Middle School Blues

My Own Trauma Is Getting In The Way

The Maker Space at Little Bean’s new school

The three soon-to-be fifth graders move through the tour of their new school like a gang, like they are on the verge of taking over.

To the credit of their soon-to-be-teachers, one of them actually recognizes the whole group.

“Hey, all of you three are on the basketball team, aren’t you?” she says.

The girls beam.

We are about to reach that place that we’ve been warned about, that dreaded time, the upside-down time otherwise known as middle school.

But I’m unfamiliar with this iteration because when I attended middle school, that meant seventh and eighth grade. Here, middle school begins in fifth grade. The teachers take us for a walk around the whole campus, which now consists of two buildings - one is the primary unit where 6-8 graders, the gym and the cafeteria are. The other is a whole separate building for the fifth grade classes, where this gaggle of three will reside.

The district - aware that parents like me are wary (unfamiliar?) of having fifth graders hanging out with eighth graders - makes a big show of assuring us that the littles will be kept mostly separate from the bigger kids. I’m not as concerned about that, honestly.

What sort of, kind of, mostly irritates me about the tour is that the principal and teachers spend a lot of time talking about sports. Like, a lot of time. On our walk-about I try to nudge them into deeper conversations about, well, academics. Is there a process for helping higher achieving kids? What sort of Lexile Level or framework is used to asses reading levels? Are any of the extras or after-school clubs geared toward science or math? Book clubs? Anything?

I don’t know. Little Bean loves it. She’s excited the whole time. She talks freely to teachers she’s met for the first time only minutes earlier. She wants to go here, she feels she’s ready to go here. Me? Well…

My opinion perks up a bit when we get a tour of the library, which is really nice. I shoot straight over the young adult section and am glad to see some higher level reading there, and a very fine selection of more complex graphic novels. That’s good. There’s also a seed library.

And our whole family gasps when we come across a enormous section of the library developed into a Maker Space. Little Bean wants to begin building right there. The downside is, unlike her current elementary school schedule, there’s no weekly built-in mandatory library time. But I’m pretty certain she’ll find the time to come up here.

Someday, in these pages, I’ll write about my own middle school experience which was traumatic and awful. And maybe I’m just projecting, uncertain and wavering as she begins to enter this new phase that - for me - was one of the worst times of my life.

This is different, she’s different. Her life is different. I have to keep telling myself that.

Back a home, she’s all chat, talking about the book corner in one classroom or the ping pong tables in the cafeteria or being the piano player in the new school band. Upbeat. Excited. Wanting to do well. I swallow my fears. We’re moving ahead, I’m going to do my best. She’ll be MY inspiration.