Question on your time at school

I used to hang with a group and we were all massively into Star Wars. We'd hang around the playground and chat to each other throughout playtime. Mostly Star Wars, but science fiction in general. I especially remember the week when "V" first aired and it was the talk of the playground for that week. One of the group was a spectacularly talented artist and he used to draw comics and then tell us the story during playtime. This group introduced me to Forbidden Planet and i have particularly fond memories of that time.

I'd have the occasional run in with some other kids. People now would probably call it bullying, but it never felt like that to me at the time. It stopped when i wasn't prepared to go along with it any more. I might get a clump, but it always stopped. (Actually, the guys that did "bully" me turned into very nice people.)

Before that, i had a friend who was massively into Doctor Who. Same MO where we'd just chill in the playground.
 
We moved around England a lot when I was a kid, so I always seemed to be starting a new school, which was unsettling, and while I always had friends I was on the fringes of groups and always felt like an outsider (still do sometimes). Fortunately, I was always one of the tallest in class and although a medium gust of wind would have blown me over, it was enough to put off the bullies.

I didn't read much then, so the first time I took an interest in SF was when the movie 2001 came out. I read all of Clarke's works after that and eventually moved on to the other classics.
 
I was not bullied in school. Usually chosen last for sporting activities since I really was not that good at them; turned out I needed glasses a couple of years before I had an eye test.

Actually, upon reflection, the only bullying I got was from my 3rd grade teacher who gave me a "D" on a writing assignment because I had the audacity to write a science fiction short story. This was way back before 2001 A Space Odyssey came out. Or Stephen King, or role-playing games, etc. Spoiled any interest in writing for decades.
 
I was the kid with a couple of spare exercise books in my backpack.
They were filled with my indecipherable scribbles (that only I could comprehend) and odd little sketches.

A couple of times the mob rule kids grabbed me and gave it "what's all this then? What does it mean?"

I always told them I was trying to invent a code for MI5 to buy when I left school but it never worked out right.

Usually I got the books threw back at me, I think only once some big oaf started to tear one but his cronies said it wasn't worth bothering with.

Thinking back I must have been scary weird, because those scribbles were my secret plots of how to safely murder those self same bullies.... It's a good thing I grew out of that part of my life really
 
Yeah, Danny, I had a lot of @#$%^&* I plotted to murder; but I couldn't figure out how to get away with it.

Kids, these days... pshaw... they all want to die in the crossfire when they exact their revenge. Stupid gits. What's clever about that?
 
Introvert here. I daresay there's not much bullying happening where I come from. Sure, there are popular girls and dudes but the most popular are the brainiacs, geeks and nerds and those they call otakus and weibos etc. Not one of them but I have my own group of friends with whom I hang around with and shared my interests with zombie apocalypse.
 
Grade school, no real friends and got bullied , one year junior high, much the same thing , one year parochial middle school 8th grade , somewhat okay, Parochial high school, good and bad but, n I got my Diploma . University was by far the best 4 years of my life , I got my Diploma there as well .
 
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My high school, located in a provincial capital in southern China, was not a good school; in fact, it was one of the worst schools in the area.
The teachers in the school, I don't think any of them are bad. But the leaders of the school were very bad - most of them were very arrogant and rude, and their behaviour was annoying (they smoked in the office, even though this was not allowed according to the rules), and they always had strange ideas, such as waking up at 6:00am to run, they had the students lined up in square after square and then running around the playground, and asking to stay in order. They think it builds up the will of the students. After the run, they have to give lectures (most of them are criticisms of the students, even openly naming a certain student), sometimes for 30 minutes, while the morning study session starts at 7 am!
After the 2nd class of the morning, there was another run (there were 4 classes in the morning).
The last lesson then ends at 5.30pm before school is dismissed. If you were a boarder (which unfortunately I was), there was also an evening study session after dinner, which varied in duration depending on the grade, with first year high school students having to study until about 9pm, and third year high school students closer to 10pm.
They also often hold speeches and conferences to call on students to prepare for China's college entrance exam (which I didn't have to attend), these activitieswas so boring that all the students at the school thought it was pointless.
These memories are really unpleasant, and I'm glad I'm out of that life.
There are positive things though, I made some friends in that school, they were all very interesting people, we would always play badminton ,talk about history, literature and comics (I was the only one in our group who can't draw) and play TRPG board games together.
 
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In grade school and junior high I was a bit of an outsider, though I did have some friendships with neighborhood kids, basically because we had known each other so long, not because we had any shared interests. No bullying because, although I was shy and retiring, I had a temper and absolutely would not stand for it if anyone tried it.

Then, just before I started high school we moved 400 miles away. And because I knew absolutely no one in my new school and because I was shy and bookish, it was very hard to make friends. I did, eventually, form a few friendships, but they didn't last long, again because we really had no shared interests, so most of the time I was a loner with my nose in a book. I did have some cousins who shared my interests in fantasy and science fiction, but we didn't attend the same schools, and besides one of them was three years younger and the other was three years older, so we wouldn't have shared classes even if we had been in the same schools. However, I did come across some science fiction in my high school library (I remember The Midwich Cuckoos, by Wyndham, and You Shall Know Them, by Vercours, because the plots of both of these stayed with me). And it was there that I discovered Andre Norton, and they had a good collection of her books, science fiction, fantasy, and science fantasy, which definitively hooked me on speculative fiction for the rest of my life.

And though I didn't have long-lasting friendships, I did occasionally have some friendly interactions. It was during one of these that a classmate recommended the Narnia books, when I told her I had read and loved The Lord of the Rings.

It wasn't until I was an adult and out of school that I began to discover kindred spirits.
 
There is one other thing for me also. From junior to senior high and a few years after, I volunteered at the planetarium located in the Natural History Museum a few miles from our house once or twice a week after classes. (Never have a full day of HS, was done after 5th or 6th period).
Built many special effects for the educational/SF shows we did. (And yes, we had Laserium too.):)
Great times and made many cool effects with slide projectors or projectors I made from scratch. (Try telling that to your class mates.) I did get a lot more interested in astronomy and in SF.

In my last year of HS, we put together an SF program based on Asimov's 'The Last Question' and we had Leonard Nimoy narrate it. I did not tell any of my classmates that I had a hand in it at all. But my interest in SF did grew from it.
 
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