What does a middle-schooler say when…?
Part 1: Remembering my teaching days
After teaching middle school for many years, I am accustomed to the
12-year-old perspective. For some reason, my pre-retirement memory keeps
replaying the soundtrack of belligerent middle school boys I taught.
For example, let’s call my quintessential recalcitrant male middle schooler Johnny. When I tell him
to get ready for a pop quiz, all of a sudden he can’t find a pencil. When I ask
him for his homework assignment, he tells me that he spent last night in the ER
for his peanut allergy which doesn’t seem to bother him when he eats his peanut butter and jelly sandwich at lunch later that day. He brags about how he usually
stays up half the night and that he can get away with anything.
Although I try daily through my lessons to change things, Johnny appears to lack empathy and the
ability to listen to others. He seems to lack the will to learn.
When I begin to teach an especially important concept and remind the class
they need to listen so they will understand tomorrow’s lesson, he is writing
and passing a note to a friend. When I rebuke him for something inappropriate
that he just said, he answers,“ “That isn’t what I meant.”
He snickers at the
girls and whispers to his buddies about how each one rates on a scale of one to ten.
When I give him a D on his essay, he says “That’s not fair. You keep finding
all my mistakes. I’m gonna get my parents to fire you.” When I question why he’s
late to class, Johnny doesn’t give me a straight answer, implies a talk with
the principal and suggests there are some things he knows that I don’t.
When someone laughs at his answer in class, he pretends he meant it as a
joke in the first place. More often, though, he lashes out and puts his classmate down, “You’re a retard!”
I wonder how Johnny will grow up and if he ever will. When his tax return is due,
will he still be looking for a pencil? When he tells his neighbor that there is
a secret underground tunnel beneath his house, how will his neighbor know what
he means? When he doesn’t get a sales contract he wants, will that be because
his boss is incompetent?
I
always understood that some middle schoolers needed a lot of guidance, that they needed to be
held accountable to certain rules so they would neither destroy themselves nor
lead everyone around them crashing into a wall of insanity. Until this past year, I thought I was through dealing with a certain middle school mentality when
I retired, but these old memories haunt me today.
Part 2: And now a word from Meryl Streep
...“ But there was one performance this year that stunned me. It sank its hook
in my heart not because it was good. It was — there was nothing good about it,
but it was effective, and it did its job. It made its intended audience laugh
and show their teeth. It was that moment when the person asking to sit in the
most respected seat in our country imitated a disabled reporter, someone he
outranked in privilege, power, and the capacity to fight back. It kind of broke
my heart, and I saw it, and I still can't get it out of my head because it
wasn't in a movie. It was real life. And this instinct to humiliate when it's
modeled by someone in the public platform by someone powerful, it filters down
into everybody's life because it kind of gives permission for other people to
do the same thing.
Disrespect invites disrespect. Violence insights violence. When the powerful
use definition to bully others, we all lose. Ok. Go on with that thing. OK.
This brings me to the press. We need the principal press to hold power to
account to call them on the carpet for every outrage.
That's why our founders enshrined the press and its freedom in our
Constitution. So I only ask the famously well-heeled Hollywood Foreign Press
and all of us in our community to join me in supporting the Committee to
Protect Journalists because we are going to need them going forward and they'll
need us to safeguard the truth.
One more thing. Once when I was standing around on the set one day, whining
about something, you know, we were going to work through supper or the long
hours or whatever, Tommy
Lee Jones
said to me, "Isn't it such a privilege, Meryl, just to be an
actor?" Yeah, it is, and we have to remind each other of the privilege and
the responsibility of the act of empathy. “ (Meryl Streep, Golden Globes
speech as recipient of the Cecil B. Demille Lifetime Achievement Award, January
2017)
http://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/wireStory/text-meryl-streeps-cecille-demille-award-speech-44644411
A somewhat related blog from 2016:
http://bjschupp.blogspot.com/2016/11/love-top-down-and-bottom-up.html
