Friday, August 22, 2008
Page 15
AT THE SIDEBAR (Column)
Middle School Raises Big Question
By J’AMY PACHECO
Last week, I wrote here about some of my fears surrounding my only child’s start in middle school. She’s been attending for several days now, and things seem to be going pretty well.
Her Language Arts teacher reminds her of her beloved fourth and fifth grade teacher, so that’s a good thing. Her math teacher has a wonderful sense of humor – always a big plus, in my book. She loves her chorus class so much she wishes she could attend every day, instead of every other day. Her science classroom is so cool it looks like something out of a movie set, she reported – and, she gets to sit next to a cute boy. Boo-yah.
While she has a gym locker, she hasn’t had to change in front of strangers – yet. I know that day is coming, but I think even that will be okay, because they apparently don’t have to shower. Phew.
It all sounds good enough that I was surprised when she got up on the third morning of school and said, “I wish I didn’t have to go to school today.” Since she hadn’t yet run out of new school clothes to wear, I couldn’t imagine what would cause her to say that.
I found out that night, when I sat on her bed to chat with her before she fell asleep. She mentioned her discomfort with a boy who sits next to her in homeroom. The boy has, to put it mildly, a “potty mouth.”
“While the rest of us have daily vocabulary words like ‘obsequious’ and ‘illiterate,’ his include the “F” word and the “S” word,” she joked. But I could see that it bothered her. She told me his mutterings are low enough that the teacher can’t even hear him. She said she hoped he’d eventually stop; I told her I felt the same way.
Later, she casually mentioned something that had happened to her on the first day of school. As she waited outside a class to be let in, a bigger girl came up to her, snapped a rubber band against her bare arm, and asked if it had hurt. My daughter said it had, and the girl said, “Oh, sorry,” before walking away.
My first instinct was to tell my daughter that her response should have been, “Yes, it did. Now let me stick my pencil in your eye and see if THAT hurts!”
Fortunately, I held my tongue. It occurred to me that if she’d voiced the idea, the girl might have considered it to be an interesting experiment.
She had other tales – of a girl who walked up to my daughter’s group at lunch, barked like a dog and walked away; of an altercation between two girls, one of whom had taken the other’s pencil, that turned into an emotional drama culminating in one of the girls lying on the floor and crying; and of a boy who, during a lecture on sexual harassment, voiced the idea that it was okay to “squeeze” a girl if she was “yours.”
I’m guessing all of this is fairly normal for a middle school with 1,200 students. I keep telling my daughter that while nobody has the right to hurt or scare her, she has to learn to deal with all kinds of people in the world.
The problem, I think, is that my daughter has led a relatively sheltered life at school. By the time she got out of the cute early elementary years and some of her schoolmates started acting weird, my daughter had transferred to a small, public school for gifted children. There was only one class in each grade level and just 30-ish children in each class, which meant most of the students were together for three years.
They got to know one another. The teachers knew them – and knew who and what to watch out for. There wasn’t much a child could get away with there, because it was kind of like having 30 brothers and sisters watching your every move.
Now, she’s just another little ponytailed head on a campus bursting with students. I can see how it would be very easy for a troublemaker or a bully to fly under the radar for a while.
I know she has to learn to handle people like the rubber band snapper and the potty-mouthed boy. There is no doubt in my mind that she will be confronted by people like this her whole life.
But I can’t help wondering why she is the one who has to adapt. Why don’t these kids have to learn to conform to societal norms in terms of behavior? Why does my “good” child have to skate around these fledgling bullies?
These seem like some substantial questions to have after less than a week’s exposure to middle school.
I suspect it will take a lot longer for the answers to emerge…
Copyright 2008, Metropolitan News Company