Oh, seventh grade

[resonant]

Met up with one of the kidlet's friends that we haven't seen for a year or so, and unexpectedly she's started turning into one of those sighing, eye-rolling, bored teens-in-training. "I hate my school," she says, "and when I'm at school, I'm bored and I want to go home, but then I go home and it's just as boring as school."

It's a sorry irony of middle school: If you have a culture that punishes people when they demonstrate enthusiasm, then -- since enthusiasm is what makes people interesting -- everyone in it is going to be really, really boring. Including yourself.

The kidlet is interested in all kinds of crazy things -- the derivation of 'mare' and whether it's related to 'mars' (no), pet frilled dragons, home-based businesses, toddlers, whether every ice cream in the church freezer contains high-fructose corn syrup (all but one), what it's like to try to quit smoking, why Dominion cards smell the way they do ... that's just today's list -- but somehow the culture of their middle school is very friendly to enthusiasm, even the awkward nutty geeky kind.

Oh, seventh grade. I wouldn't go through you again for all of Lydia and love besides.

Comments

[sillymom]

Your kid is an example of why I love seventh-graders. I've taught them in religious school and for bat mitzvah, and damn but they ROCK.

[arallara]

but somehow the culture of her middle school is very friendly to enthusiasm, even the awkward nutty geeky kind

That is really quite remarkable, and I'm so glad for your whole family that she gets to have that experience!

Cannot express how grateful I am never to have to go through all of junior high again. *shudders*

[krait]

I suppose I had it relatively easy at that age -- I had one or two fast friends who were just as geekily into weird things as I was, and I genuinely didn't care about the rest. (I took her "don't worry about other people's opinions" to heart at a young age... much to my mother's sometime chagrin!)

I was proud of being a geek who read 1,000 pages of fiction (SF/F) a week and took the Etymology class for fun rather than for test-score-improving purposes. Anyone who didn't want to read about telepathic horses, I didn't need to talk to. :D (Unless, of course, they wanted to argue the relative merits of telepathic birds.)

[tevere]

Awww, kidlet is awesome. Is there a pet frilled dragon in your family's future?

[the_ragnarok]

your kid is amazing. (did she find out what 'mare' is derived from? also, why mars, apart from the similarity in sound?)

[princessofgeeks]

i read this great thing once that said that cool is seen as arch, as above all that, as detached and jaded, because passionate is mockable. once you're invested, you can be mocked. all the groups we mock are INVESTED.

cool=bored is like the 13 year old's interpretation of adult cynicism. it's an attempt to grow up.

but of course the catch is that to learn anything, to begin anything, a sport, a hobby, a musical study, you have to begin at the beginning and be all awkward and unpolished. You can't skip to the expert stage. You have to be willing, as collette said, to be foolish and do foolish things with enthusiasm.

to be so cool that you're bored is a form of death. a pose. poor things!!!!!! and you can sit on the sidelines and sneer and no one will make fun of your performance because you are only a critic and not out there risking it all.

to participate is to risk, to flounder, to look stupid. and to some kids there's nothing more frightening. and some people never grow out of this stage, unfortunately.

[jelazakazone]

It may be the school environment, but I also think/hope that home environment has a lot to do with a kid's enthusiasm for learning.

[resonant]

That's interesting -- I remember having a perfectly miserable time being one, but maybe with better teachers that would have been different.

[resonant]

It's amazing, isn't it? She never really had likeminded friends before (even at Montessori school!), and it made me so happy the first time she got in the backseat with a kid from the new school and they had a conversation that went, "Oh, you have a Lois Lowry book -- have you read X and Y?" "I loved Y, but I didn't know about X. Let me write it down. Do you read Patricia C. Wrede?" "No! Write her down for me!"

[resonant]

I had one geeky friend in grade school, but he was a boy, and I found remaining friends with him in middle school to be beyond my meager herd-defying abilities. I didn't connect with likeminded friends until the ninth grade, and middle school was a long, barren horror. High school was pretty fun, though.

[resonant]

I really only like cats as pets, but one of the camp counselors brought her frilled dragon to camp. "Supposedly he turns darker when he's mad," the kidlet said, "but we didn't make him mad, so we didn't get to see that."

[resonant]

I think it was just the similarity in sounds. "Marh" is "horse" in one of those root languages; it wasn't as interesting as we expected it to be.

[resonant]

I'm tempted to print this out and hang it on the wall -- it's such a great description of the danger of the cool.

The irony, too, is that if you think of someone like Johnny Cash, who's often described as cool, who's been idolized and imitated by so many people -- well, he's passionate, enthusiastic, not afraid to embrace the unpopular. He loves something, and so he transforms it and it transforms him.

Kidlet's little friend is a child of international adoption, so she's a different color from her parents and most of her schoolmates -- I think that that one unavoidable mark of being Different makes her all the more eager to fit in in every other way.

What I remember from middle school, though, is that the kids who clearly put a ton of effort into fitting in (including me) could be mocked and nitpicked and badgered by the self-nominated Queens of Style, but they couldn't touch the girl who got up every morning and happily, intentionally chose socks that didn't match!

[resonant]

In the long run I do believe that's true, but in the short run it didn't do it for me; I had a family that was passionately devoted to education, but I spent my junior high years muffling my mouth and not talking about the things that interested me for fear of standing out and getting mocked.

The kidlet has a lot more social confidence than either I or the spouse had at her age, and I'm not sure how much of that is inborn and how much (if any) of it we might be able to take credit for.

Certainly one of the proudest moments of my parenting life was when she gave me the Mother's Day card she had made in fourth grade, and it said: "My mother took me to TWO libraries -- AFTER LIGHTS OUT -- because I needed the second Harry Potter book. We understand each other."

[jelazakazone]

LOL!:D That's awesome.

[krait]

Ah. Nope, HS was the (low-grade) long, barren horror for me -- my family moved when I was halfway through 9th grade, so I lost both of my genuinely-awesome-and-geeky-like-me friends and got dropped into a totally different situation. I resented it like burning, made just enough casual acquaintances that I had a group to sit on the edge of at lunch, and now can barely even remember their names, never mind keep in touch with them. (I never let go of the genuine friends, though -- I still keep in touch and have been in both their weddings and intend to return to that area when I'm able!)

Granted, given my quiet bitter hatred of the school and entire surrounding region of the country during HS? Yeah, wouldn't have wanted to be friends with me, either. I suspect even HS kids can sense a kid who's determined to escape and never look back. (Really, my only regret regarding that time period is that I didn't push myself to make better grades. Screw the social development; I shouldn't have let anger be an excuse for slacking off. That 3.12 GPA I graduated with was just... that was me coasting, doing the minimum I could get by with because I hated everything. If I could travel back in time, I'd shake me by the shoulders and shout at me until I convinced myself to 'show them' by blowing them out of the water, not just getting by...)