The very interesting Middle School Friends Are Critical For Future Success by Rick Nuaert is a discussion on how important a student’s middle school years are to his or her future. If you’re well adjusted by middle school then your future is bright. If you’re hanging with the wrong crowd in sixth grade, you can expect to be a bum at age 30. Maybe that’s a bit dramatic, but is the jist of the article. Worth checking out.
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The article does beg the question of why middle school is always a person’s most hated years. I’ve never in my life heard someone say that their best years were spent in sixth through eighth grade. People point to high school, others point to college, some even point to when they were a small kid (me) when they define their best years. Never have I heard someone say, “I was in my prime in middle school” It just doesn’t happen. We all suffered through them, some more than others, but we were all completely miserable.
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So how can we make a kid’s middle school years less destructive, given that we now know how influential they are? How important really are those high-stakes, anxiety-ridden State exams? If a kid’s socially formative years are in middle school, maybe we shouldn’t be imprinting them as failures or setting them up to lose sleep. Maybe instead we should think about what’s really important – teaching kids how to react to stress and how to build strong friendships with good people, helping kids discover a creative outlet, impressing on our kids how great it is to LEARN and not just to pass exams – instead of filling them with fear and hatred of school.
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Were you forced to take a State exam? Aren’t you successful anyway? Well, think about how much more successful you’d be if you hadn’t stood in that parking lot drinking Night Train before your first middle school dance and gotten caught with that joint by Ms. Sutherland who didn’t call your house because she was drunk herself. Imagine if your parents had just taken you ice skating instead.
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But I digress. Whether or not I subscribe to Rick Nauert is still up for debate even in my mind, but it does present an interesting angle on the torturous middle school years.
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