Seventh Grade English class shaped me more than any other class ever has.

I realized the music I identified with, the movies I would consider classics, and read books that no other book could compare with. Every seventh grader that went to Creekland Middle School had to read "The Outsiders" by S.E Hinton.

Over the years, people wouldn’t remember the book, only to describe it as “the book that had the greasers”. It’s really strange that a book that I had nothing in common with would completely change the way I looked at life.

A book displaying of the correlation of social and economic status may not have appealed to the average twelve year old, but for me "The Outsiders" did just that. It connected the concept of ‘status’ that never crossed my mind and tied it with something that happened in my school everyday: bullying.

In middle school, I naively never saw the difference between people, so I never understood why the people that got picked on were the unlucky ones. However after reading the book, my eyes were opened to the amount of bullying due to social status.

The lower you were in America’s idea of a social ladder, the more you had to defend and prove yourself to not be walked over by the people you felt inferior to, and conversely the higher on the social ladder, the more entitled you felt to let everyone know that you were not at the bottom.

That was an idea that repeatedly crossed my mind when reading the book and also influenced my thought when analyzing people. I’ve read the book so many times, and I am amazed at how much I sympathize with S.E Hinton’s story of young Oklahoman teenagers in the 50s.