Junior High

After teaching The Member of the Wedding over the last week and a half, and then reading this article at Rookie, I asked my students to write 500-750 words of advice to kids younger than themselves trying to survive junior high or high school.  They have to be HONEST, use personal anecdotes, and above all say why they know what they know.  It's an assignment they are all really interested in writing, and I'm going to learn far more about them as people than I ever would if I just gave them a test over the book. 

And, since I want to be at least as brave in my own writing as I ask my students to be in theirs, this is my story:

Junior high can be a rancid fishbowl of unchanged water and scummy surfaces.  My junior high experience was so awful that I barely remember parts of it.  I wanted desperately to fit in, to be seen as pretty and popular, but I had this terrible affliction: integrity.  If I thought someone or something was stupid, I said so.  Tact was not a friend I made until much later in life, and even now I don't always answer when he calls me up. 

I have always had a real problem pretending to like things when I thought they were silly or dumb or beneath my intellectual pay grade, and this lack of subterfuge--my refusal and total inability to camouflage my distaste--may make me funny to hang out with at cocktail parties, but it didn't make me any friends in the image conscious world of junior high.

I wore Palmetto jeans which--from a distance--might be seen as Guess! until you noticed the triangle patch was the wrong color and right side up as opposed to the trendy and subversive inverted triangle of Guess!  I had big blue framed glasses and then, later, green colored contacts.  My hair was teased and blonde and I listend to NKOTB as often as I listened to Madonna, and by eighth grade I was hard core into a hair metal phase that spoke to my intimate need for someone to pour some sugar on me.  I liked what I liked and had no time for people who who were too stupid to understand me.

When student council elections rolled around in seventh grade, I was sure I could be elected president despite my total lack of popularity.  In my heart, I knew these small town kids would want a motivated, hardworking, intelligent young woman to represent them, and so I made locker notes and posters and hung them up all over school announcing my run.  It was an epic campaign by junior high standards and the popular kids were none too thrilled.  They tore my posters down, shoved them through the slats in my locker so that all my ahrd work came pouring out at me each morning, they wrote me notes that said, "Drop out of the race, bitch."  If the GOP needs a team of intimidators as we head into the next election, I recommend they transport themselves back to Salina South Junior High circa 1989 and hire CJ, Jamie, Mandi, and Kristi.  Those girls did not fuck around.

On the day of the election, candidates were to give speeches in front of the entire class: 250 seventh graders chomping gum and waiting to be told why you should win their vote.  My opponent, one of four popular boys named Jeremy distinct from the other three only because he had a twin sister (equally beautiful, equally popular), gave his speech--all two minutes of it--about how cool student council was and how cool he was, too.  He left the podium to riotous cheers and applause.  I stood in my gray acid-washed Hang Ten skirt and pink and gray button down shirt and took my place at the podium.  Just before I opened my mouth to speak, the room erupted into an echoing chorus of boos that haunts me to this day.  Two hundred and fifty kids channeling cruel mob energy my way because I, an unpopular smart girl who believed in making a difference through student government, had dared to infiltrate the inner sanctum of junior high coolness.  The first line of speech, co-written by my dear aunt, went like this: "Hi, I'm S---- D----, and judging from that response, you all know exactly who I am." 

They were supposed to have applauded. 

They didn't.

I gave my speech, sat down, and managed not to cry until I was safe in a stall in the girls' bathroom.  I lost the election, and hated myself for thinking I could be something different than what I was, for believing I could be whoever I wanted to be.

Now, at 35, I see that experience as pivotal to my survival in the world.  Those kids weren't angry at me, they didn't hate me, I'd never even spoken to most of them, so they had no basis on which to judge.  What they were reacting to was my confidence.  My belief that I fit wherever I choose to fit, and my willingness to go after what I want even if everyone else is telling me I shouldn't.  They were afraid of someone who knew who she was at twelve in a way that many of them would never know.

If I hadn't been booed that day, if I'd never felt so small and scared and insignificant, I may not be the teacher I am today.  I can look at my students and tell them they are bright and beautiful and capable and deserving because they are and because I know how important it is to receive those messages from the world at large.  And, if I'd never had that happen to me, I wouldn't know how to survive the horrible things that happen in adulthood. 

It is hard to be optimistic and to believe in yourself, but--in the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald--"There are no second acts in American lives."  So, if this is all the time I get, I'll stand on stage every time, boos or no, just to say I was living, just to say I tried.