Middle School Muddle: What kind of student emerges three years later?
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At the start of the harried public middle school search process in New York City, parents take tours and are forced to think a great deal about different academic approaches, settings and styles. What kind of school best suits your child: A traditional school with uniforms, a steady diet of homework and lots of exams? An arts-based curriculum that emphasizes creative projects? A collaborative learning approach with lots of group work? A hybrid approach? A secondary school, which continues through 12th grade?
There’s lots of variety in the largest school system in the U.S. and even more competition for programs with the best reputations. What I remember most about the middle school search had little to do with making the selection; it was more the anxiety about getting in along with a sense of outrage about how difficult the process was.
Through it all, I had a hard time envisioning the kind of student the 10-year-old accompanying me might become, or even where he would flourish most. It was even harder to imagine that the child I worried so much about putting on the subway alone would develop his own ideas about what kind of student he would – or would not — become.
My now eighth-grader – newly taller, and even more opinionated, than his mom — is getting ready to graduate from middle school. As I look back on some of his adventures and mishaps, I have no choice but to laugh at the many unexpected twists and turns in the transition from the child who held my hand to the teenager who asks that I walk on the other side of the street or at least a block behind.
Some of the transitions were delightful (new talents and friends, a particularly inspiring teacher). Others were merely appalling — the time he almost failed physical education for poor behavior, the unforgettable day where the highly amused school principal led me to his locker and said: “I thought you should see this,” as a tangled rush of notebooks, sneakers, jackets, overdue library books and assorted gear (and smells) tumbling onto the floor. There was no lock, but a long missing academic planner was discovered – with not one word written inside it.
So what kind of student is emerging? It’s a complicated answer, but the short answer is, we don’t really know yet.
Ultimately, we were lucky in our choice of middle schools; the staff for the most part knows that the children who enter may be on their way to becoming absurdly awkward, absent-minded Facebooking, text-messaging, self-conscious teenagers. Hopefully, they will have developed a love of learning and some good study habits to become the students they – not necessarily their parents – want to be.
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