Changelings

I work with middle-schoolers. I write for middle-schoolers. I like middle-schoolers. But today's Rhymes With Orange sums up the essential weirdness of middle school.

Any system that puts sixth grade boys and eighth grade girls on the same planet is suspect. Putting them in the same building is insane. It's like all the boys are Rupert Grint and Jerry Mathers, and all the girls are Emma Watson and Natalie Portman. The boys are down at one end of the cafeteria swapping GI Joes while the girls are at the other end comparing eye liners, and never the twain shall meet.

Honestly, now, I'd have also been delighted by a strip that showed a classroom in which some of the kids were tadpoles and some were frogs, but the majority were galumphing around with two or three legs and half a tail, because there's a lot of that, too.  If you have any compassion, and any memory of your own youth, it's painful to see some of the grooming and clothing choices these dear little half-metamorphised beings come up with as they work to define themselves.

Acne explosions aren't the only thing that makes it uncomfortable to be in their skin.

But Hilary is right: There is this sudden moment and out steps the butterfly.

My older son did Grades 6-8 at a school with uniforms, so that there wasn't a great visual explosion until the very last night at graduation, when the girls were out of their plaid uniforms and into for-real dresses and for-real hair and for-real makeup. And the boys were in jackets and ties, but mostly looked like J. Fred Muggs.

For a time, I used to run a busload of middle- and high-school kids down to Manhattan for a day of sightseeing, made bearable by having one teacher for every five kids. But it was still a three-hour -- or was that three-day? -- bus ride, during which the main challenge was not going medieval on the sixth graders and keeping the juniors and seniors from doing the same.

After the first of these annual outings, I told my younger son, who was teaching sixth grade at the time, that I didn't know how he did it. He laughed and said, "Oh, I hate my kids on field trips, too!"

But then you're working with them in the classroom and you're trying to explain a concept. Middle-school kids are frighteningly concrete in their thinking and simply getting them to understand a motive can be more than a challenge.

They understand that Hamlet hates his uncle because his uncle killed his father. And they get it that Polonius is a pretentious old pedant. But the various interactions of Hamlet, Ophelia and Laertes are simply beyond their ken. They'll repeat what you tell them, and they can write it down on a test, but they don't get it.

Until that moment when they do.

Or, as in today's RWO, when one of them does.

But, whatever the ratio of caterpillars to butterflies, it's beautiful when it happens, and you just sit back and marvel.

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Keeping up with the flood

For those who have been monitoring the plight of the Schulz Library at the Center for Cartoon Studies, Tom Spurgeon has a terrific interview with Librarian Caitlin McGurk that updates the story of the rescue as well as the plans, such as they are, for the collection's future.

Which reminded me that, last April, I published an interview and tour with Caitlin here, which I repeat  in order to show what they were rescuing, and what they are currently shelving or storing while they figure out the next move.

It ain't over, and there is information on how you can help within Tom's interview. Meanwhile, there has been so much volunteering and good neighboring in our public and private disasters  -- including this effort that happens to combine a middleschool teacher and several libraries that fared worse than the Schulz one -- that it really gives the lie to the contemptible notion that, when disaster strikes, everybody just sits back and waits for FEMA to pay for it all, as well as to the equally asinine idea that, if we'd all get off our lazy, entitled butts, we wouldn't also need FEMA.

Anyway, here's Caitlin and her library:

Comments

[Mary in Ohio]

Middle schoolers - you are so right. And most of us who teach them are (or become) a little that way too. Given the current spate of diagnosing everyone with "autism spectrum", I have become convinced I have/had Asperger's Syndrome. But since I taught at the middle school, no one noticed. When I ended my career at one of the elementarys, the guy I taught with told the principal(he was joking) I had Tourette's Syndrome. The principal told him to tell me to give it back before Mrs. Tourette called and complained. So you can see that the schools are definitely run like Dilbert's business, at least in our neck of the woods. (Epilog: 2 years after I left, that same principal was forced to resign because he had tipped some of the info on the 4th Grade Proficiency test to the fourth grade teacher he was having an affair with. Her sister happened to be on the school board. I couldn't make this stuff up.)

I am also glad you featured this strip today because my bookmark (and your link, actually) come up blank. Hopefully tomorrow I can look back at a larger version.