Age changes things. Even though I knew it was coming, it is so strange to have it hit me so forcefully - and when I'm only 21! It just doesn't feel like it's been very long since I was in junior high; and yet when I stepped foot in one yesterday I found myself in a war zone unlike anything I can remember.
Teenagers are LOUD.
The halls ring with laughter and shouting and other (less flattering) noises. Tile floors and metal lockers serve as excellent amplifiers, so the sound gets rebounded a hundred times before it dies down. I felt as though I were swimming in the waves of noise.
But really I was swimming in a throbbing mass of adolescence. Teenagers seem to have no qualms about touching each other - I was bumped, jostled, rammed, and nearly run over a dozen times before I made it down the hall to the classroom I would be observing for the day. In that time I witnessed a lot of intentional touching as well (and that part I remember) - hugging and slapping and picking each other up . . . the energy of the place was almost alarming.
I watched keenly, like a scientist on safari, trying to make sense of these strange beasts who looked so much like humans. And yet, no matter how hard I tried, I could not - for the life of me! - figure out which teenagers were friends and which ones were enemies. They were all hitting each other, shoving each other, throwing each other into trash cans, and yet they were all smiling. It made no sense. No sense at all.
And then I remembered a time when I was in junior high - when my friends and I shoved someone in a locker just to see if he would fit, and then walked away, leaving him trapped, because it was so funny. And even the kid in the locker was laughing. Rattling the handle and laughing his head off.
Maybe it doesn't have to make sense. Maybe that's just the nature of junior high.
Well, that's all very well for the teenagers. But if I'm going to survive in this jungle as an adult - full of sensitivities and a strange yearning for order - then I think I'm going to need a pith helmet. Junior high is a dangerous place.
4 comments:
And that's why I don't teach junior high. Are you doing a cohort/student teaching thingy-majig?
Funny that you came to jungle at the end. I was thinking that from the beginning. Like a living documentary on human jungle life.
Maybe if you narrate as you go, with a British accent, it will be a little easier. And wear your pith helmet. Definitely.
Amen! I work at a high school. I look like a student (actually, just today, one girl told me I look 13. Hm). So I get jostled around the hallways too! It's ridiculous. But you've got a good point. I used to be ridiculous too. And sometimes I still am. Just in different ways.
Chelsea, I'm just doing observations. Taking notes on students with disabilities, that sort of thing. Working my way up. ;)
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