Roseville Middle School

From Candypedia
Roseville Middle School
First appearanceUnfit for Education, page 1
May 12, 2006
Related charactersLucy, Mike, Paulo, Daisy, David, Sue, Amaya, Stacy, Katie, Headband teacher, Sex-ed teacher, Gym teacher (Middle School), Spotted teacher, Yashy

Roseville Middle School is the school attended by Mike, Lucy and the rest of the main cast when the comic begins. The group graduates in Farewell, Middle School and moves up to Roseville High School, and every visit after that is a flashback. The school is only named on panel once, when Daisy introduces its cheerleading squad at the Pep Rally.[1]

Description

The comic never says where in town the school sits, and the outside is only ever shown in pieces. There is a school sign,[1] plus a bus drop-off flanked by a chain-link fence and a stretch of brick wall.[2] The front double doors get their one big moment on the last day of the year, when the whole student body pours out of them.[3]

Inside, the classrooms hold rows of individual wooden desks with attached seats,[4] facing a chalkboard that serves math equations and the Sex-ed teacher’s diagrams alike.[5][6] The halls are lined with combination lockers, one of which takes Mike a good three minutes to open.[7] There is a gymnasium with bleachers for rallies and volleyball games,[1] plus a school nurse on hand for emergencies.[8] A flashback in Wardrobe Malfunction also offers brief one-off glimpses of a cafeteria and a science lab.[9]

The sex-ed teacher introduces the class to its new bundles of mechanical joy.[10]

The school’s pool reopened in the spring of the cast’s seventh grade, newly renovated after roughly a year of work that Mike had spent impatiently waiting out.[11] The renovation brought solar heating and a bumpy anti-slip strip around the rim. The strip is there, the gym teacher explains, because “the school doesn’t want to pay a cent for any idiotic behavior”.[12]

The first class at the new pool, shown in a flashback in Carry On, goes very badly for Lucy. Confronted with the water, she suffers a panic attack full of memories of drowning, faints at the pool’s edge, and has to be seen by the school nurse.[8]

Katie and Stacy squeeze in some locker-side gossip before the school day gets going.[13]

History

The comic’s first trip to the school comes at the end of Merry Snow Day, when Lucy’s show-off ice skating across the frozen schoolyard lands her at the feet of the class’s headband teacher. A hastily faked ankle injury earns her nothing but a curt “My classroom. NOW.”[14] The classroom itself appears in Unfit for Education, where Yashy demands to be educated alongside Lucy, gets turned away for being a pet, and stages a sit-in with the class hamster Hamtaro instead.[15]

The Burden of Parenthood introduces the Sex-ed teacher, whose lesson plan boils down to “Sex equals babies.. .. and you don’t want babies”, along with a mechanical baby-doll project.[6] Paulo, of all people, grows tearfully attached to his doll Alegria and walks away with the best result in the class.[16]

Mike’s locker rewards his three-minute struggle with an avalanche of love letters.[17]

The fullest tour of the building comes in Pep Rally, which opens with Mike’s failed escape attempt through the halls.[18] It moves on to a gym rally with a full marching band, then a students-versus-teachers volleyball match that Mike wins at considerable personal cost.[19] The hallways get their turn in Puppy Love, when Mike’s locker spills an avalanche of love letters and Lucy gleefully reads one aloud.[7][20]

Daisy makes her tearful apology to Mike after a class bacteria presentation in Confrontation.[21] The athletic grounds then host the year’s last Field Day,[22] and Mike ends it walking with a cane.[23]

The last day of school arrives in Farewell, Middle School. David celebrates by flooding a hallway with chocolate ice cream.[24] The school janitor, who introduces himself with “HI I AM JANITOR I CLEAN STUFF”, whacks Mike into the ice cream river for angsting too much.[25]

The flashbacks paint a much darker picture of the place than its gag chapters ever did. Left Behind returns to Lucy’s first day of middle school, when other students sexually harass her in the hallway. She walks away with a resolution: “Next time I’ll be ready for those creeps.” The comic presents this as the moment her hardened, combative persona took root.[26]

Flirting with Disaster reaches back to the start of sixth grade, when a shy Paulo practiced his flirting at these lockers until an eighth grader named Alexa praised him for treating her “like a princess”. It ends badly with Lucy, who answers his attempt at a line with a punch to the face.[27]

Mostly, though, the school lives on as shared nostalgia among the cast. Years later, the baby-doll project gets retold to an incredulous Tess, and Daisy dates the whole affair in two words: “Middle school.”[28]

Staff

The same few teachers see the class through to graduation, with wildly varying levels of affection.

  • The headband teacher is the cast’s main classroom teacher, running everything from regular lessons to field day.[15][29] She is the only one genuinely sad to see the class go.[24]
  • The Sex-ed teacher delivers abstinence terror lectures and runs the mechanical-baby project.[6] She once gave Mike “Detention.. ‘forever’”.[30]
  • The gym teacher guards the doors against escapees during the pep rally,[18] and later runs the seventh graders’ pool orientation.[12]
  • The spotted teacher also catches would-be escapees on rally day.[18] Her farewell to the graduating class is a puzzled “Do I even know you kids?”[25]

Trivia

  • The school’s first appearance is a bit fuzzy. The headband teacher orders Lucy to class at the end of Merry Snow Day, but no part of the building is actually visible on panel until Unfit for Education.[14][4]
  • Veronica settled on the cast being eighth graders at the start of the series, admitting in her commentary that the grade “was kind of irrelevant” at that point.[4]
  • The middle school was also the setting of the pre-BCB comics, in which the cast “never ended up going to high school”. According to the commentary, that made Farewell, Middle School the first time the headband teacher ever needed a goodbye.[24]
  • Sue’s polar-bear psychology experiment in Unfit for Education was drawn while Veronica was studying for a psychology final, and was taken “more or less” from a real exercise used for OCD.[31]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Chapter 11: Pep Rally, page 3
  2. ↑ Chapter 10: Gone Fishing, page 6
  3. ↑ Chapter 18: Farewell, Middle School, page 5
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Chapter 4: Unfit for Education, page 1
  5. ↑ Chapter 15: Aftermath, page 3
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2 Chapter 5: The Burden of Parenthood, page 1
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Chapter 13: Puppy Love, page 1
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Chapter 31: Carry On, page 4
  9. ↑ Chapter 24: Wardrobe Malfunction, page 4
  10. ↑ Chapter 5: The Burden of Parenthood, page 2
  11. ↑ Chapter 31: Carry On, page 2
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 Chapter 31: Carry On, page 3
  13. ↑ Chapter 8: Helping Hands, page 8
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 Chapter 3: Merry Snow Day, page 4
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 Chapter 4: Unfit for Education, page 2
  16. ↑ Chapter 5: The Burden of Parenthood, page 7
  17. ↑ Chapter 13: Puppy Love, page 1
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 18.2 Chapter 11: Pep Rally, page 2
  19. ↑ Chapter 11: Pep Rally, page 4
  20. ↑ Chapter 13: Puppy Love, page 2
  21. ↑ Chapter 14: Confrontation, page 27
  22. ↑ Chapter 16: Field Day, page 1
  23. ↑ Chapter 16: Field Day, page 12
  24. ↑ 24.0 24.1 24.2 Chapter 18: Farewell, Middle School, page 3
  25. ↑ 25.0 25.1 Chapter 18: Farewell, Middle School, page 4
  26. ↑ Chapter 26: Left Behind, page 5
  27. ↑ Chapter 27: Flirting with Disaster, page 5
  28. ↑ Chapter 51: Unrequited, page 8
  29. ↑ Chapter 16: Field Day, page 8
  30. ↑ Chapter 5: The Burden of Parenthood, page 2
  31. ↑ Chapter 4: Unfit for Education, page 4
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