"In our grade the boys are a little more shy," Ms. Levy said.
In our grading system, 1 is the highest and 5 is failing.
Her name was Coretta, and before my arrival she had been the only black person in our grade.
I wondered, what right does having the highest G.P.A. in our grade give me, to tell you what to do?
Even now, she all but gloated, "There are some catty fights in our grade, not only for power, but for very stupid reasons".
There's this one girl in our grade that we don't hang out with that much, and she's not afraid to be herself.
This was the required course in sewing, cooking, social etiquette and smart supermarket shopping to which girls of my era were routinely subjected while the boys in our grade took an introductory shop class.
"That would never happen in our grade, but if you were a senior, it might," said Brooke Yalof, 12, who played host to an informal panel of seventh graders convened to view the pilot at the request of The New York Times.
Any college where tuition dependency is less than 5% of revenues gets a perfect score in our grading.
