Goodbye, high school.
Goodbye to bad girls and clueless boys.
Goodbye to the casual racism of children of all colors.
And goodbye (I hope) to never having homework.
On Tuesday, my 14-year-old niece, who moved in with me five and a half years ago, will graduate from eighth grade. Having raised a daughter who is now 31 years old and married, I never expected to guide a child through the high school years again, especially as a single mother.
When my then-8-year-old niece moved in with me in 2019, life as I knew it came to a screeching halt. And when the pandemic hit the following year, life as we know it. all I knew he stopped abruptly.
During lockdown, my niece and I worked great at opposite ends of the dining room table in my post-divorce one-bedroom apartment. Thanks to his 90 minutes of daily Zoom class, I was able to repeat fourth grade. Did you know that there are a kind of jellyfish is that immortal?
By the time fifth grade graduation rolled around in 2021, the kids had returned to the classroom and I was teary-eyed about their move to high school.
Now I can't wait for her to move on.
This is not a reflection on the teachers or support staff at your school, who have been wonderful, good-humored, and patient. (I'm talking to you, Mrs. McNairy, Mr. Bloom and Mrs. Benson.) It's all about the demanding nature of living with a high school student.
When I was my niece's age, the Los Angeles school system had not yet adopted the concept of high school. We still had middle school, which went from seventh to ninth grade, followed by high school, from tenth to twelfth.
That changed in the mid-1980s, when the district accepted the idea, first proposed in the early 1960s, that young teenagers were not well served by the middle school and high school settings. Middle school, the argument went, was simply a mini version of high school that didn't address the unique needs of adolescents who are neither young children nor fully formed.
Whatever the impetus behind replacing high schools with middle schools, it really makes sense to corral everyone going through puberty behind the same high fence.
“I really don't understand how you can stand being with these kids all day,” I recently told a counselor at my niece's school. “You really must be crazy.”
“Oh,” she replied, smiling, “we are.”
High school students need space to deal with social problems that will presumably be fixed by the time they reach high school. This is where the infuriating lack of homework comes into play.
“The lack of academic pressure allows kids to be a little more carefree,” said Nancy Geshke, a science teacher at Mark Twain High School in Venice. “The negative thing about high school is that, in general, everyone is a disaster. However, if you can't be affected by his mood swings, you will get real gems.”
High school students can be terrible to each other. They have spent their entire lives learning that teasing is bad and bullying is worse, and yet they are unable to control their worst impulses. My niece has returned home with stories about being called a “cookie,” about how black children were told to “go back to work,” and about how Latino children born in the United States were called “illegals.”
Add to their impulsivity the instant communication that cell phones offer, and you get a pretty toxic mix.
“In sixth grade they are still babies,” Geshke said. “Seventh grade is the worst of the worst. They don't know who they are. At the end of eighth grade, they start to find their people and they rule the school.”
(Indeed. As my niece lamented the other day: “I can't believe I'm going back to the bottom of the food chain.”)
And my goodness, they are such unreliable narrators.
I was furious when my niece told me that a sixth grade classmate had been saying really horrible things to her. It seemed like serious harassment to me. I didn't call the counselor with guns, mind you, but I did imply that my niece was being a victim.
The counselor very calmly told me that the girl was saying bad things to my niece because my niece had taken one of the girl's books and hidden it.
“You did that?” I asked her.
“Oh yes, I did,” she replied. “I guess I forgot.”
I applaud the approach your high school has taken to these types of disputes. My niece has spent many hours in adult-supervised conflict resolution sessions (thank you, Mr. Chaka) resolving issues with her enemies. “Later, aunt, we all hugged each other,” she said. And peace ruled in high school, at least until the next fight.
