The Middle Ages : What if I get teased? Beaten up Lost? Thousands of kids will leave the comfort of elementary school this year for the halls of junior high. And they’re all fighting their own fears.
The first day of middle school, 10-year-old Mario Pallais was too nervous to eat. Schoolmate Marie Paulino, 11, asked if she could stay home. Their insides were shaking because in just a few minutes, the youngsters would be launched into a new universe, a world fraught, they had heard, with endless possibilities for personal humiliation.
As the fall term arrives, thousands of Southland kids like them are worrying with varying degrees of hysteria:
What if I get lost and have to ask directions from an older kid who makes fun of me?
What if they notice I’m wearing fake Adidas from Payless?
What if I get beaten up?
What if they make me change clothes for P.E. in front of everyone?
What if I get a pimple on the end of my nose?
What if the teachers are mean to me?
What if I don’t know anyone?
Switching from elementary schools to larger, more impersonal junior highs or middle schools never has been easy. Not only are kids leaving a single classroom teacher for multiple, specialized teachers, they are switching during puberty--a growth spurt second only to infancy in its velocity of change--and the excruciatingly painful self-consciousness and wild energy that goes with it.
Now, there is also the additional, sometimes legitimate, fears of bodily harm and drugs, which, to them, just get lumped in with the rest.
“I’m afraid to get beat up and I’m afraid to get talked about,” said Candace Marshall, 11, who still likes to play with Barbies. This fall, when she enters Marshall Fundamental School, which includes grades 6 through 12, she said, “I’m going to be the youngest person there and there are bigger kids around me and everything. I’ve got to learn to act right around them. If I’m acting childish, they’ll say, ‘Oh, look at that girl over there, she’s acting all childish. . . .”
Her solution: “I think I might have bodyguards.”
Some are afraid their belongings will be stolen; others are afraid they themselves might vanish. Crystal Noe of Pasadena, a seventh-grader, said she’s no longer eligible for the district school bus and dreads, as do some adults, having to ride the MTA. “I just don’t want to get stolen,” she said.
Going into Wilson Middle School in Pasadena, Ingrid Wilk, 11, figures the worst thing that could happen to her would be to get “jumped into a gang.” She knows how it goes: “First they ask you. If you say, ‘Yeah,’ they say, ‘We’ll meet here at this time’ and stuff. The whole gang comes and they say, ‘Are you ready?’ and you say, ‘I guess.’ And they start beating you up. They hit you with bats.”
But sometimes, girls who say no also get beaten up, she shrugged. “It’s like, which way to go?”
In Orange County, the methods are only slightly more refined. Marisa Jester, 12, going into Los Alisos Intermediate School in Mission Viejo, said she’s heard that “people will have girlfriends go over and ask if you like them, and then they tell them what you said about them and the little group gets on you and threatens you.”
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Making it all worse is the urge to conform, which peaks during early adolescence, said Anne Petersen, professor of adolescent development and pediatrics at the University of Minnesota. “It puts more pressure on kids to find out what the rules are. It’s a time when kids are much more likely to worry about all sorts of extra things.”
How they look, for instance.
In reality, there is precious little physical conformity in middle school. While some students weigh less than 50 pounds, others look so mature they have been mistaken for parents. Some girls still snuggle with stuffed animals, while some boys wear full beards and want to make out behind the buildings. Sometimes, child and adult coexist in the same cartoon-like body: bone-thin legs planted in sneakers the size of ski boots.
Since she started at Le Conte Middle School, a year-round school in Hollywood, a few weeks ago, it’s been clear that Marie Paulino is the smallest girl in school. She said her 46-pound backpack weighs more than she does. “Just because I’m small, they think I’m stupid,” she said. “I try to tell them, not with words, but with eye contact. I give them a sorry look.”
On the other hand, girls and boys who develop earlier than others can have problems that last into adulthood--especially girls, Petersen said. Without social or emotional maturity to match, they often become easy prey for older boys or young men.
Ingrid said she has two friends like that. “Boys would always go up to (one girl) and say, ‘Let me grab your chest.’ She was sitting down one day and a boy grabbed her chest really hard and she started crying and went home.
“They don’t tell that to (my other friend). She would grab them by the hair and throw them around.”
Petersen, who conducted a long-term study of middle-school students, said: “One of the most interesting things is that the body type that kids have in junior high tends to persist in our data into adulthood. Kids who were fat in early adolescence think of themselves as a fat person even if they’re not fat.”
Because it is a time of heightened emotions, those years tend to be remembered with more clarity--a phenomenon known as “hot cognition.” Especially if it’s painful. “A lot of the kids in these various (long-term) studies talk about the years of early adolescence being the worst of their life so far,” Petersen said.
(How many adults still have nightmares about forgetting their locker combinations? Hands, please.)
Adina Nack, 21, said she was labeled by classmates and even teachers as a nerdy brain in junior high. It wasn’t until her sophomore year in high school that she began to shed that internalized image. “I had my first boyfriend and he was not a nerd. He was a jock. He had a varsity letter. I felt like I had finally reached acceptability status.”
Recently graduated from UC Irvine, she said she retains “a tinge of animosity” toward the really popular people.
“I don’t wish them ill,” she said. “But I’m looking forward to reunions.”
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Kids are painfully aware that difference brings ridicule and sometimes danger. For some, clothes can be the first line of defense.
“I got to dress up-to-date,” said Donald Boyd, 11, of Pasadena. “The first day of school, I’m wearing black jeans, creased hard, and a white shirt. I can’t be going in no bell bottoms with an Afro on top of my head. I’d be the laughingstock of the year on the first day of school. I’d be considered a nerd.”
Phi Nguyen, 13, recalled her first day at El Rancho Middle School in Anaheim Hills. “Everyone is looking at everyone else and you’re looking down at your own clothes, and looking at everyone else.”
Said Mission Viejo’s Marisa: “If you’re not wearing the labels No Fear, Stussy, Mossimo, they make fun of you. They say, ‘Nice clothes, cheapie.’ ”
In Pasadena, “You have to have shoes that go with the outfit, or you’re not there,” said Mia Nakao, a second-year student at Oak Avenue Intermediate School.
Not all kids are traumatized by the transition. Researchers said about 80% of kids get through middle school without falling apart, about the same success rate people in general have getting through life.
Studies show that self-esteem drops among both boys and girls in junior high, probably because of their loss of status. But by the end of the first year, their esteem has returned to the same level prior to the transition, said Douglas MacIver, a research scientist at Johns Hopkins University.
“For some kids, it’s a piece of cake. They use the newness as a challenge and really grow as a result of it,” Petersen said.
Looking back on seventh grade at Corona del Mar High School, Danielle McDermott, 12, said, “It was my best year. I made a lot of friends. I had good teachers. I liked the breaks and we had all kinds of lunch things, like McDonald’s. You could leave for lunch if you wanted.”
Her grades improved to straight A’s. “We did more creative thinking.” Math--a notorious bete noir for girls--was her best subject, she said.
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What makes the difference is the school environment itself, said Anthony Jackson, program officer with the Carnegie Corp. of New York, which funds a national reform movement to make middle schools more user-friendly. Many schools, particularly in California, are starting to hold orientation programs the preceding spring to de-traumatize the transition and have instituted team teaching to create smaller, more personal, schools within schools.
This year, as Le Conte switched from grades seven to nine to grades six to eight, the school also eliminated the use of lockers and instituted uniforms in an effort to better monitor students and identify outsiders. “I’m not sure if it’s the uniforms or eliminating the lockers or the grade change, but it’s 100% better,” teacher Nancy Carr said.
If they want, kids can wear their gym clothes all day long. (“It hasn’t been that bad, actually,” said P.E. teacher Jeanette Young.)
Most middle schools are aware of the need for reform, Jackson said, but only a small percentage is pursuing change aggressively.
For some children, their distress over middle school can push them over the edge.
“Every year somewhere in the U.S. at the beginning of school, a kid is found hanging from a tree or with a shotgun blast in his head, usually a boy, because of P.E.,” said Joan Lipsitz, founder of the Center for Early Adolescence at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“Sometimes it happens at first report card time; he’s terrified to take home a report card with an F. And the reason he has an F is that he refused to take off his clothes and if you don’t get into gym shorts, you don’t get credit.”
Andy Parker, a gym teacher at La Conte, said some boys don’t want their legs to show. “It’ll be a hundred degrees and they’ll be wearing sweats, they’re so self-conscious,” he said.
Some girls have developed elaborate methods of changing underneath large T-shirts, or holding up towels for one another in specially reserved corners.
Beyond changing, the playing field itself can terrify kids. “The thing that scares me most is getting crushed in football,” said Damian Butler, 13, who is about to enter Washington Middle School in Pasadena.
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For better or worse, the middle school transition has almost become a rite of passage in a culture lacking such unified, formal rituals. Girls particularly start dressing more maturely, with make up and dangling earrings. Older boys like to initiate the younger ones with pranks, similar to fraternity hazing.
At Le Conte, newcomers have been called “scrubs” for generations. “Sixth-graders are toilet scrubbers. Eighth-graders are kings,” explained Ruben Andreasyan, 11, who has been in middle school a few weeks now.
Sometimes, sixth-graders get “scrubbed” (given a noogie--or Dutch rub) or “corded” (beaten up). Explained 8th-grader Fernando Trebno: “If somebody acts stupid in class, then everybody starts saying, ‘Cord, cord, cord. . . .’ When they go out, everybody jumps on them.”
“Sometimes they flush some kids’ heads in the toilet,” said Ronnie Ramirez, 11. In the locker room, older boys snapped him with a towel.
Still and all, he said, “I thought it was going to be worse.”
After only a few weeks, Mario Pallais said most of his fear is gone. Often lost the first day, he got directions from teachers. “The second day, I was getting better and better, and now I don’t get that lost,” he said. Teachers were nicer than he was led to believe and he hasn’t been hurt. At least, he said, “Not yet.”
Cynthia Presnell, 11, a classmate at Le Conte, said before she started school, she was afraid she might be killed. One time a stranger did mug her off campus, she said, and attempted to strangle her with a string when she refused him money. But the string broke and she escaped by pretending to take a bus home, she added proudly. On the bright side, she said, “The first day of school, I made four new friends. And I didn’t need directions.” And she’s chosen to wear her gym clothes all day long.
Looking forward to their next chapter, most kids might agree with Ingrid from Pasadena, who knows her feelings are definitely mixed. “I’m excited because I’m going to a new school and meeting new people and everything and I’m nervous,” she said, “because of the exact same reason I was excited.”
