What’s one thing everyone in your homeroom has in common? Uh, besides the fact that they’re all in the same homeroom. One thing you all have in common is that you were all born. Okay, that’s pretty stupid, but here’s an idea that’s not: Buy a birthday card for every kid in your homeroom. We know it sounds kinda weird, but think about how cool it would be if everybody got one! Everyone likes birthday cards. Yes, everyone. The mean kid who doesn’t like anybody or anything? Yep. The guy who hates kittens? Even he likes to get birthday cards. He probably even likes birthday cards with pictures of little kittens on them!
This idea works best if you decide to start right at the beginning of the school year. Tell your homeroom teacher your plan and ask him to get you a list of student birthdays. (Make sure you get your teacher’s birthday, too.) Then buy some boxes of cards and spend a couple evenings filling them out. In the top corner of each envelope, lightly write the person’s birth date in pencil. Then organize the stack of cards in birth-date order, and set them on your dresser. Or ask your homeroom teacher to keep them in his desk drawer. By doing it this way, you’ll get all the work done up front and won’t run the risk of forgetting about somebody whose birthday occurs later in the year.
If you’re starting later in the school year, simply make up for lost time by handing out belated birthday cards to the people who’ve already celebrated their birthdays. If a person’s birthday falls during a summer month, give her a card sometime in the middle of the school year, like in January or February. Perhaps you could give her a card on her “half birthday” instead.
The fun part about this idea is that you can go about it any way you want. You can either sign the cards with your name or sign them FROM YOUR HOMEROOM. You can hand them out yourself, ask your homeroom teacher to hand them out, or set the card on the birthday person’s desk ahead of time. You can make a huge deal out of it or keep it real low-key. You can be known as the giver of cards or you can keep your identity a secret.
Everyone enjoys getting birthday cards.
I WAS A MIDDLE SCHOOL DORK!
—MARKO
When I was in seventh grade, my family moved about a half hour from where I’d lived all my life. The house we moved into didn’t have a bedroom for me, but the plan was to build one in the basement—which I thought was the coolest thing in the world.
So for about six months, my “room” was just a corner of the basement (which wasn’t very private!). But eventually, my dad and I started putting up the walls. One day while we were hanging the paneling, I asked my dad if we could build a little “secret compartment” into the wall.
I’d always loved secret compartments and passageways. On family trips, we’d been to a few old mansions and castles that had mysterious hiding places and secret stairways and bookshelves that spun around. I remember one place we toured where the boy’s room had a secret door built into the wall. Behind the door was a ladder that led to a secret playroom. I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen, and I wanted something secret like that in my new room.
So my dad and I planned a small, secret compartment above the doorframe. We cut out the piece of paneling, put hinges on it, and added a little semi-hidden handle made from a painted nail. Inside, I lined the compartment with a small, plastic box so things wouldn’t fall down into the wall. That would be a little too secret!
(Oh, let me interrupt myself for a moment. Years later, when I was a young adult and living back at my parents’ house for a little while, I was planning to ask my girlfriend, Jeannie, who’s now my wife, to marry me. I’d already bought her a diamond ring, so I kept it hidden in my secret compartment for a couple months until the day I proposed.)
Anyway, when the secret compartment was finished, I was so excited. I loved it! It wasn’t that big a deal, but I just couldn’t contain my excitement. So I did something really, really stupid: I told everyone about my secret compartment. Seriously. Everyone who visited my room, every one of my friends, every family member—I showed them all, with beaming pride, my secret compartment.
Small problem—a secret compartment isn’t very secret when everyone knows about it. Proof, once again, that I was a middle school dork!