The Most Often Remembered Part of Middle School

Health

We are back to the health room for diagrams of reproductive organs and lectures on the importance of self-esteem. My teacher talks as little as possible. Mostly, we watch videos. All of the videos are from a series called Degrassi Junior High. Actually, there quite good. And they're Canadian, so they're even better. And they're twenty years old. 

 

For some reason, many people envision health rooms as being full of shy kids who are afraid to speak up from embarrassment. They have obviously not stepped foot in my health classroom. Several kids are so talkative they have to be suppressed. Also, the Internet has not made teaching any easier. It is so overloaded with information, most of health is correcting information, not teaching it.  

 

Health doesn't stay in the health room. If you walked the halls with a tape recorder, you would pick up many conversations about health subjects. Maybe not with terms like 'self-esteem' or 'abstinence', but the general ideas. Students talk very openly with one another, which is important. However, health class information is also used to insult, make others uncomfortable, or to shout out about in the middle of a test. 

It seems, though, that at least the class makes an impact on it's students, which about as good as it can get, right?

"What if they came in here?"

"Well, we could blockade the door with the desks..."

"Or we could just bust through the window."

"If it happens, of course."

It didn't happen. Despite the rumors and the jokes, yesterday was just another day. Besides from the fact that nine hundred and thirty four students didn't show up to T.C. Williams. Or the fact that yesterday was the anniversary of Columbine.

It all began when a few high school students began spreading rumors that they were going to recreate Columbine at T.C. This led to searches, suspensions, and even more rumors. As you can imagine, students reacted differently. Some students laughed at it, like a joke. Some took it very seriously. So seriously, they didn't come to school.

Of course, what happens at T.C. trickles down into the middle schools. Rumors flew there, too. Kids began discussing what would happen if a shooter really did come into the school (completely forgetting that, even if there was an actual plot, T.C. was the only target). They joked about it and added gory details and then stopped abruptly with an expression of "What if this really did happen? In fact, it has happened. What if?"

The school sent out talking points to all of the teachers so that they could talk to their students. That meant that anyone who hadn't known before, now knew.

Nine hundred and thirty four students stayed home from T.C. Williams yesterday.

It was just another day.

How I Feel on Picture Day
Like a puppet.

Over here, sweetie! Now, just tilt your head a little too the right- too far! Just drop your hands. Relax, okay? Smile! The boys picked at the collared shirts their mothers made them wear, and fret about which pose they will have to stand in. At least the woman who ran it today didn't have a voice intended for two-year-olds.

In language arts, our class had the option to read Anne Frank; The Diary of a Young Girl or Hiroshima by John Hersey. I've already read Anne Frank's diary, so I decided to read Every few days or so, we have literature circles comprised of three or four kids each, and then we debrief to the class. We have just finished reading the fourth chapter of Hiroshima.

Areas of Disbelief

• How could the Japanese be so calm? Why aren't they raging and fighting?
• Their nationalism stretched far beyond 'The Pledge of Allegience'.
  
• Why did America drop the bomb in the first place?
  
• How could we have been so angry?

How could we have been so angry? My generation can not imagine an America in which there was so much hatred against the Japanese. I guess all of those multi-cultural nights and long American-dream speeches have made a difference, after all.

Soccer is about to end in P.E. We began it just as winter turned into spring-a perfect time. Soccer, I must say, is actually distinguishable, unlike most of the other sports we play. Although there are football tackles and the occasional blatant handball, the basic concept of soccer remains fairly intact.

We play on the field behind our school. It's slanted at the corners, so the ball goes out of bounds more than often, and if you even touch the ball you're guaranteed to get tripped or beaten, but sometimes you can smell the bread in the ovens of a bakery up the street, so it's all worth it.

The first thing I did when I got home from school yesterday was open the freezer and roll an ice pack up and down my arms, and around my face. It's been that hot. Of course, that means everyone is wearing skimpy little dresses and tanktops (girls at least; a few boys- somehow- continue to dress like it's winter). Our school has decided to reestablish it's long-forgotten dress code.

A Summary of Our Dress Code
-Skirts and shorts must extend past your fingertips
-Shirts must have sleeves that are at least two fingers wide
-No bandannas

Most of the teachers have completely ignored the most recent campaign, but a few have joined with the vigor of a hungry lion. Yesterday, I was asked to change my shirt because the sleeves were too narrow. I admit it was border-line. But two weeks ago, no one would have said a word.

You may be wondering why our school doesn't allow bandannas. Well, after your first 'gang symbol' lecture from our school officer, you'd be just-plain-scared to wear one. I did, once, make the mistake of wearing one. It was a green one with fact boxes about snakes on it-because I'm part of the Nature Geek Gang. Another loop-hole in our dress code is the fact that there is a limit on how thin your shoulder straps can be, but no (well-known) limit for how low your shirt can dip.

However, considering the dress code is only reinforced a few weeks of the school year, what difference does it make?

Well, it was back to school today. Sun-tanned tweens in short shorts and badly concealed spaghetti-straps spilling with stories of the beach, the friend's house, the unexpected encounters...
Strangely, even after a week of not seeing one another, no says 'How are you?'. No one asks if someone else had a good spring break. If you want to know, you ask 'what did you do'. There was hardly even a 'hello' before the tales of the week came cascading down like a bombarding hummingbird.

The 'popular' friend group clustered around the cafeteria tables in the corner exchanging the latest gossip. I stood a bit apart, my back against the wall, listening in.

My Status At Middle School
An Outsider on the Inside.

I don't really fit in. Not like a puzzle piece, or a secret ingredient. My style is a bit different. I'm a whitewater racer; a sport which no one understands, let alone remembers (you do crew, right? or oh, I went rafting once...). I enjoy theater, but I'm never in the school plays because I like working with adults in community theaters. I don't curse regularly. I sing to myself in the hallways. I know songs from musicals by heart, but I also have K'naan and Taylor Swift on my i-pod.

It isn't as if I don't have friends. Everyone in that corner of the cafeteria knows me, and I know them. We have had a few shared words. A compliment on one another's shoes or essay. There are those that I have discussed the world with. And middle school. There are those that I eat lunch with every day. But there's only a handful of friends who really get me.

They may think they know me. They only know part of me. This makes me sound like I'm a shy, soft-spoken spectator. Anyone will tell you that's not me. I'm actually quite talkative, and not at all afraid of speaking up. I just don't have much to say at school. I smile at jokes, and nod when someone tells me a story. I laugh, too. Perhaps it has to do with the time of the day, perhaps it has to do with the people I'm with, but I don't often get silly at school.

This is not to say I don't have friends. I have many people who I consider friends, and they consider me their friend, too. But I don't have a group of friends who gets together every other Friday for a sleepover, or spend weekends together at each other's summer lodges. But I'm all right with that. Just as long as they get some part of me and I have someone to eat lunch with, I should count myself as lucky.

I'm a puzzle piece for a different puzzle. But somehow, I fit.

In 2000, Remember the Titans made it's debut on the movie screen. It portrays the true story about the integration of T.C. Williams football team. It is T.C. William's biggest claim to fame. T.C. Williams happens to be my future high school and I have heard stories from people who went to school there during that period in time, if not during the initial integration. It was pretty rough. If you walked into my middle school today, you would probably think ACPS (Alexandria City Public Schools) still struggles with racism. Except for, we don't. True, tables at lunch are more-or-less divided by race. True, racial jokes fly with hummingbird-speed wings. But I can explain.

Major Ethnicities at My Middle School

1. African-American

2. Caucasian

3. Hispanic

People of the same ethnicities and economic classes tend to have similar ideas of what is popular, similar interests, similar ways of talking...similar cultures. Naturally, they will group together. That's common knowledge. But the school also naturally divides races. My school has two classes for science, language arts, and social studies: regular and honors. When you sign up for classes, you choose which one you would like to take. (Honors is supposed to move faster and require more critical thinking skills, but the difference between honors and regular varies from teacher to teacher.)
This is where the separations happen.
1. Most of the white students sign up for honors (of course, there are several who don't)
2. Most of the black students don't sign up for honors (though there are many who do)
3. Most of the Hispanics don't sign up for honors (again, there are many exceptions), and many are in ESL (English as a Second Language)
It is important to state that there are many, many, many exceptions. However, this is the basic idea.

As for insults, it doesn't take a long time to realize that they're not said in hatred. There are certainly people who take them seriously, and everyone should. Is it not worrying that, by the age of eleven or twelve, kids know enough stereotypes to insult one another with them? Is it not worrying that stereotypes are so played up in our society as a whole? Of course it is. Unfortunately, if you take the insults seriously, you will feel hurt.

It is a little ironic that, even though everyone knows these stereotypes, they are not common occurrences at our middle school. We don't have the preppy white kids who wear knee socks and are clueless to other cultures. We have just as many Hispanics and whites who wear chains and low pants as we do blacks. We have our own version of these stereotypes. We do have kids who are preppy, but they aren't clueless, and they aren't always white.

Basically, appearances can be misleading. It is extremely hard to keep every lunch table diverse, just as it is hard to keep stereotypes out of society. Overall, my middle school is pretty decent in that regard.

But I'm on Spring Break now, so I don't have to deal with all that.