7th-Graders Endure Rites of Passage : Turbulence Is a Part of Shift to Junior High

Just minutes into the lunch period Tuesday at Walter Reed Junior High School in North Hollywood, “it” happened.

“You’ve been scrubbed!” Tim Baca’s friends shouted after an older student named Adam lightly mashed his knuckles into Tim’s hair.

Tim, 12, was lucky. He could have been scrubbed with lipstick, or, as happened to his friend Jason Handler, with a Skittles candy. In the often mortifying world beyond elementary school, Tim, a seventh-grader, had just weathered his first rite of junior high.

As nearly everyone who goes to junior high knows, Tim explained, seventh-graders are “scrubs,” fair game to the upper classes. Eighth-graders, presumably higher up on the pecking order, are “toilet bowl washers.” And ninth-graders, the envy of all, are “kings and queens,” and neither they nor eighth-graders get scrubbed.

Far From Worst

For Tim, one of 450,000 Los Angeles Unified School District students who started classes Tuesday, scrubbing was one of the less pleasant, but probably far from the worst, of the experiences that the new school year might bring. Educators say starting junior high is the most traumatic change a student undergoes during the 12 years of public schooling. Unlike elementary school, where a student usually has one teacher and the same classroom all year long, junior high mixes everything up.

In addition to the usual turbulence of adolescence, junior high means that instead of one teacher, suddenly you have seven. You have to carry books and remember locker combinations. And, perhaps worst of all, you have to dress for gym. The only good news, from the students’ point of view, is that showers have not been required for years.

“I like to say these three years are the most difficult years of your life,” said Reed seventh-grade counselor Nancy Newton. “It’s roller-coaster time. I try to help them recognize that this inside thing that’s going on is OK, nothing to be frightened about.”

Junior high is an important time for youngsters too. Experts from California Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig to members of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching say public schools have to work much harder to get students through these fragile middle-school years because this is where test scores are lagging and students begin to drop out.

Clothes Primary Concern

But for most seventh-graders at Reed Junion High on Tuesday, the biggest concern was more along the lines of whether one’s attire was socially acceptable. “It sounds stupid,” said Jessica Hoffmann, 11, “but what I was worried about was whether people would like what I was wearing. It took me three hours to decide on this,” a black-and-yellow sweater and miniskirt.

On Tuesday, Tim, who lives in Studio City with his parents and an older brother, acknowledged feeling “a little bit” nervous. He woke up at 5:30 a.m. without needing his alarm clock, ate a hearty bacon-and-eggs breakfast, and put on the clothes he had picked out three days before--new stone-washed jeans, rolled at the cuff, a white shirt with gray stripes (“Not new, but I like it”) and sneakers.

He remembered to load his backpack with his lunch, a binder, a pen and two notebooks. But he forgot the school map (“That was dumb,” he said later, when searching for a classroom) and a copy of his schedule and classroom assignments.

Luckily, the first stop of the day was homeroom, where teacher John Parmenter passed out extra copies of each student’s schedule and read the daily bulletin.

In elementary school, said Parmenter, who speaks slowly and in a soothing voice, “you were very comfortable. You knew where your classes were, you knew who your teacher was. It’s all very new here. We’ll try to get you over that uncomfortableness . . . so that it won’t be a terrible experience.”

No Cheeto Dust, Please

The next class was Beginning Strings. Tim, who plays the violin, seemed to perk up for this one. The teacher, Yolanda Gardea, told the 28 students a little personal background--that she graduated from UCLA, that she’s getting married this winter, and likes Sting and KROQ. She explained class rules--promptness, taking care of instruments and not eating while playing music. “You know, Cheeto dust on the strings, it’s disgusting.”

Later, Tim said he thinks music is going to be his favorite class, mainly because of Gardea. “She’s the youngest (teacher),” he said. “And she’s, like, fun.”

For academic classes, Tim was enrolled in Reed’s honors program for highly gifted students. The first was math, then science, where he spent much of the hour in a wide-ranging class discussion of the meaning of science and the nature of the universe. It ended with an assignment to figure out how far light travels in a year.

Then there was P.E., which started with orders shouted drill-sergeant-style by instructors. Lockers wouldn’t be assigned until later in the week, so no one had to get dressed Tuesday--a relief to some of the 150 boys sitting on benches outside the gymnasium. But, “I think he (the teacher) is going to yell in our face now,” Tim said when he realized that he and his bench mates had missed the call for last names beginning with B.

By 2:53 p.m., the day was done. By Tim’s reckoning, there had been no really awful moments. It was an “average” day, he concluded, though parts of it had been “kind of exciting.”

Would the year get better?

“Maybe. Probably. I hope.”