Re: Middle School...
Blowing stuff up is awesome - I just sat making poodles out of those atom ball thingies the rest of the time. We had one teacher who liked exploding his daughter's Barbie dolls in the fume cupboard - dunno whether she thought it was much fun though...
Different subjects appeal to different people - I loved music, drama and English but hated maths, science and anything involving an unheated outdoor swimming pool and communal dressing rooms. Religious Studies was good because I found it easy but at college we had to do some nonsense called General Studies which was piloted in my A Level year and consisted of essay questions like "If you could invent a machine what would it be and what would it do?". A load of crap, really.
Government here has really screwed with the education system. It's all about league tables and percentages now, not whether the students can actually cope with the workload and achieve anything worth their while. And now, to cap it all off, they are actually paying kids to stay in school. If it were up to me, those who skipped school for no good reason ought to be disallowed to apply for any kind of welfare and forced to get a job - it's disgusting to think that kids are being rewarded for not being lazy...