449: Middle School

So we got this email at our radio show near the end of the school year from 14-year-old. - Huh? - Hey, is this Annie? - Yeah. - I caught her up at her house in California and asked her to read it.

- Mm-hmm, it says, "Do you know the American mice? I just escaped the whitewash brick wall. I am a gated prison that has commonly known as middle school." And then finally out for good. But in all the time, I have listened to your show.

I have never heard an episode devoted to what goes on inside the walls

of the middle school. I hope you'll think about it. And not a miss? - Yeah, you signed it anonymous, but then you actually, your email was signed with your name. - Yeah.

- Yeah. - Yeah. - I had said anonymous because in middle school everybody's so judgemental and I didn't want a kid to judge me anything if they were to me on the radio. - Mainly she says that she wrote to us because she and her friends are talking.

Right after they go after eighth grade, about how terrible a middle school was.

“And she wondered, was it just as bad for other people as it was for them?”

- Yeah, you always wonder whether other people are going to the same thing as you.

And it'd be cool to like hear other people stories about it and how what they went to. - And if you had to explain to somebody like, "What are the worst things about middle school?" Can I ask you to just walk me through it like, "What is so bad about middle school?" - The kids there are all in kind of socially awkward stages that the drama every day can be frustrating. And girl boy things or if someone likes someone so and so and then no matter who you are,

what you do, you'll get made fun of for it. Anything, anything in the world you can get made fun of for. - In Annie's case, she had friends who smoked, so she got criticized who smoking. And then she also was made fun of for not smoking, for being too much of a city to start smoking. She was made fun of for coming from a bilingual elementary school, everybody going to speak Spanish and spoke it throughout the day.

- And leaving elementary school, I guess I thought that when I got to middle school, everyone would think it was really cool that I swoop Spanish, but when I got there, I mostly just thought it was. - I don't know if they were jealous or what, but it wouldn't make fun of me for it. The kids say we're all full of ourselves for that. We spoke different languages and stuff. - Did it make you feel bad?

- Yeah, I didn't want to stick out in that way. If I got a new sweater or something, favorite Christmas that I really liked and I would really want to wear it to school or something that I'd be nervous

“because like what if someone didn't like my sweater or someone made fun of me for wearing it?”

It can be hard to do even the smallest things because you're so nervous that people tease you or judge you from it. - Did that sweater example, was that a real example? - Yeah, actually, I worried about it so much.

I also had up there in my cousins that I'd never worn it and they're kind of my signature now, I was really really like them.

They're like in Go Highly, set in my cousins. And how long did you have the moccasins before you actually wore them? - A few months, like probably two months. I guess I just thought if people didn't like them, they would only like fun of me for wearing them. And I didn't want to stand out that much.

- What could be done to make middle school better? - I don't think you can really do anything about it. - Nothing. - We talked about this for a little while, she said basically, everybody comes into middle school as a little kid and you're gonna have to grow up.

“If you're out, who's in what group and who you are and who's above who, and you'd have to figure that out somewhere at that age, right?”

Might as well be middle school. There was terrible, she says, but now she's in high school. - Whatever, whatever middle school was at work, everyone's a lot from the end. It's whatever one's lives are a lot better now. - What do you do on a video program for Annie? We look at whatever it is that happens in those mysterious years that we call middle school.

As the new school year begins, we have stories today from all over the country. People were watching their way through these years when you're figuring out so, so much. We go to middle school dances and classrooms and down to the Mexican border. From WB EZ Chicago, it's this American life, I'm out of glass. Stay with us. - It's this American life, today shows a rerun, one that we thought would be a nice one to run for returning to school with at one life in the middle ages.

So we wanted to understand what is going on exactly physically and emotionally with middle school kids and we talked to all kinds of people about that this last few weeks.

And you can go to different that experience? - I don't know if they learned anything. Like they are so consumed with learning all these other lessons about where they fit in in the social order and how their bodies are now working and who they're attracted to and who they're going to be. That facts and figures and geography and all the other stuff that you teach in school, it just doesn't even penetrate.

- Why are you saying, we shouldn't even bother to have them in school, we should just basically put them to work in the factory for two or three years?

- Yeah, I basically came away thinking, you're sort of wasting your time trying to teach middle school students anything. - If that team's just insane, Alex told me that Maria Montessori, who's the creator of the Montessori schools, who looked at what kids could learn at each developmental stage, at one point in her career actually tossed out a similar suggestion. Perhaps she said, young adolescents will be better off than a farm school, which is called an arid kinder, where they would work with the land.

- Is he just got a great sense of humor or what? - I am ran out to start by Marion Stroke, the principal of Evergreen Academy Middle School in Chicago, which was listed as one of the best middle schools in the country, a school to watch by the national form to accelerate middle grades reform.

“- You have to say, well, I obviously don't agree, okay, I think that we definitely have a way to stick knowledge in their heads.”

It's being creative about how we do it and taking into consideration all of those other things.

I'm not going to lie, it's not easy. - Can I ask you how much of the stereotype around students as age is true? Are you saying, are you saying that stereotype is true? You just got to deal with what it is? - It is true, and you have to, as the adult in the situation, you have to find a way to work around it. Find a way to help them to grow up. They won't have to suffer if we do things right. They won't have to suffer as much, let's say. I mean, you're going to go through emotional changes in your body changing, that can't be helped.

The raging hormones, that can't be helped. All of that can't be helped. It's the way that we react to it, that will make such a difference in their lives. It's our flexibility, it's our concern, it's our listening to them, it's our hearing them out.

“- And so what's actually happening? Developmentally, in the bodies and brains of kids, when they're in middle school?”

- Let me give you the overview of this way, the terrible 12s are a complete analog to the terrible twos. They're just not as cute, right? - This is going to purlstein. When she wrote a book called Not Much Just Chillin, the hidden lives of middle schoolers, following five middle school students very closely for a full year, she also incidentally researched everything she could find out about what is going on developmentally with kids that age. That makes them so different from other ages and fascinating.

- This is the time of biggest growth for human being, aside from infancy. So, your bones are growing faster than your muscles, so you can't actually sit still. But your brain, your gray matter during the middle school years, what happens in your early stages of puberty is this vast overproduction of brain cells and connections far more than you actually need. And only some of them are going to survive puberty. This growth in your frontal cortex, it peaks at 11 for girls and 12 for boys and then what happens is the cells just fight it out for survival.

And the ones that last are the ones you exercise more.

“- In other words, during those years your brain turns you into you, the adult you. The stuff you don't exercise just kind of goes away. And what's the days?”

- If you think about what you learned at the early stages of puberty, I don't know what that was for you. For me it was tap dancing and French, you know, it sticks. I know French much better than any language I learned after that and not because I had a better teacher. I was learning it at the right time. I can still do tap dances though I won't that I learned when I was 12 or 13. - I can still do magic tricks that I learned at that age. - Exactly. It's it's it's it's embossed in your existence. It's this important time for your brain. It's like this use it for lose it time.

- When the person agrees that all this stereotypes about middle schoolers, everything in fact that Annie complained about, all of that is true. But she says there's a flip side that people don't usually talk about. Middle school is when kids open up to the world.

It's when they think about bigger things. And I haven't formed their opinions on things yet. Everything is up for grabs, which is amazing to be around.

- I just think kids that age are fun. I like being around them. Middle schoolers are in their real nice spot of being interesting, but also being able to explain to you what's going on in their minds and why they do the things they do.

- Older kids she says, high school kids, by then they can be jaded or cynical. They're settling into who they are. Middle school, everything's new.

“You're probably picking your friends for the very first time. But the first time they aren't just the kids on your block or your parents, friends, kids or the kids who are around.”

So you make a best friend one day who then you drop two weeks later. You get obsessed with guitar or computers or dance for two weeks and then two weeks later you drop it. - Everything is awful about middle school she says. That's the great thing about it. You experiment. - Two, stutter steps. One good place to see the experiment that is life in middle school in action is middle school dance. Last Friday there were middle school dancers all over the country all at the same time. And we sent reporters to a half dozen of them to find out how kids were doing. They talked to them before the kids went inside to the field of battle and no surprise. We found a lot of stress, a lot of uncertainty.

- Who's nervous about tonight? - I am. I don't know. - Why? Well, I don't know. We don't know what's going to be like. I just don't know.

I mean, yeah. I mean, lots of things before, but they've never exactly had the term dance to it.

- These four girls are six graders and they're in a car on the way to a neon themed dance at edgewood middle school in Highland Park, Illinois with their mom and reporter Rob World of Bar. - Who's going to dance with a boy tonight? - Nobody.

“- I don't, I can tell you that. - You don't know what's going to be like slow dancing or regular dancing. That's why we are nervous.”

- Roughly 800 miles east in New Jersey. Six greater Ethan D'Rose was hoping that there would be at least one slow dance though. - Did he feel ready for a slow dance? - Nope. Not at all. - Why not? What do you, what do you, what do you worried about? - I just don't know how to do it. I'm not sure that I'll do it correctly or yeah.

- He's standing in front of the school with reporter Brian Reed as a kid's stream into the school. Ethan is wearing a button up shirt with green and black stripes that he is not happy with.

- That was my mom. She made me wear it. She said that if I don't wear the two shirts and I am wearing right now that I can't go to the dance. - What do you, what are you hoping happens at this dance? - I'm hoping I don't, like, nothing bad happens like, no humiliation or not something that'll be a story for the next month or two, at least to me. - Of course, Ethan and the girls have been that car and Illinois are six graders. In New York City, seventh graders Evelyn Benson and Alice Westerman are excited and feeling very grown up

on their way to their schools, Halloween dance. - I'm really happy because, like, last year, they like split the gym in half so it's like light on one side and like pitch black on the other side. All the six graders are kind of like band from the dark side, but that's where like all the cool kids are. So now we're in seven grade dance on the dark side, so it's like, "Whoa, you're cool!" - Don't talk about the dark side. - Some of the middle school boys got up the nerve to ask girls to be their dates to the dances.

But because this is a new experience for the girls too, being asked out on a date, they don't exactly know how to handle it. Here's a grown-up autumn talking with her producer who's a pop-up in Delaware. - Did you get asked the dance? - Um, yes, I did. - And what did you say? I said I don't know, but I probably won't say yes. Wait, you haven't told them, yes or no yet? - No.

Okay, so it's 120 and the dance is seven.

“- Yeah. - When do you have to let them know?”

- I probably won't answer. Are you serious? - Yeah. I just kind of want to hang out with the girls. - So he's the only one who asked you. - It was on the people too. How many? - Probably five-ish. - What, five boys asked you to the dance? - Yeah.

- You told all these guys I don't know? - Yeah. - But if they took that as a yes, then they got the wrong answer. - Do you say I don't know because it feels too mean to say no? - Yeah. - I'm not mean. - Of course, some of the boys are no better. During the dance and win the main,

a reporter Claire Holman pulled six-grader Christopher Potter out of the action for a chat.

- Does she know? - Yes, she does. We're kind of dating at the time. - So how's that going? - Good, it just started like 20 minutes into this. So, yeah. - You asked a girl to go out during this dance? - No, a girl came to me and asked me out.

“- Okay, let's go for a minute by minute. So where were you in this happened?”

- I was in the cafeteria, just got on a drink of root beer, and she walks up to me and asks me to go out. - What did she say exactly? - She said, Chris, will you go out with me? - And were you surprised? - Not really. We've kind of been like on and off again. - So it's not the first time? - Yeah, not the first time.

- But she always asked you or do you ever ask her? - Well, it's kind of weird,

because it's always she wants me to ask her, so it was weird that she asked me. - Usually they don't last, it's a middle school relationship, nothing really happens. - What does that mean like a middle school relationship? What do you mean doesn't last? It just is destined to fail pretty much. - Because it's a middle school, this is like where you start at your life with. You don't hear the things about middle school sweetholds.

- In Richmond, outside moody middle school's dance, we put an Eric Manel spoke with Elliot German and his stepfather Jonathan Lawton, both eighth graders, who ran through the official rules for the dance. - So some of her kind of funny, he says, I mean it's like no hands below the waist, no petting.

“- No petting, but the false kind of funny. - No petting? Yeah, yeah, no petting. What does that mean?”

- I don't know, I don't know. - It was specifically all like the flyer that they had out, like they gave you the dress code and they gave you like the rules.

No petting, and it did like quotations, and you never know what it means.

It's like, do people like sit there at dance? This is just like pet other people, because I do really weird. - There are rules like this at all the dances, and some more comprehensible than others. - As for whether or not the kids obey the rules, and what actually happens inside the dance, on the actual dance floor, one of our producers leaves a Pollock went inside to the dance floor at the fall costume dance in Louis Delaware, and I'm going to hand it off to her.

- So the scene in the gym was pretty much the way you remember it. Older kids dancing in the middle, younger kids at the periphery. A few aimlessly wandering around looking like they're not sure what to do. Lots of kids were dancing, jumping up and down, occasionally to see if this pump. They danced in these tightly packed clusters, very little room between them,

and outside the clusters were shaperones, ready to step in if they saw any grinding or suggestive dancing. Hovering outside one of the clusters was a teacher named John Gauss, and he looked perplexed. - This knot has got me on edge at this point. - Because they're trying to get away with stuff. Like, you can tell by the way they're looking at, yeah. They have a guilty look, because you're about to see me, to swoop.

- He actually did swoop. He plunged into the pack of kids, told the boy aside and talked to him. Then he told me why. - He needed to be taken aside and told to stop being up against those girls like that.

“That's why I don't want to jump into you much, but I just want to give him like the woe with the flat hand woe,”

just woe, just calm it down a little. I mean, usually if I see it, then they're going to stop because they see me. - And then comes the moment of truth. The moment that forces every kid in the room to make a decision. The moment that separates the timid from the brave, the slow song.

- I watch it with teacher Brian Kamra. - So we got our slow song, and just as I suspected, a majority of the students left the dance floor, all the way, all the couples are in the middle of the dance floor and a cluster. I suspect so they're not near an adult. - I love how the kids go up to the couples dancing and interrupt them. - Oh, absolutely. - Some of the couples didn't have much privacy. The friends were standing a foot away, hanging out and talking to them.

And every so often a random kid would just cut across the dance floor. - This girl, right here, just grabbed onto the back of her friends. Ned, while the friend is dancing with the boy. - Yep, yep. I don't know if she didn't want to be left out or they came as friends, or I think with this stage of the game it's hard.

When poison and girls tear off, and then one friend is always left behind.

- There's a few of these slow dances, but most of the songs are fast. - And then suddenly the song "Hit the Road Jacks" starts playing in the light snap-on. - Oh my god, they just all like, oh my god. - Yeah, it ends very abruptly. It's nine. It's nine o'clock. - That's it? - That's it. There's no wind down, nine o'clock, lights come on, parents are waiting.

- And he was right. The experiment in many adulthood that is a middle school dance was over.

“The same kids who minutes earlier were holding each other and swaying awkwardly on the dance floor,”

gotten to cars and said hi to their parents. - Lisa Pollock, coming up, surviving middle school by pretending that you are from a completely different family that is in a minute. - That is in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. - This American life, America last year, you're going to show, of course, you're just a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme today's show, a rerun on middle school.

A 14 year old from California who just got out of middle school asked for a show on the horror that is middle school. - It'd be cool to hear other people's stories about it and how what they went to. - Without you know, that's a pretty good idea. - That is a place with a lot of stories. We've arrived at Act 3 of our show, Act 3, Memes in the Middle. The place that the Ming and Martinez went to middle school, they still caught it junior high.

And he says it is sisters did something to cope with any feelings of inferiority they might have otherwise felt in the new school with all those new kids. - When they started junior high, my sister's Mary and Margie invented the Memes as a way to cope with any feelings of inferiority they might have otherwise experienced. They were entering the sinister world of teenage girls, which in the mid-1980s in Brownsville, Texas, was tingeed with border town racism. Instead of being ashamed of who they were, my sister's decided to create a polite fiction and invited everyone to participate.

First, they died their brown black hair blonde until it turned the color and burleness of hay.

Then, they began dressing in Surgeo Valenti and Gloria Vanderbilt, and finally, to cap it off, they decided to call each other simply, Memi.

“- The typical conversation between them, what like this?”

- Memi, do you like my new George S. jeans? You asked me me, I do. Do I look rich in my new Nike's Memi? Memi, you look like a tennis player, Memi. I know, Memi, maybe I should make one by me a racket. It was really that simple. The Memi's made a conscious decision that they would be rich and white, even if their family wasn't. In other words, margin mirror had a small break from reality that we all participated in to help them through junior high. We all helped in creating the Memi's.

At the time, the rest of the family had not fully realized that her job as relatively new Americans and worse yet Texans was to be as wide as possible. And we honestly didn't see their delusion as anything other than another bewildering tactic in our sister's quest for a high level of superior fashion, just teenage girls doing what teenage girls do. There had been a time when her family had been rich by barrio standards because her grandpa, dad's stepfather, fought in the Korean War and used his GI money to start a trucking business when he got back.

He married grandma, who was widowed from her first marriage at age 16, and gave both her and my dad citizenship.

“My siblings and I, we were all born in Brownsville as Americans, but really didn't understand what that meant, not really, not in that area.”

The grandpa died in 1980 when our world began to crumble. The trucking business began to disintegrate around dad and he was started on a slow road towards desperation and religion. Meanwhile, the Memi said made their decision to be too blue-blooded, trust-funded tennis buddies from Connecticut, accidentally living in Brownsville, Texas with us. A poor Mexican family, they had somehow befriended while undergoing some dekenzian series of misfortunes. [Music]

No one acted like it was peculiar, especially those in the family who didn't speak English, or could not understand the Memi's when they showed up at family gatherings. Yo, no Pareto, a baro, Espanolau, one of the Memi's would say to a nukular cousin, who more often than not would linger less seriously around them.

At first, conflicted by the idea of being turned on by so young or relative, and then mentally calculating, just how distantly related they were,

and tabulating his odds and scoring with this new white chick who just happened to show up at this baro party. But only after two or three beers. [Music] Memi, how did you like my Spanish? Oh, Memi, it's getting really good.

Memi, do you think they understood me? Oh, Memi, who cares? [Music] Soon, the Memi's rebuzzing at a fever pitch, intoxicating everyone who came near and caught a whiff of the Memi's Anayis, on a East perfume.

We had all seen the commercials on network television while watching Dallas or not's landing, and it was a forbidden fragrance for rain-depressed English women, with secret muscular boyfriends,

and they found it at the local JC Penny, and had Mom pay for it. Me and my brother Dan, in our oldest sister Silvia, we just kind of stand from the heat and dealt with it. [Music] Even Mom developed her own fascination with the Memi's, like she couldn't believe her luck, now that she was related to royalty.

Feeding into their fantasy gave her one of her own, so she was always ready for an air condition trip to the mall.

She took the little clothes budget reserved for us boys, my brother and me, and added it into the Memi's wardrobe, because to her, it was a sign of status for the family that the Memi's looked their best. None of the rest of us would question it, even though it felt wrong. I was often left with the Memi's recently stylish hand-me-downs. No one else in my grade school was remotely label-conscious, or capable of reading an English really, so it passed unnoticed.

That most of my clothes were made for glamorous junior high school girls. Almost every child that my school came from recently immigrated families, kids so poor they'd save half their free lunch to share with their younger siblings at home, their head shaved to rid them of lice. My best friend Arthur, he noticed though, he was part black and part Mexican, had just moved to Brownsville from some big city slum in Michigan,

where his mother's boyfriend had been employed at a GM factory, and he read labels.

Hey, Dom, he said, "Yo, man, you're wearing a girl shirt, or is this free-making baggy boy shirts now too?" So to change the subject, I slugged him high in the chest and ran away. He chased me down to punch me back and left me crying in my girl's blossom. If she had any guilt about giving the Mimi's the lie and share of the clothing budget, I imagined the justification my mother probably used, was that my older brother and I, which is ruin our clothes, working with dad under the greasy trucks.

It made better sense for the Mimi used to be in high fashion than for the feral boys to wreck new clothes. Mimi, you look just like Jennifer Beals and flash dance. You should join the dance team at school. I know Mimi I think so too.

“Mimi, I think you should dye your hair back to its original color.”

Ash, I know Mimi I'm trying. During this time, my brother-dance eyesight was so bad he couldn't read the blackboard in school and constantly ran into corners or short skinny people. People thought he was Asian, he squinted so much. Every photo of him taken in junior high, he looks like he's trying to see into the photographer's eyes through the camera lens.

This of course goes entirely a notice and it is the younger Mimi Mary with a 2020 vision who gets vanity glasses with her name etched in gold script in the corner. Dad wouldn't get glasses until he was in the military when he was 17. Eventually, Dad's failure at navigating the business and providing for his family and treated on the Mimi's fantasy. Dad made a decision that as soon as school ended, Mom would take the Mimi's and sill

and drive them to California to participate in the season with great harvest with Dad's cousins.

“People vaguely related to grandma through marriage, I think.”

They would be treated like adults there, paid the same as everyone else. Mom, I remember, was horrified at the implications at the shame of having to send her virginal and royal daughters out to the fields. Plus, Dad's extended family out in California were very different from us, wild and frightening and Californian. The Mimi's though were indented. Did not understand the complications.

Mimi, we're going to California. Oh my god, Mimi, we're going to be valley girls. Mimi, gag me with a spoon, Mimi. Mimi, you're what you're showing. We packed up Mom, the Mimi's and Sylvia, in the beige 1980 Pontiac Bonneville,

already in antique on its second engine and failing transmission, and they drove out of Brownsville. A year later, I took this right as well and also ended up picking grapes for the summer, mostly out of envy. That we were migrant workers for that period didn't occur to me, nor to anyone else.

That label would never stick, couldn't ever stick.

We couldn't descend to that level. We just had to do it to help out Dad. That was all. Desperate circumstances calling for desperate measures and all that, but it was too much for the Mimi's, the reality of this first trip.

“Sadly, I think it was childhood's end for the Mimi's.”

The vineyards had somehow inverted their secret garden, and the low door and the wall had closed shut behind them. When they first reached California, the Mimi's did indeed become valley girls. The hippest, cutest, best-dressed migrant workers of that year, and very likely for many years to come. The older Mimi, Marge, continued to dress like Jennifer Beals and flash dance out in the fields, where the sun sizzled any inch of exposed skin. She wore a spaghetti strapped, red and white striped, a spree top, white cotton shorts, and a matching headband with her red and white leather Nike tennis shoes.

Her headband kept a white strip of skin under four head from tanning, and as a result, she was forced to wear headbands for a few months afterwards.

“Way after headbands were out of fashion.”

Eventually, though, even she started dressing like the rest of the migrant workers, wearing long-sleeved-colored shirts bunded all the way to the neck, thick and stylish denim and work boots, with a bandana covering her nose and mouth, or else she would have died of heatstroke. There were no photos taken of that. Mary, the younger Mimi, did not fare any better.

Her vanity glasses with the fake lenses were scratched while beyond recovery. Her roots grew out, and her hair turned a lighter brown as a result of the heat and the pesticides of the great fields of Southern California. The hard work went on all summer, and eventually it became bitter enough to breach even the walls of the Mimi's perfectly constructed fantasy. And so sadly, eventually even they were humiliated, and the illusion of wealth that had kept the family's idea of itself buoyant was deflated.

When they returned to Branzel, as happy as we were to see them, no one ever mentioned the Mimi's again. They were gone, and it was margin-marry that returned to their place. Mary rubbing her nose with the palm of her hand from allergies, and snapping at anyone who tried to talk to her,

“and March, who never went back to California, and took a job at the bank the following summer instead.”

I was sorry to see the Mimi's go. We all were. When they were at their peak, the Mimi's had been capable of creating a real sort of magic around them, and chanting both people in places so that you could be looking at the same dreary landscape as them, the same terrible and hopeless event. And while you might be miserable and bitter, they would be beaming and thrilled and enthusiastically hopeful. And then, if you got near them, who were blessed enough to maybe talk to them, you would walk away feeling the same way as they felt too.

They were a gift to everyone who was lucky enough to get caught in their unease and unease the Mimi's. They made all of us Americans. Deming of Martinez, reading an excerpt from his book, The Boy Kings of Texas, which is memoir, and a finalist for the National Book Award. So, to her broadcast today's show, Deming was published another memoir called "My Heart is a Drunken Compass." Like four, anchor babies.

So, this week, as we were putting together the radio show and sending reporters out into middle schools, we discovered that in schools all over the country, there already were reporters on the ground.

“Deep inside, covering the issues that middle school kids really care about.”

Good afternoon, Huskies. It is Thursday, September 15th, 2011. After today, there are only 162 school days until summer vacation. I'm Taylor. And I am... These are student newscasters from Heart Middle School in Pleasant, California.

I myself got my start on the mic, on the morning announcements. And this is what middle school morning announcements in some schools are like today. Students make these full-blown video productions. Some of them have music themes. The kids stand in front of banners with their school logo, or sometimes it's a green screen backdrop.

So, they make it look like they're in a local TV news set. But this is Jonathan Menhevar, who's been watching these newscasts all week with fascination. And he has noticed a few trends. Just like the local news, middle school news cast tend to follow a formula. They almost all start with the Plege of Allegiance.

And two to three probably. This next segment from DMS news at Dibble Middle School in Dibble Oklahoma is a staple of almost every broadcast I watched. Okay. We have late-breaking news.

You will be the first to know that we have two birthdays today.

Happy birthday to both Gabriel Romero and Nathan Nido. This has to qualify as breaking news because it's school. There's not a lot of exciting stuff for them to report. They have to tell their fellow students what the cafeteria is serving that day. When makeup pictures are being taken and do the weather.

My favorite comes from this girl, McKenna, near Buffalo, who's clearly had enough. Good morning, every middle school is McKenna with today's weather. It's going to be how it is like it is now pretty much all day. In the afternoon, colder, windy and wet, we have your rain. And the evening wins the South West.

These newscasts are middle school and relief. Like what you'd see if there was a middle school exhibit at the natural history museum. There are tiny kids with big ears, shy, red faced kids, jocks, computer club kids, completely normal super sweet over achieving ones. They were fun to watch.

I'd forgotten that middle school kids can have this overconfident goofiness. I spent days watching kids deliver these newscasts. And I was curious what they'd be like if they actually reported on the stories that mattered the most to them.

Stuff they'd never say on the morning announcements.

So I found a school that was willing to play along.

Parkville middle school is just north of Baltimore. And the students there do their morning announcements as a six minute show called PTV. But the help of their teacher, Ms. Davis, the kids put out a really involved production. There's three TV cameras, a control room.

And the anchor sit at one of those giant news desks. It has a PTV logo on it. Behind them, there's a backdrop of downtown Baltimore. It's much of a pair, I see a man, especially if you're sitting right on your mind. With Ms. Davis's help, I enlisted the kids in this experiment to write up a newscast

with news from their lives and the stories they each cared about. And they delivered. They said they had fun doing it. So I've heard that there is a newborn Luther King Junior statue, Washington D.C. That statue just even looked like him.

It looks like he has a unibral. Our school's getting their boiler fixed.

“And they talked over the announcements like it was an important thing.”

But it didn't really sound important to me. But I guess they thought it was important for some students and the teachers. Kids were randomly clapping at lunch and the teachers got fed up. So last week, we was made that you're not allowed to clap. So lunch, just one kid, Raymond Clap.

I think you got suspended. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is banning potatoes from school lunches. I love potatoes. They can just make them healthier or something. They don't have to ban them.

The weather has been terribly cold lately. I've had to wear my ugly boots like five times in the past three weeks. I swear if I find any dirt on them anywhere, by the nature's going here from me. So over the weekend my best friend told me he's still going trick or treating.

He says he's going with a friend from school. Firstly, I think we are all through all of each trick or treating. Well, if that is all I have for today, I'm really happy to have a good day. The key of Bryant decided to go hyper local with her news. She wears glasses and she had her hair pulled back with a headband.

In local news, A.K.A. here at Parkville Middle, there is a lot of drama going on. Me personally, I lost most of my friends. I really missed those chicks, but I don't think they feel the same. Katelyn and Jay are with my best these and other gone.

I still love them, though. They're my sisters. Well, I don't really have too much point to say,

“because my life is kind of boring. So, dooses.”

The key in I talked for a while. She told me that dooses is just another way of saying peace out. Can I ask you about your friends what happened? Well, it was a lot of drama going on. Something I said and people's feelings got hurt.

And some of us made up, some of us didn't, but I hope that we can. You know, it sucks. So, you're just not talking to them at all. Well, actually, she's not talking to me. Because I called her an aim in her feelings.

So, you know, she's very upset with me. I just, I need to apologize. I didn't do that yet. I feel kind of bad about that, so I'm going to. The very last kid I talked to was Jay Awadi. She'd say I want to share my surprising news

in between a couple other stories. My brother goes to Penn State and he's on the football team. And I've been to all the home games. And there are a lot of fun. The students are crazy and they get dressed up in blue light.

It's really cool.

So, my friend is always depressed.

And then she's like met at me all the time. So, don't understand that. I was watching the news other day and they were talking about how President Obama... Did you catch that? About her depressed friend.

I asked Jay, if it was hard to write about her. Yeah, because I didn't want my hurt her feelings, but she really doesn't care. Because she said she would about me too. Oh, this is Zikia.

Yeah, yeah. Oh, wow. I didn't realize that her friend she was talking about. We're in this one. Yeah, we are.

But I've known her since like 5th grade. So, we kind of fight a lot.

But we always want to be in friends in the end.

So... What happened exactly? Nothing really. Just people telling other people things, spreading rumors in drama, middle school.

[music] Ms. Davis, the journalism teacher at Parkville Middle, is always stressing that her students be factual and truthful in their stories. The news isn't rumors and opinions.

“But in middle school, sometimes it's hard to remember that.”

It's hard to step back and look at a story from different perspectives. [music] Jonathan Mayhivar, these days he's the executive producer of a new podcast from the Guardian, called "State Side with Kai and Carter." They're on YouTube and everywhere you get your podcast.

[music] It's like five. Blue Kid on the block. Last September, a kid that we got to call Leo, not his real name, started seventh grade at a new school.

He was having a harder time finding his place in middle school than other middle school kids. Because he was new to town.

“His family had just arrived from Rochester, New York.”

He had that on top of everything else. Leo still loved Rochester. He loved his school there, he loved his friends. Suddenly, everything about his life was different and according to Leo, much, much worse.

The signature in his Gmail account read, "Rochester is much better in big red letters." Sarah Canig, Nose Leo and his parents, and visited them at home to see how Leo was doing. This is how much Leo does not want to be here.

When I got to his house, he was on the sofa with a laptop, investigating Greyhound bus schedules. His mother was going to drive him and his sister back to Rochester for the Columbus Day weekend, but not until Saturday morning, and Leo wanted to get there Friday for more time with his friends.

A multi-stage negotiation followed with his dad. For one thing, a bus ticket cost money. That's not a problem. Not for you. We know that wasn't a problem for you.

No. But there isn't one. It isn't one. It's not a six or six week morning. And you won't be in the school on Friday. The bus takes eight hours. Even if you left it noon, you'd eat it.

Yeah, you're going to do the math. That's excellent.

Never mind that the bus takes twice as long as driving,

and never mind that Leo would be alone and have to change buses. And then his parents had no intention of letting him go through with this plan. But it's the kind of negotiation you indulge when your kid is miserable. And Leo is miserable.

He told me right away he was. And then he had been from the moment he got here in August. Is this the first time you've in your life where you felt like you've been sad about something for this long? I think so.

Except for maybe my other cat died, my old cat. And does this feel worse than that? Yes.

I've never had long periods of said and don't know.

I don't know any one year of really.

“And I think it's just everything in general.”

It's overwhelming. Back in Rochester, Leo had known all his best friends since kindergarten or before. They played together at school after school on weekends. Everybody knew everybody. Everything was comfortable.

And as a sixth grader in his old school, Lena's friends were at the top of the heap. They were green sashes in the morning and got to be door monitors for the younger kids coming into the building. So imagine now, Leo takes a school bus for the first time to his new school, a sprawling one story building full of six-seventh and eighth graders.

Leo's small for his age, only a hair taller than his sister, who's only nine years old. On day one, he knows exactly no one. Much louder than my old school, much louder. People talking, people closing and opening lockers, people walking, it was just noise. Just older kids, more kids, because my old school was tiny.

Leo is between. He's old enough to decipher greyhound bus schedules, but not old enough to actually travel on one by himself. And old enough to know that if he's going to survive in middle school, he has to make friends. But then making those friends stands to be significantly more complicated than it was back in Rochester. Leo's sister, Auden, is in fourth grade. He says she's not having as hard a time of it.

She hasn't been alive as long, she hasn't made his deep connections, and she already met some a friend in her school.

“I think it's easier to make friends in elementary school than in middle school.”

Really why? Because people care less about who you are. What do you mean by that? The older you get, the more you judge people on their books, their background, their how they act. Like what cool is for kids, because in kindergarten, you could just walk up to someone and say,

"Do you want to be my friend?" and they would, that would be it, but it's harder. I just think people are more wary before they open up.

They like, "All right, I'm first grade. If I met someone, I wouldn't really care who they were. I would just care if they were nice or not."

The day I interviewed him, Leo had had a couple of breakthroughs. He emailed his parents during the school day to tell them the first piece of good news they'd had from him. Until that day, the emails had mostly been three desperate words. I feel awful. Without even a period at the end to make the feeling finite, it was an endless awful. But on this Thursday, he wrote to tell them the mashed potatoes they serve in the cafeteria were great, followed by four exclamation points.

Second, and this was the big news. He asked another kid if he wanted to come over. Leo told me he'd thought about it first for a few days and finally emailed the boy, whose name is Devin, another seventh grader. But now, Leo didn't want to call Devin's house to finalize a plan. He dreaded the awkwardness of the phone.

He goes to school with your son, Evan, and we were a Devin. I'm so sorry, Devin.

I'm getting the evil look for my son, I apologize, but we're hoping Devin can come over on Sunday. Thanks. Hi, Panic. How'd that go? Not well. I thought Leo might be upset about it, maybe get sulky. But here he was cracking up, joking with his dad. It was such a relief to hear him laugh after he'd been so solemn in our interview.

And I thought this is all going to be okay. He's going to snap out of it. He's almost there. And after noon with Devin is going to do the trick, then Sunday came. Okay, now I have three health again. I think you could tell you will. Okay, I'm going to tell my wolf to attack them.

Leo taught Devin how to play Dungeons and Dragons. And the wolf lands on its feet.

Yeah, go wolfy, go wolfy, go wolfy, go wolfy.

I'm so weird. On the drive home, Leo and Devin talked nonstop. I general rat attack one up and ship emanating from deep inside a computer game.

“I am a blood elf, warlock, warlocks are fun. Can you summon your infant?”

Uh, yeah, you start with him. All right. I like, um, I had a goblin shellman. I'm on night off through it, and I can turn into a cat at level eight. Which is nice. And at level 12, he had a bear.

Yeah. By the time they dropped Devin off, they were giggling. You start running. Our cat responds to whatever you call. He said, he's in a different way. You can call him football.

He's football. Thanks for coming over. Thank you for inviting me. See you tomorrow. So a perfect day, right?

Leo's parents were relieved. Hopeful. But no. It's Wednesday.

“You had your friend over on Sunday how to go.”

Yeah. One okay. Yeah, one okay. Has it changed anything about being here? Oh, a little bit. I don't think very much. But a little bit. Yeah.

What's changed? What's the little bit? They know someone at school. It helps. Yeah. Not all that much, but sort of yeah. And this is when I realized I'd underestimated the depth of Leo's gloom.

That he greets every morning of every school day with dread. And not because he's being bullied or anyone's being mean to him. I feel sick because I know that I have the whole day out of me. And then I have the next day in the next day and the next day in the next day and the next day ahead of me. Does it pass once you get to school?

No, not early. It usually, um, good increases to a climax around lunchtime and then I actually have been throwing up recently. And then it just stays that level of sickness until I get home. You're kidding me. You're throwing up at school? Yeah. Oh.

And that's awful in the bathroom or where? Yeah, in the bathroom. Usually lunch, I feel really bad and then go to the bathroom and I throw up. Is that happened this week? Today, it did. Do you tell your parents like, "I don't want to go. I don't want to go."

“Or do you just, you know you have to see, don't say anything?”

Oh, no. I throw a screaming fit. Every morning? Yeah, pretty much. I didn't today. What was different about this morning? How come you didn't today? I felt resigned and I knew that I would have to go anyway, so I gave up.

Here's the curse of being almost 13. Old enough to understand his life will supposedly get better with time. But not all enough to really believe he's going to feel any differently than he does right this minute. Since making friends with Devon, Leo is one step toward being the kid he wants to be. Someone with pals, someone who's comfortable again.

But he says, "Right now, he's just worried he's going to be throwing up all year." Cercanic. In the 15 years since we first broadcast this story, Leo has transitioned. She now goes into New York City and is pursuing a career in the arts. She says she's not happy all the time, but things are better than they were.

Cercanic is now the host of cereal. She's working on a brand new show that I heard a draft version of.

I have to say it's incredible. It is a total pleasure. It's going to be at very soon this fall.

So I've been talking to educators and one who had taught for years in high school and then moved to middle school.

you have to be sympathetic to and patient with all of the emotional drama.

“You have to deal with that directly if you want the classroom to work.”

Which brings me to this next story of a student who was doing bad way in a middle school in New York, New Jersey. He was a master. He would come in. His uniform would be dirty. He had it powered. He had it had breakfast. His bookbag, most likely at a hole in it, and all of his pens and pencils had fallen out. His homework was undone. And so of course he'd come in and he'd be angry.

This is Shannon Grande, who teaches at Rise Academy Middle School, which is a public school. 91% black and Latino and eligible for free lunches. One of the kip charter schools hence the uniforms. I heard about this story from Elizabeth Green, who has been reporting on this school for a journalism outfit called Gotham Schools. Anyway, this teacher, Sharon Grande, says that this seventh grader would come in angry all the time. And usually someone would say something little to him like, you know, your shirts are tucked in or the kid would.

Yeah, because they, you know, they do that. They like, you know, just kind of pick it up each other and it was set them off.

And then he would just be very loud and just be like, oh, why do you always have to say this to me and slam his stuff down.

“I hate this place and you just go into like these very general rants and, you know, usually that's an indicator to us.”

Like when they use his very general statements that they're not processing through their emotions and that they're feeling overwhelmed. So this kid was an unfortunate spiral. He felt isolated from the other kids just inherently because his home situation was so bad. And then he would get angry with the other kids, which then made them mad and made him more isolated. And he got worse and worse. There's some stuff across a room and it hit a teacher.

I mean, there were points where he would come in and he would refuse to do anything all day long. And he'd just, he would cry. He would break out and cry in the middle class. He didn't even know why. He couldn't explain why. When big problem for him, when reason that he was ostracized, he didn't wash kids whisper about it.

And when he would get mad and then arguments would escalate, that is where it would go. Your dirty, you smell, because you say it right to his face. Every time the staff found all kinds of ways to address this, they got him clean clothes and a place to clean up before school. But the bigger problem, and that's the problem of his isolation and his anger. Ms. Grande says it was not clear how to deal with that. They would try things but nothing was working.

And then finally one day in history class during a group work, he was trash talking.

And one of the best girls in the class, one of Ms. Grande's best students ended up in an argument with them saying terrible things. And Ms. Grande felt like really you too. When I pulled the girl and she was like, well, he brings it on. So he gets angry and then one of my supposed to say, I was like, well, you could not say that. That being.

That he's dirty and he smells and she's like, well, he does.

“And I said, I think this is a bigger conversation.”

Ms. Grande took this girl and the three other girls who had been doing group work with this boy. And she took this girl's into the teachers room and all four of these girls were academically strong. And all of them had shown good leadership qualities in the school in the past. You know, I had explained to them that he. He struggles just to get here every day that I was like, you know, you wake up in the morning and you've got somebody that's

Getting you out of the door, giving new breakfast, making sure your clothes are clean. Making sure you get a hair on time. He doesn't have that. Like he has nobody doing that for him. And at that time, you know, I knew that the power had been offered his house That the week before the water was shut off that they had had part of the roof cave in.

He has an elderly grandmother that he tries to take care of and. She had been getting up in the middle of the night and wandering. And he would hear her and get up and carry her back upstairs. What was the reaction? Empathy.

And she's like, I didn't know that. You know, and the other girls there were, you know, talking about that and I was like, you know, I'm telling you something that I normally wouldn't tell another student. You know, this is something very private. But I'm trusting that you're mature enough to handle this. And I was like, so, you know, you're kind of breaking him down when you're doing these things and she's like,

"Well, can we talk to him?" I was a little nervous, you know, obviously. I was really worried about it. It was like, what am I doing here? This could be really dangerous and backfire on the terribly. They started to talk and they're like, you know, when you get angry,

I, you know, we, we get angry back. What do you expect us to say? And it really was just a couple minutes before the kids told Miss Grande. We can take it from here. And she left them to talk.

It about good that these girls knew that he was trying to deal with his anger.

“And since this conversation, over time, the entire class has entered this discussion with this kid.”

And when this kid has an outburst, they will all talk openly about his anger. You're like, the students say, well, you've told us you're working on this. What are you going to do differently now? And then he tried to explain, well, you know, I'm trying to take the breasts. You know, I'm trying to journal when I'm getting angry.

I'm trying to, you know, need to come up with whatever solutions he's trying to do. But a lot of times, even it wasn't about the solution, the peer pressure itself. And the feeling like, you know, he'd come in and, you know, he's making these general statements like everybody's against me. And then he's starting to feel like, okay, maybe everybody isn't against me. You know, maybe they are just frustrated with this behavior that I'm doing, that I could be doing better.

And so that, we started to see that impact of peer pressure. Like you took the entire machinery of middle school dynamics and you're harnessing it to help this kid. Exactly.

“Harness the fact that they'll listen to peers.”

Exactly. And we know they do. This is what the research shows. That in middle school you listen to peers more than you listen to anybody else. And that is working with this kid.

The other day this kid got a detention from missing part of his uniform. And he started on a rant in class about how they're all against him. And all the time they're on his back and everybody's against him.

It was the end of the world and Miss Grand 8 finally asked him, "Who's there? Who's everybody?"

And he started smiling. And she asked him, "What's he really upset about?" And I'm like in the past, he could untangle it. He could tell her. With the base program as produced by Lisa Pollock with Ben Cowhoun, sir,

a canning Jonathan Manhever, Brian Reed Robinson, and a list of ship and Nancy Updike, our senior producer for today's show, Julie Snyder, music up to date from Damian Grafe. Production up on today's rerun from Stone Nelson, Matt Tierney Adrian Goli and Ruby Schwartz.

Special thanks to day to Adrian Hayes, Gayle Andrews, Clay Bolton, Nishod, Korawas, Zachary Bar, Gabe Spitzer, Alicia Zuckerman, Tony, and Griffin. Radio K, Marcy Creaver, Erin Trivus, Meredith Davis, and Will Yeurman. Thanks today to all of our this American life partners.

We're this week, they get to hear this bonus episode that we put out that is unlike any bonus episode we've ever done. It is about one of the hardest episodes of our show that we've ever produced. An episode that kind of tortured the entire staff for months as we made it. And the topic of that particular episode,

the theme that week, the show that tortured us so much, is one that I think you'll be very surprised to hear was so difficult. Take care of that bonus episode and all the others. Also to get this newsletter with hot tips that I and the other producers have been sending out. The most recent newsletter by the way explains how we hired two actual famous people.

Recently for our show and then some things happened to get all that stuff. Sign up right now to be a life partner when you do this. You'll be helping us fund the show which we need.

“That's what we're going to all this trouble to join.”

Go to thisamericanlife.org/wifepartners that link us also in the show notes. This American Life is a little bit of public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange.

Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Trimality,

you know, he gets so confused at the beginning of every HR meeting. Look, they give you the rest color, they give you like the rules. No petting and it did like quotation. I'm Eric Glass. Back next week with more stories of this American Life.

♪ School of summer again ♪ ♪ Early morning meeting ♪