In her October 7, 2019 article in The Atlantic magazine, Alia Wong writes, “Here’s a thing no one’s thinking: Geez, I wish I still looked the way I did when I was 12. Middle school is the worst.”
To be a middle schooler is to be a kind of biological missing link, a thing in the process of becoming but not yet identifiable—something in between a tadpole and a platypus—a science experiment gone terribly wrong.
Middle school is a time when hormones, those mysterious chemicals that promise to make you tall and beautiful and muscular and popular, instead turn you into a parody of an adult. You may get a deep voice—except sometimes when you are trying to be suave around girls or read aloud a Robert Frost poem in English class, it squeaks and honks like a startled goose. Girls who were tiny elven creatures, suddenly grow into giraffes, all ankles and elbows. Or they “develop” and discover boys are now afraid to talk with them. And let’s not even mention armpit hair and Adam’s apples and pimples and BO. Junior high is a frightening time to be alive. Who in their right mind would want to be in middle school? Any sixth grader, that’s who.
By 2024, Iowa City sixth graders will have been swept from elementary schools with all those “children” into middle schools to join with the big, mature seventh and eighth graders. School officials explain that the move will give sixth graders more opportunities to make friends and get established with their teachers by the time they graduate from eighth grade and move into high school. They want to extend the transition period during that critical time in a student’s evolution.
And speaking of evolution, does that sixth grader, so eager to be one of the big junior high kids, realize what a shock it’s going to be when they set foot in middle school? Like one of those prehistoric fish, learning to use its flippers as feet when it steps out onto dry land for the first time. Those sixth graders will be giving up their status as the biggest, smartest, most mature kids in their entire school in order to become the most puny, frightened and socially insignificant. At recess, they will want to play hide-and-seek and tell knock-knock jokes while the seventh and eighth graders will be talking about cars and making out with girls—who look like grown-up ladies. It wasn’t that long ago they were playing T-ball. Now the big boys are playing hardball and nobody is going to pick a little sixth grader for their team.
As unsettling as it will be for Iowa City’s sixth graders to adjust to the challenges of junior high, that’s life. Ms. Wong quotes Mayra Cruz, principal of Oyster-Adams Bilingual School in Washington D.C. who observes, “Everybody struggles with early adolescence. It’s not like you can just skip that.”
And the ironic thing is: when you get to be 70, you will take out one of your awkward junior high photos with your unruly mop of hair and buck teeth and you will marvel. “Wow,” you’ll say. “I used to have hair. And those were my real teeth….”