Middle School and Midlife Crisis

There are times in life when nothing seems right. Midlife or middle school, the “crisis” is the same.
On Tuesday teacher and blogger Dan Brown in Huffington Post told why New York’s mayor is completely off track in his approach to middle school improvement:

Rather than making school a nurturing and personal experience, kids, as early as kindergarten, are jammed into overcrowded classrooms, denied support services like fundamental skills tutoring, denied much-needed counseling, and are supervised by administrators more worried about test scores than their real needs. It’s no wonder that they “stop doing what you tell them to do,” as the mayor says. Bloomberg is blaming the victims here.

Here are 10 more reasons why middle school kids’ scores drop (While you’re reading this, think of your current or last chaotic life transition episode):

1. Loss of sense of self.

Just when they need people around them who know them, to give them a sense of belonging and connectedness, sixth and seventh graders are put into a massive school, into multiple classes, with teachers who may have over 100 kids/day.

2. Leslie Ritter.

In 1963 Leslie Ritter showed up for the first day of sixth grade with ratted, hair-sprayed hair, eye makeup, and pale, almost white lipstick, a tight skirt, and shaved tan legs. Leslie Ritter changed the rules and upped the ante. Life shifted for us all.

3. 8 times 7.

Just ask any kid having real problems with math. That child never mastered the basics and then was expected to do fractions and long division. Years of toil with stupid charts. Perfectly intelligent children
dread math–or reading or writing–every day, feeling stupid, losing hope. The more they worry about it, the harder it is to learn. It’s a private, stress-filled hell and then there’s. . .

4. Homework hell.

Slammed with daily homework since kindergarten, kids expect to get even more now. Gone is any hope
of time to themselves, rest, freedom, creative time, time to run wild, to experience nature, to explore life together.

5. Reorganizing brains.

This feeling of chaos and confusion comes with the breakdown of a childhood brain and the building of an adolescent brain, all accompanied by hormonal storms. It’s a creative process, not breakdown. No one’s telling them that. But then major life transitions are poorly understood at every life stage in this culture.

6. Lack of sleep.

Kids get up as early as 6 a.m. to catch the bus for school. Often they can’t sleep until 10 or later because of their biological clocks or because they have so much homework or because they’ve spent so much time doing video games or on the phone with friends. They need 10 hours of sleep to feel normal but Saturday morning they are roused out of bed for chores or sports. They are accused of laziness and bad attitudes when their problem is fatigue.

7. Malnutrition.

They aren’t hungry at 7 a.m. (those biological clocks again) and rely on snacks–sugar and caffeine–at 10. Many drink sodas instead of milk and too many don’t have protein until noon. Dinner isn’t until after sports after a long day at school. They’re starving. And often overweight because of this cycle–They fuel up their malnourished, starving bodies with junk.

8. Bummer news.

They are confronted with cynicism, with demands, with pressures. Where are the ideals? The dreams? The visions of a good, clean life? Where’s the Beaver and the Cleavers?

9. Recreational drugs.

Finally, some relief to all this. A vacation from the mess of their brains and their lives. A vacation from the brass band blasting in their heads.

10. Chaotic schools.

School could be a safe haven from the mess of life. A place of refuge for poor and disadvantaged children, for children from angry, crazy households. But it has become another unpredictable mess.

Apply the same list to midlife crisis and the workplace, to women after childbirth with young children, to men on verge of retirement, to 20-somethings at a loss in the work world, and to empty-nesters. Leslie Ritter has to shift to some other model of the next stage and you’ll have to get creative with #3. And you don’t get to blame the school system.