjective opinion. i remember getting lots of 1s in english and math, 2s or 3s in phys ed and some pretty low marks in the "shows respect for authority" and "works well with others" categories. even my university profs would have scrawled "does not work well with others" on my report cards if given the chance, and i'm not particularly embarrassed about it - i don't work well with others, and i don't want to, either.
i'm not even sure i can pick out much of anything of shape in these years really at all. we were split into classes that taught core subjects, and then shipped into different rooms for specific topics. so, i remember having a science teacher, a french teacher, a geography teacher, a music teacher, a phys ed teacher, a home ec teacher, a history teacher and then a kind of general "grade 7 teacher" that was tasked with everything else, which i guess is math, religion and english. but, that really meant that the curriculum was focused on the peripheral subjects due to the more rigid scheduling, and that math & english were largely unstructured babysitting periods with a lot of pointless busy work. when we went to geography class, or phys ed, we were there for a short period with a defined curriculum; when we went back to the general class room, the teacher could organize it any way they wanted to, or not at all, which was often the actual reality.
so, the system put more of a priority on learning french or geography than it did on learning math or english. we did regular spelling bees in grade 8 english class. and, i don't really remember taking math in grade 7 at all. grade 9 was more structured, in the sense that there were separate math and english classes, but i still didn't get graded, and i still don't remember reading any actual books. i explicitly remember reading shakespeare, but we read it orally in the classroom. and, there's a text called the chrysalids that i can't otherwise place that i might drop into grade 9.
of course, there's some possibility that i don't remember any reading projects because i was so efficient with them. there's a few texts from later in high school that i remember putting off until the last minute and then reading through in an afternoon. there's certainly some possibility that i just devoured it so violently that it never really got digested. but, the thing is that i liked reading, so i don't know why that would have been true.
i think the truth is that i was mostly baby sat all the way to the end of grade 9, and consequently don't have a lot to report on.
if i remember something, i'll insert it, but i think the way we're going to do this is that i'll be doing independent reading over these years, instead.
the chrysalids was grade 8, and i have a copy of it that i found used. i also remember doing a man for all seasons in grade 8, and the shakespeare. the only thing i remember from grade 9 is the shakespeare, and i don't remember anything from grade 7 at all.
there are a few shakepeare plays i'm not sure if i read in class or not. i should get a collected shakespeare. that's a reasonable thing to have.
however, i read a lot on my own. i can generate a list of several hundreds of novels that i bought with allowance money and read on my own initiative from grades 5-9. starting around grade 9ish, i was spending more time playing guitar and less time reading novels, and the first demoes were recorded in grade 10 (1996). so, this is the period i'm really focusing on in rebuilding this.
i moved out of my mom's basement and into my dad's basement between grades 7 and 8. my mom smoked and my dad's third wife was highly anti-smoking (she used to smoke). she claimed my collection of science fiction and stephen king novels smelled like smoke and told me i couldn't bring them with me. so i left them there and never really replaced many of them. she was a clinical sociopath with no ability to comprehend sentimental value, so it didn't make sense to her to collect books; in her view, books should be read and disposed of immediately after, and keeping them around is just hoarding clutter. she hated keeping anything at all around past it's immediate use. when she realized this bothered me, she did try to compensate by buying me new books (because why would i want books i already read?), which ranged from ayn rand texts (which i just thought were boring and terribly written) to jack clancy novels (which were ok) to grisham, koontz and ludlum. i read most of what those four authors had written up to about 1995 or so, and i also bought some newer king, but i just didn't have time for books after i started playing guitar more seriously. i never replaced most of the king or the science fiction - asimov, clark, bradbury, wells, jules verne, cs lewis, lewis carroll, etc. i had everything stored on a large shelf outside of my basement bedroom. in later years, my mom claimed to still have these books and became evasive when i asked about getting them back when i was older. it was relatively clear that she wanted to keep them. i've been unsuccessful in even getting her to just write out a list of them for me.
if i'm doing this now, i wanted to see what i had written in 2019 and it's not all that helpful. that's ok. i'll have to just remember it.
i apparently also have a music list dated to the summer of 2008 to recover on my external drive.