Middle School
By Good article about middle school/junior high in the New York Times. I’ve never taught 7th graders, but my general recollections of being a middle school student seem to accord pretty well with the experiences of the teachers. Thinking back to it still gives me the willies; it involved a degree of physical and emotional insecurity that I don’t like to recollect.
I’d like to say that there really must be some better way to handle kids of that age, but I don’t know if that’s true. I’m all for experimentation, though. I think that part of the problem is that junior high is kind of like the French Revolution. When I say that, I mean the French Revolution as Edmund Burke saw it, an environment in which brutal political authority remained, but all of the softening edges had been stripped away. Social authority exists in high school, but by that time most people have figured out that straighforward torture and continuous confrontation are exhausting and don’t do anyone any favors. Junior high is about the simple, blunt application of social power.