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Roseville Middle School

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Roseville Middle School is the school attended by Mike, Lucy and the rest of the main cast during the comic's first two volumes. The group graduates in Farewell, Middle School and moves on to Roseville High School after that. Despite all the time the comic spends there, the school is only named on panel once, when Daisy introduces its cheerleading squad at the Pep Rally.[1]

Roseville Middle School
First appearanceUnfit for Education, page 1
May 12, 2006
Related charactersLucy, Mike, Paulo, Daisy, David, Sue, Amaya, Stacy, Katie, Sex-Ed Teacher, Yashy

Description

The comic never says where in town the school sits, only that the cast can walk there from home.[2] From the outside there is a school sign,[1] along with a set of front double doors that the whole student body pours out of on the last day of the year.[3] The athletic grounds are big enough to host a full day of races, archery, ring toss and basketball.[4]

Inside, the classrooms hold rows of individual wooden desks with attached seats,[5] a chalkboard that serves math equations and the Sex-Ed Teacher's diagrams alike,[6][7] and, in one room, a caged class hamster named Hamtaro.[8] The halls are lined with combination lockers, one of which takes Mike a good three minutes to open.[9] There is a gymnasium with bleachers for rallies and volleyball games,[1] plus a school nurse on hand for emergencies.[10] From the cast's seventh-grade spring onward, there is also a renovated pool with solar heating and a bumpy anti-slip strip around the rim.[11]

History

 
Lucy in the hallway on her first day of middle school.[12]
 
Students gather at the edge of the newly renovated pool.[13]
 
Class applauds after a group presentation.[14]

The comic's first trip to the school comes at the end of Merry Snow Day. Lucy's show-off ice skating lands her at the feet of the class's poodle teacher, Sir Poodles of Noodles, and a hastily faked ankle injury earns her nothing but a curt "My classroom. NOW."[2] 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 Hamtaro instead.[8] Sue spends the rest of that chapter running a polar-bear-themed psychology experiment on her unsuspecting classmates.[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.[7] Paulo, of all people, grows tearfully attached to his doll Alegria and walks away with the best result in the class.[16] Class time in Prom Preparation goes about as smoothly, with a round of music suggestions for the Spring Dance dissolving into the girls fighting over Mike.[17]

The fullest tour of the building comes in Pep Rally, which opens with Mike's failed escape attempt through the halls.[18] The chapter takes in a gym rally complete with marching band and confetti, 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. His ensuing meltdown at his admirers earns him the nickname "Homo McWhiskers".[20]

A few quieter scenes land here too. Daisy makes her tearful apology to Mike after a class bacteria presentation in Confrontation,[21] and the awkward days after Mike and Lucy's kiss play out across the school's hallway, classes and recess in Aftermath.[22] The athletic grounds host the year's last Field Day, with Sir Poodles officiating a slate of three-legged races, wheelbarrow races and dead-even archery and basketball duels between Mike and Lucy.[4] Mike ends the day 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, and the placement sheets put Mike into Honors English.[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 teachers get their goodbyes on the way out. Sir Poodles is the only one genuinely sad to see the class go.[24] The pug teacher, by contrast, hopes the high school teachers will beat the kids, "because we're not allowed to."[25] The school's time as a present-day setting ends at the front doors, with the students bursting out into summer vacation.[3] The chapter's commentary confirms that Roseville High is an entirely different school, and that none of the middle school staff would be seen again.[24]

Every appearance after that is a flashback, and the flashbacks paint a much darker picture of the place than its gag chapters ever did. One shows 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". The apprenticeship ends badly with Lucy, who answers his attempt to ask her out with a punch to the face and storms off in tears.[27]

Another flashback, set in the spring of seventh grade, covers the first class at the newly renovated pool.[28] It 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.[10]

Mostly, though, the school comes up 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."[29]

Staff

Four teachers see the class through to graduation, with wildly varying levels of affection.

  • The poodle teacher — the cast's main classroom teacher, handling everything from the science fair to math class.[8][6] He officiates field day, and he's the only teacher genuinely sad to see the class go.[23][24]
  • The Sex-Ed Teacher — delivers abstinence terror lectures and runs the mechanical-baby project.[7] She once gave Mike "detention.. 'forever'".[30]
  • The pug teacher — guards the doors against escapees during the pep rally, and plays on the teachers' volleyball team.[18][31]
  • The cat 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. Sir Poodles 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.[2][5]
  • 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.[5]
  • 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 its teachers ever needed a goodbye.[24]
  • Sue's polar-bear experiment was drawn while Veronica was studying for a psychology final, and was taken "more or less" from a real exercise used for OCD.[15]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Chapter 11: Pep Rally, page 3
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 Chapter 3: Merry Snow Day, page 4
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Chapter 18: Farewell, Middle School, page 5
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Chapter 16: Field Day, page 1
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Chapter 4: Unfit for Education, page 1
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Chapter 15: Aftermath, page 3
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 7.2 Chapter 5: The Burden of Parenthood, page 1
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 8.2 Chapter 4: Unfit for Education, page 2
  9. ↑ Chapter 13: Puppy Love, page 1
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Chapter 31: Carry On, page 4
  11. ↑ Chapter 31: Carry On, page 3
  12. ↑ Chapter 26: Left Behind, page 5
  13. ↑ Chapter 31: Carry On, page 2
  14. ↑ Chapter 14: Confrontation, page 27
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 Chapter 4: Unfit for Education, page 4
  16. ↑ Chapter 5: The Burden of Parenthood, page 7
  17. ↑ Chapter 7: Prom Preparation, 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 15: Aftermath, page 2
  23. ↑ 23.0 23.1 Chapter 16: Field Day, page 8
  24. ↑ 24.0 24.1 24.2 24.3 24.4 Chapter 18: Farewell, Middle School, page 3
  25. ↑ 25.0 25.1 25.2 Chapter 18: Farewell, Middle School, page 4
  26. ↑ Chapter 26: Left Behind, page 5
  27. ↑ Chapter 27: Flirting with Disaster, page 5
  28. ↑ Chapter 31: Carry On, page 2
  29. ↑ Chapter 51: Unrequited, page 8
  30. ↑ Chapter 5: The Burden of Parenthood, page 2
  31. ↑ Chapter 11: Pep Rally, page 5
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