– Why do you have two backs? – a boy maliciously asks his teenage female friend, who has small breasts. The girl dies of shame and embarrassment. Other students watching burst out laughing. This is the reality of middle school.
According to children, middle school is a string of endless humiliations. People with acne are photographed with mobile phones. Then others comment that they have sexy pimples and show their pictures to other students so they can laugh. Embarrassing questions are also asked. Cynically, to hurt someone. The tone is pleasant and suggests interest, but the question is cruel: Why are you so ugly? Stupid? Why do you look like an idiot? A surprised child does not know what to say; a sensitive one cannot defend themselves. What matters is a quick retort—an even ruder, more malicious one.
The hard life of eccentrics
Students say that those who are different have it worst. The people most often discriminated against are good students, diligent people, or those who have their own passions and talk about them. Eccentrics, sensitive people, and the shy.
The swot and the teacher’s favorite have never been popular with less capable students. But the scale of the aggression faced by “swots” in middle school is much greater than in primary school, which students compare middle school with. “In primary school, you did not feel this surrounded, threatened by the whole class,” says a good middle-school student. “Sometimes I feel that everyone hates me, mocks me, that they are on the other side of the barricade and will attack.”
The sense of danger is unfortunately real. Discriminated-against students talk about the threats they hear from their classmates. The aggressors arrange to wait for them after lessons. They threaten that they know where they live and will wait for them there. Students unanimously say that it does not end with verbal aggression; their classmates may even hit them with a fist. “You cannot have different interests because you get rejected,” says another female student. “People talk about you behind your back, and you are stressed that you will be beaten up.”
Good students are also bothered by the fact that in middle school, nothing can be learned in some lessons because teachers cannot maintain discipline. They seem passive to them. Students say that teachers simply do not react to some aggressive behavior, especially verbal taunts.
Powerless or defenseless teachers?
“I think they do not deal with students’ problems or intervene in our conflicts; they do not defend us,” one student complains about her form teachers. “Teachers only admonish us, but nobody pays any attention because those are just their words. How many times can you say, ‘I’ll take your phone away if you don’t pay attention,’ and never take it away?” the girl wonders.
Middle school students say they do not trust teachers and do not believe that any teacher will stand up for a child whom the rest of the class torments. Sometimes a teacher provokes the other students’ aggression toward a good student. They praise the student in an unpedagogical way. They tell the class that the good student is better than their classmates. They set the student against the class. Instead of praising them, they tell the students that they are worse, less capable, lazy, and will achieve nothing in life, unlike their talented classmate. This naturally arouses aggression. The talented child bears the brunt, but only after the lesson—when the teacher does not see, or, as the students say, does not want to notice.
Just as with drinking on school trips. Middle school students describe one of the many such class excursions. A group on a mountain trip drank all night. The next day, despite the cloudy weather, the students put on sunglasses and wandered around hungover, refusing to take part in the hike. Alcohol was still steaming off some of them. On the way back, the driver stopped every kilometer because everyone was vomiting. The teachers, however, decided that it was an attack of motion sickness.
Everyone knows that people drink on school trips. Vodka, beer, wine. Older classmates or minors buy the alcohol, using temporary identity cards. There is not the slightest problem with it. One boy talks about buying alcohol with such an identity card. When the “distrustful” saleswoman looked more closely at the document, the date of birth visible on it made her suspicious, and she asked whether the boy might be sixteen. “I told her that it was the issue date, and she rang up the purchase without a problem,” the middle school student recounts.
Teachers are not the only ones who turn a blind eye to drunk teenagers. Parents do not see anything either. “When I have a hangover the day after a party, I lock myself in my room and tell my mother that I need to study,” says a sixteen-year-old who likes parties. “When she comes in and sees me sleeping, I tell her that studying has made me tired. It always works; I have peace and quiet and can recover.”
Who is without blame…
There is no point looking for those responsible for what happens in middle schools. There would be too many. Governments and ministers constantly changing the education system, school principals, teachers, parents, society. You can choose freely. Middle school is perceived as a bad place for children and teachers. Education there is described with phrases such as: you have to survive it, endure it, or it is a terrible period; children are monstrous, and nobody can handle them.
The students’ opinions about middle school quoted above are one-sided. They confirm what we already know about it—and, worst of all, what nobody is able to change. Despite efforts, educational programs, teacher training, prevention programs, and other teaching and educational ideas intended to help schools and middle school students, they themselves still feel bad in middle schools. And they grit their teeth in order to survive.
(information: Grażyna Hanaf)