Tidbits

Middle School: An Anthropological Study

I used to dream about the wonders of middle school. I was pulled out of school and forced into homeschooling at the age of nine, so, while I had plenty of memories of elementary school, middle school was something of a mystical place. It was the legendary land of books and Disney shows, whose inhabitants had an exotic and fascinating culture. They had customs that were completely foreign to me, but I secretly yearned to try - flirting and wearing make-up and going to dances. Of course, I'd heard rumors that were quite daunting to an outsider like me – that the teachers hated the students, the nerds got beaten up, and before P.E. every day you had to change clothes in front of everyone – but that wasn't enough to quell my interest. I wanted to observe the middle-schoolers in their native habitat, see their rituals with my own two eyes, and maybe even integrate myself and become accepted as one of their own. So, the week before I was to start eighth grade, I went to my parents with a list of points and begged them to let me take my last chance to experience middle school. If only I'd known what I was getting into.

My best friend Kristi, who lived three houses down, was going to start sixth grade that year. All of her elementary school friends were going to a different middle school than her, so she rejoiced when I told her she and I would be going to the nearby school, Dallas Ranch, together. We promised to walk to and from school together every day, sit together at lunch, and go to all the dances.

Kristi and I arrived at school on the first day wide-eyed and in awe. We had walked by Dallas Ranch before when we went to the drug store to buy ice-cream, but it looked bigger from the inside than out. All the buildings were the same pale orange, with two or three stories each. We set off to search for our classrooms and the handful of people in the school who we knew, familiarizing ourselves with the campus along the way. It didn't look like the middle schools on TV – the bathroom mirrors were too scratched to see through, the lockers were rusty and difficult to open, and the pavement was dotted with blackened gum. Soon the bell rang, and Kristi and I were pulled in different directions. She shouted good-bye and promised to meet me by the front gate after school.

I was not thrilled with my schedule. I wanted Spanish for an elective, but it was filled, so instead they gave me Industrial Technology. The teacher was a bald, buff guy with a tattoo and he randomly assigned everyone to stations where we'd learn about such useful and exciting skills as pneumatics and hydraulics. No one cared about the class or which station they would get, but they did care about which partner would be assigned to work at their station with them. I got the least boring station, graphic design, and I embarrassed myself by pumping my fist and shouting "Yes!" when the teacher called my name. Everyone misinterpreted my excitement about the station as excitement about my partner, and the boy who was assigned to work with me got teased about it for the rest of the day.

The one class I was excited for was English. My passion at the time was writing stories, and I was sure I'd dazzle the teacher with my brilliant writing skills. But it was not to be. The teacher, Mrs. Chaddock, was a middle-aged woman who always spoke in the same cheery tone, always rising in pitch as she neared the end of her sentence. When she was angry, her voice would grow in volume, but her smile would remain frozen on her face. We read novels in class and if no one volunteered she would do the reading. She still kept the exact same voice when she read, and she would interrupt herself every two sentences to point out examples of metaphors or alliteration. Her narration gave me headaches. I started volunteering every time just so I wouldn't have to hear her. Eventually she told me to stop showing off and give everyone else a turn, not seeming to notice that no one else wanted one.

The first dance was on the Friday of the first week of school. Kristi and I agonized over not knowing what to wear. After school, I giddily hurried to the cafeteria where the dance was to take place. It took me forever to find Kristi.

"Hi!" I said when I did, trying not to show how relieved I was to have someone to protect me from looking like a loner.

"Oh... hi," she said.

"What do we do?" I asked.

She smiled awkwardly. "Um, I sort of wanted to hang out with my friends from class."

"Okay?"

"And, I was talking to them, and I told them about you, and they all said it would be kind of awkward to have a random eighth-grader there, so, um, sorry?"

"Umm... oh. Okay." I tried to smile. I didn't want to impose on Kristi's friends, but now I didn't know what to do. I tried standing off to the side looking pretty, like girls in movies. I thought I looked pretty enough – I was wearing my favorite knee socks, and I hadn't washed my hair in two days, so it wasn't frizzy. But no one asked me to dance, so I stared at a pillar until five o' clock when they let everyone leave.

My cultural immersion experience was a flop. Everyone else already knew each other; they weren't interested in me. I discovered that I had absolutely no idea how to make friends. In elementary school you could just walk up to someone and ask to be their friend, but I'd at least watched enough Disney sitcoms to know that wouldn't work here. I hated lunch time. Kristi didn't have lunch with me and I had no one to sit with, except the popular boys who would come up and mockingly ask me on dates. I ate in a bathroom stall until someone else transferred. Her name was Elsie, and she was even more socially incompetent than I was. She was friendly, but we had absolutely nothing in common except our loser status. When we sat together, I usually read comics while she unsuccessfully tried to befriend whoever was sitting next to us at the table.

Kristi, on the other hand, had befriended all the girls in her class. When we walked home from school she happily chatted about the fun things she had done in class, while I complained about how much I hated it all. Finally she got sick of my whining.

"If you're sick of being lonely, just make some friends!" she snapped.

"I can't!" I yelled. "It's not that easy, okay?"

We didn't speak for the rest of the walk home. We apologized and made up, of course, but our friendship wasn't the same after that year. She started developing new interests like fashion, and I, trying to figure out what it was about me that made me so incompatible with everyone else, developed an interest in psychology. Whenever we walked home together she would give me wardrobe tips (unwittingly insulting my favorite clothes) or I would try to psychoanalyze her (often throwing in passive-aggressive jabs at her newfound conformist tendencies), and we ended up in more fights that year walking to and from school than we'd ever had in the previous seven years we had known each other. When we weren't fighting, we were bored. We were losing the interests we had shared as kids. Kristi lost the interests I still had, and I lost the ones Kristi still had, and before long we didn't have anything in common but memories. When "Remember when?" was no longer enough, we stopped talking altogether.

That one year in middle school was a rough time in my life. I was torn from the sheltering cocoon of my homeschooled life and forced to seriously look at the world, and I did not like what I saw. But looking back, I'm glad I went. That year, I learned to listen to people's points of view, and that enabled me to truly form opinions of my own. I learned what happens to friendships when you take them for granted, which has allowed me to keep the friends I've made since then. I learned that many people are bullies, but that I'd rather be a target than to be someone like them, and because of that I've gained a greater appreciation and respect for all kinds of people – even people I used to look down on. I no longer complain, because in spite of the trauma, I grew a lot, and I learned a lot about how to interact with people – and in the end, learning to understand people is what "cultural immersion" is about after all.