19 ms·

Why is Middle School so hard?

110 points by laurex 7y ago

Porthos9K 7y ago
There's nothing wrong with the average American middle school that can't be fixed with evacuation and controlled demolition.
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't do this here.
  - Porthos9K 7y ago
    OK. How about I suggest scrapping mandatory attendance instead?
ImaTigger 7y ago
Middle school is hard because it's the point at which parents are cut out of the educational system, either by virtue of their not being able to be helpful (e.g., they can't do algebra or speak French either!), or by the child (through mis-directed rebellion or overzealous DIYishness).
- bayesian_horse 7y ago
  On the one hand it sounds great to let parents participate in their children's academic education, but in reality such participation is a hard requirement for success. And that, in turn, disadvantages students with working parents, or with parents that don't have the skill or experience to guide them to higher achievement. It may sound awful to trust "the state" to handle education independently, but the alternatives are usually worse.
  - Ensorceled 7y ago
    Or, frankly, parents that can't be bothered. One of the most important epiphanies in my life was realizing that some parents don't care at all about their kids, some are jealous of them and actively sabotage them and that some systematically abuse them for entertainment. It is also why I'm get angry when people push others to have children; many people should not raise children.
    - bayesian_horse 7y ago
      I'm really careful with such judgments. Humans generally love their children. If it doesn't look like that, there are other factors involved, usually alcoholism, other substance abuse and mental illness. Meaning: They would care more for their children if they had the energy and power to do so. And some of those will also rationalize their inability to spend the energy as not wanting to do it.
  - watwut 7y ago
    And in many cases, parents are fully aware the homework that requires their help did not had to be at all and has zero educational value. Parents know said homework exists only to force them to "be involved" and resent it. As much as you try to pretend you are enthusiastic yadda yadda, the afternoon evening was killed with crappy project that really does not look like having educational value.
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      Are you confident that parents spending time with their children like that is not valuable? Especially now in the era of 6hr/day YouTube and fortnite?
      - barry-cotter 7y ago
        Parents spending time with their children is valuable. Parents modeling compliance to pointless busywork with minimal effects on educational achievement is not.
      - watwut 7y ago
        Absolutely it is not valuable. Parents spending time with kids over activities that are mutually pleasant or just talking or doing needed activities are valuable. Third party organized nonsense that just needs to be done has no intrinsic "time together" value. And in case of bad parents, it puts the kid at mercy of bad parent even more.
    - rimliu 7y ago
      Is that a thing? There is homework where parents should be involved by the design of the task?
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    If the state is going to be inserting itself, I'd rather the state stay away from Harrison Bergeron forcing rich people to be less educated and productive, and focus on taxing excess wealth to redistribute to children and poor adults who want to work. What if public school is awful, and the only reason it looks decent is that some parents are picking up the slack? What would happen if you cut those parents out of the system?
  - rimliu 7y ago
    This claim is way too general. I do not know your definition of success or higher achievement, but I'd say I was quite successful with zero involvement from my parents and saw numerous cases of the same.
- HNLurker2 7y ago
  My father still gave me a ride when I was in 8th grade (14(
- watwut 7y ago
  At some point, parents have to be cut out. A child wanting to handle things more independently from parents is not a bad thing - learning to do it independently is important. What you call "mis-directed rebellion or overzealous DIYishness" is them reaching developmental milestones. A school system that requires extensive parental help is bad system.
  - indigochill 7y ago
    >A school system that requires extensive parental help is bad system. Although I think I agree with the thrust of this (children need independence), I suspect the original intent was not so much direct help as cultivating an environment conducive to independent success. Like the difference between trying to grow a flower and trying to build a flower. Of course, children eventually also need to be able to do this independently, but speaking for myself at least I didn't really appreciate this facet of education (nor was I in a position to do it for myself) in middle school.
  - bayesian_horse 7y ago
    An observable consequence of such dependencies is the degree to which income and academic achievement are "inherited", in the sense that kids with richer or better educated parents have more than a leg up.
    - barry-cotter 7y ago
      Academic achievement is inherited like height, not like religion. > The heritability of conscientiousness facets and their relationship to IQ and academic achievement https://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15273.long https://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15273.long > Genetic research has shown that intelligence makes a major contribution to the heritability of educational achievement. However, we show that other broad domains of behavior such as personality and psychopathology also account for genetic influence on GCSE scores beyond that predicted by intelligence. Together with intelligence, these domains account for 75% of the heritability of GCSE scores. > The high heritability of educational achievement reflects many genetically influenced traits, not just intelligence https://genepi.qimr.edu.au/contents/p/staff/CV448.pdf https://genepi.qimr.edu.au/contents/p/staff/CV448.pdf > Our findings confirmed positive associations between IQ and the facets of Competence and Dutifulness (ranging 0.11–0.27), with academic achievement showing correlations of 0.27 and 0.15 with these same facets and 0.15 with Deliberation. All conscientiousness facets were influenced by genes (broad sense heritabilities ranging 0.18–0.49) and unique environment, but common environment was judged unimportant.
kelnos 7y ago
> After all, middle schoolers are “kind of the best people on Earth,” says Mayra Cruz, the principal of Oyster-Adams Bilingual School, a public middle school in Washington, D.C. She appears to be at a very different middle school than I went to. Or is painfully oblivious as to how cruel children of that age can be to each other.
- scarejunba 7y ago
  I hear this on the Internet all the time but in middle school everyone was nice to me and I was nice to everyone. There was some banter and we sometimes accidentally injured each other because we're clumsy and sometimes we fought, but 'cruel'? I don't recall anyone being cruel. In fact, I remember seeing this right after I finished high school too. The Internet was always "Kids are so cruel to each other" and now I wonder to myself if this isn't just the culture you guys have built where you live. Of course we had uniforms and nearly everyone came in on public buses unless they were rich or lived close to the rich kids.
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    Start with crowding and go from there. If your school was small and everyone knew everyone, that's a vast difference. It takes just a few bullies (or worse, criminals), who get a bunch of sycophants, to ruin the atmosphere. If you cannot remove them, nobody knows how to control it. Middle schoolers are as cruel as any people, just less sophisticated, so it's much more obvious. They form tribal social groups which fight, cut out people they dislike or judge, explicitly. Trying to remove that bit is nearly impossible. They do respect teacher authority, so an oblivious enough teacher can think everything is fine - or they normalized deviance.
    - scarejunba 7y ago
      I went to an integrated primary to higher secondary school with a nearby kindergarten. 50 kids a class.
  - ohduran 7y ago
    Not cruel, but self-centered. Infancy seems to me like a progression from complete self-centerness (if I'm not pleased, I'll cry until I turn blue) to become functional, socially. Adolescence is part of that process of gauging how much to conform to society vs stand up for yourself, until (ideally) you reach a mature state in which the interaction with other human beings is healthy. I'm no psychologist so please take my input with a grain of salt. My point is, kids aren't cruel in the sense that we use to refer to adults. They, instead, are socially inept, and can't fully grasp the consequence of their actions. It's always helpful to keep Hanlon's razor in mind: assume stupidity before malice.
cryptofits 7y ago
From my personal experience, it's hard because of all the hormones.
- bayesian_horse 7y ago
  Also the prefrontal cortex is not yet developed enough to keep the hormones in check.
  - danesparza 7y ago
    (for those that don't know, the prefrontal cortex is one of the centers of the brain. It's responsible for 'planning'. Think about the last middle schooler you saw that had a cunning plan and I'm sure you'll agree their brain wasn't fully formed either.)
itronitron 7y ago
In most US school systems, middle school marks a transition from students having one teacher and classroom for most of the day to having multiple (6 to 8) different teachers and classrooms during the day. So that is potentially a 5X multiplier on the number of different social interactions that each student will have to deal with each day. On top of that they have to learn each teacher's style and expectations in order to do well. I used to think the difficulty was due to the onset of adolescence but I think if you forced most working adults through such a transition for a year they would not fare well. This is why most people hate service jobs.
- tjr225 7y ago
  Interesting. If transitioning from amount of social interactions is difficult it might also explain someone having personal difficulty when going from say, an infrastructure gig to a software support gig.
- olau 7y ago
  I think it goes both ways. If you know someone well, you can be a much better teacher to them. You can predict what they will have trouble with, what will make them happy, how and when to introduce things to them, etc. Same as interacting with coworkers. And in management, really.
- Dumblydorr 7y ago
  I taught science in grades 3-8 in low income US schools. The main difference between 3-5 and 6-8 is puberty. These humans are undergoing the most radical shift in their hormones and behavioral regime in their entire life. They go from caring what their teacher thinks to caring what their peers think; the kids get louder, stronger, less respectful of authority, more likely to join gangs or do drugs. Everyone gets a lot more talkative and disruptive. Middle schoolers are simply the hardest age group to teach.
  - tbyehl 7y ago
    > Middle schoolers are simply the hardest age group to teach. But how much of that might be structural? Under ideal circumstances, a K-5 student has one teacher each year, in a class largely composed of students they were in a class with the previous year. We throw them into 6th grade, now they have what, 5-6 teachers for 40-50 minutes each? In my district, two elementary schools feed each middle, so their grade size has doubled and even many of the students they shared an elementary school with will be unfamiliar. That's a whole lot of social upheaval to subject 11 y/o kids to. Puberty is just icing on the cake.
anonytrary 7y ago
All I remember in middle school was the sheer amount of bullying. There was almost no bullying in my high school.
- non-entity 7y ago
  Yeah it was pretty similar for me. Unfortunately, there were times in middle school, where I was the bully as well. Once I got to high school though, everyone was mostly cool, never had any of the issues I had in the past years.
pointerpointer 7y ago
> Why is Middle School so hard? Because it's mandatory, and you are forced to be around lots of people you don't really want to be with. You are forced to learn things you are not interested in at all, while being punished for not performing well. And all that, while your body goes through a major transformation sexually. There can only be very few people enjoying that. For most it is a horrible way to end their childhood. And we (parents, governments) think it is beneficial, until the kids come from middle school and cannot find a job that easily, often ending up doing completely stupid work like cashier or whatever else for the rest of their lives.
- bachmeier 7y ago
  "until the kids come from middle school and cannot find a job that easily, often ending up doing completely stupid work like cashier or whatever else for the rest of their lives." Your comment took a strange turn there at the end. I don't know even a single person that went from middle school to the job market. And if someone does, the job market probably won't be very good, that's common sense.
  - goldstone26 7y ago
    Isn't that illegal in most places? In the US, High School is compulsory until you're 18 (so most people at least get 3 full years).
    - VLM 7y ago
      Its never been federal officially although theres substantial funding bribery over the years (like drinking age enforcement), age has changed wildly over the years, vast increase over the last two or three generations, and wide variance in religious vs non-religious reasons, parental consent vs no parental consent required, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_school_leaving_age#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_school_leaving_age#...
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      Compulsory until 16 or diploma, mostly. https://education.findlaw.com/education-options/compulsory-education-laws-background.html https://education.findlaw.com/education-options/compulsory-e...
rollthehard6 7y ago
Apart from the US, where else has middle schools? Here in Scotland there is (Optionally) nursery, primary school (5-12) and then secondary school (12-16/18), no middle.
- OJFord 7y ago
  Some areas of the UK have them. (State schools in those areas anyway.) I believe as a deliberately modelled-on-America experiment some time ago that stuck in those locales but didn't expand.
- bayesian_horse 7y ago
  In Germany it's worse. We don't have a distinct middle school as such, but we have three parallel tiers after four years of elementary school. One is only until grade 9, one until grade 10, the third is up to 13 years. I'm leaving out a lot of details here, but basically students have to choose one track after elementary school. And upgrading is hard, especially because the lower tracks are "optimized for slower learners". Side-Note: As you might have guessed, the track selection has become more and more based on ethnicity. Studies have shown that such a tracked system is worse in every imaginable way. But it is extremely attractive to conservative academics.
  - ido 7y ago
    A minor addendum: in Berlin & Brandenburg it's 6/6 years rather than 4/8.
  - GLjEI4YbnGD27LB 7y ago
    I really liked the tracked system in the Netherlands. I feel like it really let the higher tier learn at a faster rate. Do you have links to the studies?
  - cf141q5325 7y ago
    After a long discussion with little alternatives, my little cousin went to a Realschule mit Förderstufe. The problem with the school has less to do with ethnicity as i can see it but the fact that large parts of her class dont speak German good enough to be educated in it. And that they are not grouped up by language to help them catch up in their first language. Pair that with the "slower learner" approach and all of those kids are simply left behind. I dont think its an issue of racism but simply abandoning anyone who, for what ever reason, cant hold the pace. Simply no parent wants their kid to be in such a class with two multilingual teachers to at least partially cover multiple languages to try to communicate with the kids in their class. They have to deal with the consequences of not thought trough political maneuvers. And the kids who suffer from that are generally those that already live in precarious situations. Painting it as a problem of racism, misses the point entirely from what i have seen and I think framing it this way is deeply counterproductive when it comes to these fundamental issues of our education system.
closeparen 7y ago
Until late high school, grades were pretty isolated from each other. There were some really awkward structured mentorship programs, and some extracurriculars like theater that had less of a Varsity / JV bifurcation, but your social circle was still pretty much grade level peers. Sometimes their siblings. I can’t imagine the set of grade levels sharing an institution being a major part of the story.
- jacobolus 7y ago
  In primary school, most American students have one main teacher and one class. In middle school, most American students walk from class to class, each less than 1 hour long and with a different teacher, and are with different students in each class. Often many primary schools feed into one middle school, so the school can be bigger and has less familiar students. The students and teachers don’t know each-other and have a harder time getting to know each-other. The school is often more formal and the schoolwork is often less enjoyable. There is significantly more homework. Students (often strangers to each-other) end up very quickly establishing a new social hierarchy in a context with less oversight and less adult support. It can get pretty brutal.
virgakwolfw 7y ago
I can't necessarily answer the boring part but, if you mean hard in a social sense, it's because everyone is undergoing physical changes that they don't know how to handle. Now, if you mean hard in a scholastic sense, get use to it because it's only going to get harder.
Consultant32452 7y ago
Public schools are literal prisons for children and for most people is the only place they'll experience violence first hand. Middle school is the age in which children's awareness of these facts start to become more clear in their minds, even if they lack the ability to articulate them so clearly.
JulianMorrison 7y ago
Have you considered not combining "a place of learning" with "a violent, over controlled, over policed, oppressive bureaucratic autocracy, that replicates all the usual dynamics found in prisons"?
- microcolonel 7y ago
  As somebody who's attended a North American public school in my life, this is roughly the slap in the face I feel when politicians talk about abolishing vouchers or charter schools, with no mention of the appalling baseline quality of public education, despite dramatically higher spending than most or all other developed nations. Meanwhile, those voucher systems and charter schools have been the thrust of almost all improvement of education in America. At the end of the day, it is rich to hear from politicians who have literally never attended a public school about how we should send our kids to schools they've avoided. A greater proportion of public educators send their own kids to private schools than the general public, by a long shot.
  - notfromhere 7y ago
    Most politicians come from the middle class, so I'd wager most of them attended public school. The most predictive stat for educational attainment is household income and parental educational attainment, so if you want to fix education, you need to fix income inequality.
    - throwaway66920 7y ago
      Source? I haven’t heard that before. It’s certainly not true for anyone in congress or upwards.
      - barry-cotter 7y ago
        Parental income and education are both heritable for the same reason height and hair colour are heritable. Grandparent is directionally correct although the effect of parental education on child education is almost entirely mediated by IQ and Conscientiousness. So people who were middle and upper class in their home country but come to richer countries have children who achieve similar success in their new country even if they end up owning a dry cleaners because they can’t really speak English. > The heritability of conscientiousness facets and their relationship to IQ and academic achievement https://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15273.long https://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15273.long > Genetic research has shown that intelligence makes a major contribution to the heritability of educational achievement. However, we show that other broad domains of behavior such as personality and psychopathology also account for genetic influence on GCSE scores beyond that predicted by intelligence. Together with intelligence, these domains account for 75% of the heritability of GCSE scores. > The high heritability of educational achievement reflects many genetically influenced traits, not just intelligence https://genepi.qimr.edu.au/contents/p/staff/CV448.pdf https://genepi.qimr.edu.au/contents/p/staff/CV448.pdf > Our findings confirmed positive associations between IQ and the facets of Competence and Dutifulness (ranging 0.11–0.27), with academic achievement showing correlations of 0.27 and 0.15 with these same facets and 0.15 with Deliberation. All conscientiousness facets were influenced by genes (broad sense heritabilities ranging 0.18–0.49) and unique environment, but common environment was judged unimportant.
ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago
Almost everyone is going through puberty at the same time for one thing.
- ken 7y ago
  That seems to be the only basis this article presents at all for the claim that "middle school is hard".
perseusprime11 7y ago
I also think Middle School is hard because elementary school is so easy.
- shantly 7y ago
  Middle school (well, Junior High) was the first time I couldn't understand a concept the first time it was explained. I'd had almost no experience of that K-6 so I had no idea what to do and thought something had gone wrong with my brain. Seriously. It was especially bad in math where "understanding concepts" plus some memorization is basically the whole deal, at least for most of K-12 education. I'd gone from among the best at math (with zero effort, because I probably should have been moving through the curriculum 2-3x as fast as I had been) to barely holding on somewhere in the middle, in a matter of months.
  - Technetium_Hat 7y ago
    you were lucky to hit that point in middle school. i am in high school currently and am struggling due to not ever learning proper study skills. everything before was too easy for me which ended up hurting me in the long run.
    - perseusprime11 7y ago
      Looking back, can you please think of somethings that could have helped you and share here?
sylens 7y ago
People who have been out of the school system for a while should watch Bo Burnham's "Eighth Grade". It's an incredibly accurate take on what being in middle school is like, especially today where your self-worth can fluctuate based on the amount of likes your last Instagram post got.
- wolfgke 7y ago
  > especially today where your self-worth can fluctuate based on the amount of likes your last Instagram post got. Simple solution: delete your Instagram account.
  - SuoDuanDao 7y ago
    That's indistinguishable from the number of likes being zero.
    - authoritarian 7y ago
      It certainly isn't. If you are active on social media and post something you care about only for it to get no likes the majority of people would feel significantly worse than simply enjoying something and not posting it on the internet for praise/approval from strangers and acquaintances. I'm very happy to have not had instagram, twitter, facebook, etc. for the majority of my early education
      - SuoDuanDao 7y ago
        Me too, but for that to be possible requires friends who don't demand that one uses them to voluntarily associate.
  - mrfredward 7y ago
    Most kids in middle school don't have careers, property, deep responsibilities, or most other things adults focus on. They just have phones, a handful of friends, and some sort of position in an arbitrary social hierarchy, and so they put most of their focus into getting social approval. Grades matter only to the extent that they get social approval from adults. Telling a middle schooler to just quit social media is like telling an adult in a capitalist society to just not worry about money. It isn't that easy to opt-out of the thing most of your world is based on.
dangus 7y ago
Disclosure: I did not read the article. It's because middle school-aged kids are awful, evil people. Every bad social trait comes out at that age without any of the adult filters.
_bxg1 7y ago
Weirdly, middle school was one of the high-points of grade school for me. It saw the initiation of nearly every important interest and passion that I have (mostly by coincidence, but still): - Middle school band introduced me to music - both listening and playing - which was life-changing for me. Band remained the best thing in my life through the rest of gradeschool, and music still is. - I learned to play guitar for the first time, joining a wonderful freeform after-school club for it - I discovered Tolkien, JRPGs, and Morrowind (and their respective music), all of which seeded my imaginative life in ways that are still felt today - I tried programming for the first time (over a summer), awakening another passion and putting me on a trajectory for my future career Socially, middle-school was rough. But that was true for pretty much all of grade school. And inwardly, middle school was amazing. I still look back on it fondly.
- sorenn111 7y ago
  Weirdly I relate to some of your experiences in a lot of ways. - Middle school was really the only time in my life i had the free time to learn instruments. I played a lot of guitar and even played with friends. Never had the time after. - Morrowind. I loved this game even though I was too young to really know what I was doing. - My passion for math and science was ignited at this time which led me on the great path of focusing on math/physic in High school. Double majoring CS math in College and programming today. - Was able to compete in chess tournaments regularly, never have had time since. Socially, I had some friends, but they were nerds too. Honestly I'm glad I wasn't "popular". The kids I know who were became just boring popular people who started drinking and doing drugs way too early, obsessing about sports that they'll never play again, and never advanced their lives in fulfilling ways (in my opinion, though i think getting distracted by over socializing early in school [ie partying] distracts one from the good grades/drive needed to achieve good a good career). Being popular and good at sports in middle school is a curse! Nerds ftw!!
  - _bxg1 7y ago
    It seemed like it was an interesting mid-point between elementary and high school: they start giving you some real extracurricular activities and electives and such to start exploring, but you don't yet have the highschool pressures of more difficult classes and preparation for college. Maybe that sweet spot is why it's a renaissance for some people. It's even analogous to college, a midpoint between grade school and adult life; a sudden increase in experiences without a proportionate increase in responsibilities.
throwaway66920 7y ago
Bullying was not prevalent in my school. But I did notice an abrupt change from elementary school. Before middle school grades were meaningless. Middle school was when kids started to be grouped into advanced and not advanced groups and your grades started to matter (not really but it felt like they did at the time). A large problem for me was the sudden collective understanding from kids and parents that most of them weren’t as special, smart, or talented as they thought. Middle school was the first time kids had to internalize that they were not particularly good at things and likely never would be.
- JoeAltmaier 7y ago
  Agreed. I remember waiting outside a middle school, for my son's elementary-school orchestra practice to end (they met at the middle school). Every middle school student that walked by, had a recognizable emotional/psychological problem. Tics, staring at the ground and not looking anyone in the eye, startling at the approach of other students, and on and on. It was shocking.
- bcrosby95 7y ago
  This isn't necessarily true - my elementary school had "advanced" classrooms - one for 4th, and then one for 5th and 6th.
JoeAltmaier 7y ago
It can simply be that, the middle school aggregates several elementary school populations under one roof. Wherever you were on the spectrum in your (small) elementary school, put you in a bigger population and you will likely move toward the mean. Which is humbling for many.
mkaic 7y ago
I’m in high school. The education system’s only saving grace is the small group of exceptional teachers and administrators that dare to defy what’s expected of them by the government-approved programs and curricula. It seems inherently wrong to place energetic, lively people like teachers and curious, high-potential kids in such a strangely restricting and oppressive environment.
- mixmastamyk 7y ago
  Unfortunately it’s also daycare for the unwashed masses and unmotivated.
Nasrudith 7y ago
From my experience part of what sucked about middle school was all of the responsibilities with none of the privledges and a seeming determination to make things suck as much as possible. Also exacerbated by things like overcrowded halls, air conditioning only in the library the faculty office, and a goddamn obsession with collective punishment.

110 points by laurex 7y ago

There's nothing wrong with the average American middle school that can't be fixed with evacuation and controlled demolition.

dang 7y ago
Please don't do this here.
- Porthos9K 7y ago
  OK. How about I suggest scrapping mandatory attendance instead?

ImaTigger 7y ago

Middle school is hard because it's the point at which parents are cut out of the educational system, either by virtue of their not being able to be helpful (e.g., they can't do algebra or speak French either!), or by the child (through mis-directed rebellion or overzealous DIYishness).

bayesian_horse 7y ago
On the one hand it sounds great to let parents participate in their children's academic education, but in reality such participation is a hard requirement for success. And that, in turn, disadvantages students with working parents, or with parents that don't have the skill or experience to guide them to higher achievement. It may sound awful to trust "the state" to handle education independently, but the alternatives are usually worse.
- Ensorceled 7y ago
  Or, frankly, parents that can't be bothered. One of the most important epiphanies in my life was realizing that some parents don't care at all about their kids, some are jealous of them and actively sabotage them and that some systematically abuse them for entertainment. It is also why I'm get angry when people push others to have children; many people should not raise children.
  - bayesian_horse 7y ago
    I'm really careful with such judgments. Humans generally love their children. If it doesn't look like that, there are other factors involved, usually alcoholism, other substance abuse and mental illness. Meaning: They would care more for their children if they had the energy and power to do so. And some of those will also rationalize their inability to spend the energy as not wanting to do it.
- watwut 7y ago
  And in many cases, parents are fully aware the homework that requires their help did not had to be at all and has zero educational value. Parents know said homework exists only to force them to "be involved" and resent it. As much as you try to pretend you are enthusiastic yadda yadda, the afternoon evening was killed with crappy project that really does not look like having educational value.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    Are you confident that parents spending time with their children like that is not valuable? Especially now in the era of 6hr/day YouTube and fortnite?
    - barry-cotter 7y ago
      Parents spending time with their children is valuable. Parents modeling compliance to pointless busywork with minimal effects on educational achievement is not.
    - watwut 7y ago
      Absolutely it is not valuable. Parents spending time with kids over activities that are mutually pleasant or just talking or doing needed activities are valuable. Third party organized nonsense that just needs to be done has no intrinsic "time together" value. And in case of bad parents, it puts the kid at mercy of bad parent even more.
  - rimliu 7y ago
    Is that a thing? There is homework where parents should be involved by the design of the task?
- lonelappde 7y ago
  If the state is going to be inserting itself, I'd rather the state stay away from Harrison Bergeron forcing rich people to be less educated and productive, and focus on taxing excess wealth to redistribute to children and poor adults who want to work. What if public school is awful, and the only reason it looks decent is that some parents are picking up the slack? What would happen if you cut those parents out of the system?
- rimliu 7y ago
  This claim is way too general. I do not know your definition of success or higher achievement, but I'd say I was quite successful with zero involvement from my parents and saw numerous cases of the same.
HNLurker2 7y ago
My father still gave me a ride when I was in 8th grade (14(
watwut 7y ago
At some point, parents have to be cut out. A child wanting to handle things more independently from parents is not a bad thing - learning to do it independently is important. What you call "mis-directed rebellion or overzealous DIYishness" is them reaching developmental milestones. A school system that requires extensive parental help is bad system.
- indigochill 7y ago
  >A school system that requires extensive parental help is bad system. Although I think I agree with the thrust of this (children need independence), I suspect the original intent was not so much direct help as cultivating an environment conducive to independent success. Like the difference between trying to grow a flower and trying to build a flower. Of course, children eventually also need to be able to do this independently, but speaking for myself at least I didn't really appreciate this facet of education (nor was I in a position to do it for myself) in middle school.
- bayesian_horse 7y ago
  An observable consequence of such dependencies is the degree to which income and academic achievement are "inherited", in the sense that kids with richer or better educated parents have more than a leg up.
  - barry-cotter 7y ago
    Academic achievement is inherited like height, not like religion. > The heritability of conscientiousness facets and their relationship to IQ and academic achievement https://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15273.long https://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15273.long > Genetic research has shown that intelligence makes a major contribution to the heritability of educational achievement. However, we show that other broad domains of behavior such as personality and psychopathology also account for genetic influence on GCSE scores beyond that predicted by intelligence. Together with intelligence, these domains account for 75% of the heritability of GCSE scores. > The high heritability of educational achievement reflects many genetically influenced traits, not just intelligence https://genepi.qimr.edu.au/contents/p/staff/CV448.pdf https://genepi.qimr.edu.au/contents/p/staff/CV448.pdf > Our findings confirmed positive associations between IQ and the facets of Competence and Dutifulness (ranging 0.11–0.27), with academic achievement showing correlations of 0.27 and 0.15 with these same facets and 0.15 with Deliberation. All conscientiousness facets were influenced by genes (broad sense heritabilities ranging 0.18–0.49) and unique environment, but common environment was judged unimportant.

kelnos 7y ago

> After all, middle schoolers are “kind of the best people on Earth,” says Mayra Cruz, the principal of Oyster-Adams Bilingual School, a public middle school in Washington, D.C. She appears to be at a very different middle school than I went to. Or is painfully oblivious as to how cruel children of that age can be to each other.

scarejunba 7y ago
I hear this on the Internet all the time but in middle school everyone was nice to me and I was nice to everyone. There was some banter and we sometimes accidentally injured each other because we're clumsy and sometimes we fought, but 'cruel'? I don't recall anyone being cruel. In fact, I remember seeing this right after I finished high school too. The Internet was always "Kids are so cruel to each other" and now I wonder to myself if this isn't just the culture you guys have built where you live. Of course we had uniforms and nearly everyone came in on public buses unless they were rich or lived close to the rich kids.
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Start with crowding and go from there. If your school was small and everyone knew everyone, that's a vast difference. It takes just a few bullies (or worse, criminals), who get a bunch of sycophants, to ruin the atmosphere. If you cannot remove them, nobody knows how to control it. Middle schoolers are as cruel as any people, just less sophisticated, so it's much more obvious. They form tribal social groups which fight, cut out people they dislike or judge, explicitly. Trying to remove that bit is nearly impossible. They do respect teacher authority, so an oblivious enough teacher can think everything is fine - or they normalized deviance.
  - scarejunba 7y ago
    I went to an integrated primary to higher secondary school with a nearby kindergarten. 50 kids a class.
- ohduran 7y ago
  Not cruel, but self-centered. Infancy seems to me like a progression from complete self-centerness (if I'm not pleased, I'll cry until I turn blue) to become functional, socially. Adolescence is part of that process of gauging how much to conform to society vs stand up for yourself, until (ideally) you reach a mature state in which the interaction with other human beings is healthy. I'm no psychologist so please take my input with a grain of salt. My point is, kids aren't cruel in the sense that we use to refer to adults. They, instead, are socially inept, and can't fully grasp the consequence of their actions. It's always helpful to keep Hanlon's razor in mind: assume stupidity before malice.

cryptofits 7y ago

From my personal experience, it's hard because of all the hormones.

bayesian_horse 7y ago
Also the prefrontal cortex is not yet developed enough to keep the hormones in check.
- danesparza 7y ago
  (for those that don't know, the prefrontal cortex is one of the centers of the brain. It's responsible for 'planning'. Think about the last middle schooler you saw that had a cunning plan and I'm sure you'll agree their brain wasn't fully formed either.)

itronitron 7y ago

In most US school systems, middle school marks a transition from students having one teacher and classroom for most of the day to having multiple (6 to 8) different teachers and classrooms during the day. So that is potentially a 5X multiplier on the number of different social interactions that each student will have to deal with each day. On top of that they have to learn each teacher's style and expectations in order to do well. I used to think the difficulty was due to the onset of adolescence but I think if you forced most working adults through such a transition for a year they would not fare well. This is why most people hate service jobs.

tjr225 7y ago
Interesting. If transitioning from amount of social interactions is difficult it might also explain someone having personal difficulty when going from say, an infrastructure gig to a software support gig.
olau 7y ago
I think it goes both ways. If you know someone well, you can be a much better teacher to them. You can predict what they will have trouble with, what will make them happy, how and when to introduce things to them, etc. Same as interacting with coworkers. And in management, really.
Dumblydorr 7y ago
I taught science in grades 3-8 in low income US schools. The main difference between 3-5 and 6-8 is puberty. These humans are undergoing the most radical shift in their hormones and behavioral regime in their entire life. They go from caring what their teacher thinks to caring what their peers think; the kids get louder, stronger, less respectful of authority, more likely to join gangs or do drugs. Everyone gets a lot more talkative and disruptive. Middle schoolers are simply the hardest age group to teach.
- tbyehl 7y ago
  > Middle schoolers are simply the hardest age group to teach. But how much of that might be structural? Under ideal circumstances, a K-5 student has one teacher each year, in a class largely composed of students they were in a class with the previous year. We throw them into 6th grade, now they have what, 5-6 teachers for 40-50 minutes each? In my district, two elementary schools feed each middle, so their grade size has doubled and even many of the students they shared an elementary school with will be unfamiliar. That's a whole lot of social upheaval to subject 11 y/o kids to. Puberty is just icing on the cake.

anonytrary 7y ago

All I remember in middle school was the sheer amount of bullying. There was almost no bullying in my high school.

non-entity 7y ago
Yeah it was pretty similar for me. Unfortunately, there were times in middle school, where I was the bully as well. Once I got to high school though, everyone was mostly cool, never had any of the issues I had in the past years.

pointerpointer 7y ago

> Why is Middle School so hard? Because it's mandatory, and you are forced to be around lots of people you don't really want to be with. You are forced to learn things you are not interested in at all, while being punished for not performing well. And all that, while your body goes through a major transformation sexually. There can only be very few people enjoying that. For most it is a horrible way to end their childhood. And we (parents, governments) think it is beneficial, until the kids come from middle school and cannot find a job that easily, often ending up doing completely stupid work like cashier or whatever else for the rest of their lives.

bachmeier 7y ago
"until the kids come from middle school and cannot find a job that easily, often ending up doing completely stupid work like cashier or whatever else for the rest of their lives." Your comment took a strange turn there at the end. I don't know even a single person that went from middle school to the job market. And if someone does, the job market probably won't be very good, that's common sense.
- goldstone26 7y ago
  Isn't that illegal in most places? In the US, High School is compulsory until you're 18 (so most people at least get 3 full years).
  - VLM 7y ago
    Its never been federal officially although theres substantial funding bribery over the years (like drinking age enforcement), age has changed wildly over the years, vast increase over the last two or three generations, and wide variance in religious vs non-religious reasons, parental consent vs no parental consent required, etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_school_leaving_age#United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_of_school_leaving_age#...
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    Compulsory until 16 or diploma, mostly. https://education.findlaw.com/education-options/compulsory-education-laws-background.html https://education.findlaw.com/education-options/compulsory-e...

rollthehard6 7y ago

Apart from the US, where else has middle schools? Here in Scotland there is (Optionally) nursery, primary school (5-12) and then secondary school (12-16/18), no middle.

OJFord 7y ago
Some areas of the UK have them. (State schools in those areas anyway.) I believe as a deliberately modelled-on-America experiment some time ago that stuck in those locales but didn't expand.
bayesian_horse 7y ago
In Germany it's worse. We don't have a distinct middle school as such, but we have three parallel tiers after four years of elementary school. One is only until grade 9, one until grade 10, the third is up to 13 years. I'm leaving out a lot of details here, but basically students have to choose one track after elementary school. And upgrading is hard, especially because the lower tracks are "optimized for slower learners". Side-Note: As you might have guessed, the track selection has become more and more based on ethnicity. Studies have shown that such a tracked system is worse in every imaginable way. But it is extremely attractive to conservative academics.
- ido 7y ago
  A minor addendum: in Berlin & Brandenburg it's 6/6 years rather than 4/8.
- GLjEI4YbnGD27LB 7y ago
  I really liked the tracked system in the Netherlands. I feel like it really let the higher tier learn at a faster rate. Do you have links to the studies?
- cf141q5325 7y ago
  After a long discussion with little alternatives, my little cousin went to a Realschule mit Förderstufe. The problem with the school has less to do with ethnicity as i can see it but the fact that large parts of her class dont speak German good enough to be educated in it. And that they are not grouped up by language to help them catch up in their first language. Pair that with the "slower learner" approach and all of those kids are simply left behind. I dont think its an issue of racism but simply abandoning anyone who, for what ever reason, cant hold the pace. Simply no parent wants their kid to be in such a class with two multilingual teachers to at least partially cover multiple languages to try to communicate with the kids in their class. They have to deal with the consequences of not thought trough political maneuvers. And the kids who suffer from that are generally those that already live in precarious situations. Painting it as a problem of racism, misses the point entirely from what i have seen and I think framing it this way is deeply counterproductive when it comes to these fundamental issues of our education system.

closeparen 7y ago

Until late high school, grades were pretty isolated from each other. There were some really awkward structured mentorship programs, and some extracurriculars like theater that had less of a Varsity / JV bifurcation, but your social circle was still pretty much grade level peers. Sometimes their siblings. I can’t imagine the set of grade levels sharing an institution being a major part of the story.

jacobolus 7y ago
In primary school, most American students have one main teacher and one class. In middle school, most American students walk from class to class, each less than 1 hour long and with a different teacher, and are with different students in each class. Often many primary schools feed into one middle school, so the school can be bigger and has less familiar students. The students and teachers don’t know each-other and have a harder time getting to know each-other. The school is often more formal and the schoolwork is often less enjoyable. There is significantly more homework. Students (often strangers to each-other) end up very quickly establishing a new social hierarchy in a context with less oversight and less adult support. It can get pretty brutal.

virgakwolfw 7y ago

I can't necessarily answer the boring part but, if you mean hard in a social sense, it's because everyone is undergoing physical changes that they don't know how to handle. Now, if you mean hard in a scholastic sense, get use to it because it's only going to get harder.

Consultant32452 7y ago

Public schools are literal prisons for children and for most people is the only place they'll experience violence first hand. Middle school is the age in which children's awareness of these facts start to become more clear in their minds, even if they lack the ability to articulate them so clearly.

JulianMorrison 7y ago

Have you considered not combining "a place of learning" with "a violent, over controlled, over policed, oppressive bureaucratic autocracy, that replicates all the usual dynamics found in prisons"?

microcolonel 7y ago
As somebody who's attended a North American public school in my life, this is roughly the slap in the face I feel when politicians talk about abolishing vouchers or charter schools, with no mention of the appalling baseline quality of public education, despite dramatically higher spending than most or all other developed nations. Meanwhile, those voucher systems and charter schools have been the thrust of almost all improvement of education in America. At the end of the day, it is rich to hear from politicians who have literally never attended a public school about how we should send our kids to schools they've avoided. A greater proportion of public educators send their own kids to private schools than the general public, by a long shot.
- notfromhere 7y ago
  Most politicians come from the middle class, so I'd wager most of them attended public school. The most predictive stat for educational attainment is household income and parental educational attainment, so if you want to fix education, you need to fix income inequality.
  - throwaway66920 7y ago
    Source? I haven’t heard that before. It’s certainly not true for anyone in congress or upwards.
    - barry-cotter 7y ago
      Parental income and education are both heritable for the same reason height and hair colour are heritable. Grandparent is directionally correct although the effect of parental education on child education is almost entirely mediated by IQ and Conscientiousness. So people who were middle and upper class in their home country but come to richer countries have children who achieve similar success in their new country even if they end up owning a dry cleaners because they can’t really speak English. > The heritability of conscientiousness facets and their relationship to IQ and academic achievement https://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15273.long https://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15273.long > Genetic research has shown that intelligence makes a major contribution to the heritability of educational achievement. However, we show that other broad domains of behavior such as personality and psychopathology also account for genetic influence on GCSE scores beyond that predicted by intelligence. Together with intelligence, these domains account for 75% of the heritability of GCSE scores. > The high heritability of educational achievement reflects many genetically influenced traits, not just intelligence https://genepi.qimr.edu.au/contents/p/staff/CV448.pdf https://genepi.qimr.edu.au/contents/p/staff/CV448.pdf > Our findings confirmed positive associations between IQ and the facets of Competence and Dutifulness (ranging 0.11–0.27), with academic achievement showing correlations of 0.27 and 0.15 with these same facets and 0.15 with Deliberation. All conscientiousness facets were influenced by genes (broad sense heritabilities ranging 0.18–0.49) and unique environment, but common environment was judged unimportant.

ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago

Almost everyone is going through puberty at the same time for one thing.

ken 7y ago
That seems to be the only basis this article presents at all for the claim that "middle school is hard".

perseusprime11 7y ago

I also think Middle School is hard because elementary school is so easy.

shantly 7y ago
Middle school (well, Junior High) was the first time I couldn't understand a concept the first time it was explained. I'd had almost no experience of that K-6 so I had no idea what to do and thought something had gone wrong with my brain. Seriously. It was especially bad in math where "understanding concepts" plus some memorization is basically the whole deal, at least for most of K-12 education. I'd gone from among the best at math (with zero effort, because I probably should have been moving through the curriculum 2-3x as fast as I had been) to barely holding on somewhere in the middle, in a matter of months.
- Technetium_Hat 7y ago
  you were lucky to hit that point in middle school. i am in high school currently and am struggling due to not ever learning proper study skills. everything before was too easy for me which ended up hurting me in the long run.
  - perseusprime11 7y ago
    Looking back, can you please think of somethings that could have helped you and share here?

sylens 7y ago

People who have been out of the school system for a while should watch Bo Burnham's "Eighth Grade". It's an incredibly accurate take on what being in middle school is like, especially today where your self-worth can fluctuate based on the amount of likes your last Instagram post got.

wolfgke 7y ago
> especially today where your self-worth can fluctuate based on the amount of likes your last Instagram post got. Simple solution: delete your Instagram account.
- SuoDuanDao 7y ago
  That's indistinguishable from the number of likes being zero.
  - authoritarian 7y ago
    It certainly isn't. If you are active on social media and post something you care about only for it to get no likes the majority of people would feel significantly worse than simply enjoying something and not posting it on the internet for praise/approval from strangers and acquaintances. I'm very happy to have not had instagram, twitter, facebook, etc. for the majority of my early education
    - SuoDuanDao 7y ago
      Me too, but for that to be possible requires friends who don't demand that one uses them to voluntarily associate.
- mrfredward 7y ago
  Most kids in middle school don't have careers, property, deep responsibilities, or most other things adults focus on. They just have phones, a handful of friends, and some sort of position in an arbitrary social hierarchy, and so they put most of their focus into getting social approval. Grades matter only to the extent that they get social approval from adults. Telling a middle schooler to just quit social media is like telling an adult in a capitalist society to just not worry about money. It isn't that easy to opt-out of the thing most of your world is based on.

dangus 7y ago

Disclosure: I did not read the article. It's because middle school-aged kids are awful, evil people. Every bad social trait comes out at that age without any of the adult filters.

_bxg1 7y ago

Weirdly, middle school was one of the high-points of grade school for me. It saw the initiation of nearly every important interest and passion that I have (mostly by coincidence, but still): - Middle school band introduced me to music - both listening and playing - which was life-changing for me. Band remained the best thing in my life through the rest of gradeschool, and music still is. - I learned to play guitar for the first time, joining a wonderful freeform after-school club for it - I discovered Tolkien, JRPGs, and Morrowind (and their respective music), all of which seeded my imaginative life in ways that are still felt today - I tried programming for the first time (over a summer), awakening another passion and putting me on a trajectory for my future career Socially, middle-school was rough. But that was true for pretty much all of grade school. And inwardly, middle school was amazing. I still look back on it fondly.

sorenn111 7y ago
Weirdly I relate to some of your experiences in a lot of ways. - Middle school was really the only time in my life i had the free time to learn instruments. I played a lot of guitar and even played with friends. Never had the time after. - Morrowind. I loved this game even though I was too young to really know what I was doing. - My passion for math and science was ignited at this time which led me on the great path of focusing on math/physic in High school. Double majoring CS math in College and programming today. - Was able to compete in chess tournaments regularly, never have had time since. Socially, I had some friends, but they were nerds too. Honestly I'm glad I wasn't "popular". The kids I know who were became just boring popular people who started drinking and doing drugs way too early, obsessing about sports that they'll never play again, and never advanced their lives in fulfilling ways (in my opinion, though i think getting distracted by over socializing early in school [ie partying] distracts one from the good grades/drive needed to achieve good a good career). Being popular and good at sports in middle school is a curse! Nerds ftw!!
- _bxg1 7y ago
  It seemed like it was an interesting mid-point between elementary and high school: they start giving you some real extracurricular activities and electives and such to start exploring, but you don't yet have the highschool pressures of more difficult classes and preparation for college. Maybe that sweet spot is why it's a renaissance for some people. It's even analogous to college, a midpoint between grade school and adult life; a sudden increase in experiences without a proportionate increase in responsibilities.

throwaway66920 7y ago

Bullying was not prevalent in my school. But I did notice an abrupt change from elementary school. Before middle school grades were meaningless. Middle school was when kids started to be grouped into advanced and not advanced groups and your grades started to matter (not really but it felt like they did at the time). A large problem for me was the sudden collective understanding from kids and parents that most of them weren’t as special, smart, or talented as they thought. Middle school was the first time kids had to internalize that they were not particularly good at things and likely never would be.

JoeAltmaier 7y ago
Agreed. I remember waiting outside a middle school, for my son's elementary-school orchestra practice to end (they met at the middle school). Every middle school student that walked by, had a recognizable emotional/psychological problem. Tics, staring at the ground and not looking anyone in the eye, startling at the approach of other students, and on and on. It was shocking.
bcrosby95 7y ago
This isn't necessarily true - my elementary school had "advanced" classrooms - one for 4th, and then one for 5th and 6th.

JoeAltmaier 7y ago

It can simply be that, the middle school aggregates several elementary school populations under one roof. Wherever you were on the spectrum in your (small) elementary school, put you in a bigger population and you will likely move toward the mean. Which is humbling for many.

mkaic 7y ago

I’m in high school. The education system’s only saving grace is the small group of exceptional teachers and administrators that dare to defy what’s expected of them by the government-approved programs and curricula. It seems inherently wrong to place energetic, lively people like teachers and curious, high-potential kids in such a strangely restricting and oppressive environment.

mixmastamyk 7y ago
Unfortunately it’s also daycare for the unwashed masses and unmotivated.

Nasrudith 7y ago

From my experience part of what sucked about middle school was all of the responsibilities with none of the privledges and a seeming determination to make things suck as much as possible. Also exacerbated by things like overcrowded halls, air conditioning only in the library the faculty office, and a goddamn obsession with collective punishment.