“Obviously, Doctor,” she said, “you’ve never been a thirteen year old girl.”
After finishing the last page of the novel The Virgin Suicides seventeen minutes ago, I cannot get this one haunting line out of my head. There’s nothing particularly remarkable about the line. It’s not laced with melodic adjectives or injected with the notable steroids of a good metaphor. But its power may rest in its mundanity, nestled amidst the lyrical prose that weaves throughout the rest of the novel. It just really sucks to be in middle school.
I think I am going to design my own masters program, in which I write a thesis about how we can use coming of age literature and film to support teachers’ practice. I don’t mean, how can ELA teachers use the classic novel Are You There God, It’s Me Margaret as a model coming-of-age text so they can check it off their state standards checklist. What I mean is, how can I sit school full of forty-seven-year-old teachers in front of Stand By Me, and then facilitate a discussion about what this film shows us about the actual walking disaster our students are slogging through each and every day?
Adolescence is an unceasing drowning in a kaleidoscope of emotions. As I walked the tightrope through Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel on the reality of those emotions, I found myself sucked into the realities of that world once again. The fixation on the tiniest smells wafting about you. The endless pouring over interactions you had with your cute chemistry partner. The life and death decision of how much skin to expose at any given moment. And the embarrassment. The embarrassment constantly bubbling beneath the surface and threatening to boil over at any given moment.
And yet I have found myself in staff meetings at school where the biggest concern we have is how to stop kids from using their airpods in the middle of the school day. Rather than considering why a child may want to drown out the voices around them with the sound of Ice Spice, we are angry about their perceived lack of respect. The student’s emotional wellbeing is completely washed out by the torrential voices of overworked teachers
Thus comes my new brand of professional development. I call it the Teenage Rebirth: unearthing the inner teenager of every teacher in America. It involves a curriculum of chapters from books and clips from movies that rekindle the turmoil of adolescence. It asks teachers to really stew in that turmoil, and to stir up empathy for what the students are going through. Perhaps I could even round up a panel of students to come in and describe the sort of emotions and struggles they are facing on a daily basis.
Excuse me while I copy and paste this post into all my grad school applications (that are a mere figment of my imagination at this point). Feel free to comment below if you would like to write me a recommendation.
But in all seriousness, it can be painful to watch how far removed teachers can become from the realities of being a teenager and actually having no clue what to do with a single one of your emotions. I look up to veteran teachers for their classroom management, for their literacy knowledge, and for their bulletproof lesson plans; the Lord knows I could use a hefty dollop of help with all those things.
But from the other side of those immaculate plexiglass lessons, teachers lose access to their adolescent empathy. They forget how truly hard it is to be a thirteen-year-old, when they should be up on stage dancing through the embarrassment with them (cue the ending of Little Miss Sunshine).
I would like to dedicate this post to the 7th grade class of 2023 at my school. I see you. It sucks. And you really, really made it through 7th grade.
Susannah currently lives in New Jersey and works as a 7th grade ELA teacher in East Harlem. When she is not teaching or writing, she can be found exploring independent bookstores, going backpacking, and trying to roller-skate on all the cool trails in the city. She is also recently experienced in the art of citrus skunk repellent (I know you’re impressed).
