449: Middle School

Ira Glass

Hey everybody. Ira Glass here. So we got this email at our radio show near the end of the last school year from a 14-year-old.

Ira Glass

I called her up at her house in California and asked her to read it.

Ira Glass

Mainly, she says that she wrote to us because she and her friends were talking right after they left eighth grade about how terrible middle school was. And she wondered was it just as bad for other people as it was for them?

Ira Glass

In Annie's case, she had friends who smoked, so she got criticized for smoking. But then she also was made fun of for not smoking, for being too much of a sissy to start smoking. She was made fun of for coming from a bilingual elementary school where everybody learned to speak Spanish and spoke it throughout the day.

Ira Glass

We talked about this for a little while. She said basically, everybody comes into middle school as a little kid, and you're going to have to grow up, and figure out who's in what group, and who you are, and who's above who. And you're going to have to figure that out somewhere at that age, right? It might as well be middle school. And it was terrible, she says, but now she's in high school.

Ira Glass

Well, today on our radio program, for Annie we look at whatever it is that happens in those mysterious years that we call middle school. We have stories today from all over the country, people lurching their way through these years when you're figuring out so, so much. We go to middle school dances and classrooms, and down to the Mexican border. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, Life in the Middle Ages. So we wanted to understand what is going on exactly physically and emotionally with middle school kids, and we talked to all kinds of people about that these last few weeks. And one of the producers on our staff had a very strong opinion about all this, Alex Blumberg. Before he got into radio, he taught in a middle school in Chicago for four years. He was a science teacher. And he concluded from that experience--

Ira Glass

If that seems just insane, Alex told me that Maria Montessori, who's the creator of the Montessori schools who looked at what kids could learn at each developmental stage, at one point in her career actually tossed out a similar suggestion. Perhaps, she said, young adolescents would be better off at a farm school, what she called an Erdkinder, where they would work with the land.

Ira Glass

I ran Alex's thoughts by Marian Strok, the principle of Evergreen Academy Middle School in Chicago, which was listed as one of the best middle schools in the country, a school to watch, by the National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform.

Ira Glass

And so what's actually happening developmentally in the bodies and brains of kids when they're in middle school?

Ira Glass

This is Linda Perlstein. When she wrote a book called Not Much, Just Chillin': The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers, following five middle school students very closely for a full year, she also incidentally researched everything she could find out about what is going on developmentally with kids that age that makes them so different from other ages. And it's fascinating.

Ira Glass

In other words, during those years, your brain turns you into you, the adult you. The stuff you don't exercise just kind of goes away. And what stays?

Ira Glass

Linda Perlstein agrees that all the stereotypes about middle schoolers, everything, in fact, that Annie complained about, all of that is true. But she says that there's a flip side that people don't usually talk about. Middle school is when kids open up to the world. It's when they think about bigger things. And they haven't formed their opinions on things yet. Everything is up for grabs, which is amazing to be around.

Ira Glass

Older kids, she says, high school kids, by then they can be jaded or cynical. They're settling into who they are. In middle school, everything's new. You're probably picking your friends for the very first time.

For the first time, they aren't just the kids on your block or your parents' friends' kids, or the kids who are around. And so you make a best friend one day, who then you drop two weeks later. You get obsessed with guitar or computers or dance for two weeks, and then two weeks later, you drop it. For everything that's awful about middle school, she says, that's the great thing about it. You experiment.

Ira Glass

Act Two, Stutter Steps. One good place to see the experiment that is life in middle school in action is a middle school dance. Last Friday, there were middle school dances all over the country, all at the same time, and we sent reporters to a half dozen of them to find out how kids were doing. They talked to them before the kids went inside to the field of battle. And, no surprise, we found a lot of stress, a lot of uncertainty.

Ira Glass

These four girls are sixth graders, and they're in a car on the way to a neon-themed dance at Edgewood Middle School in Highland Park, Illinois, with their mom and reporter Rob Wildeboer.

Ira Glass

Roughly 800 miles east in New Jersey, sixth grader Ethan Derose was hoping there would be at least one slow dance, though did he feel ready for a slow dance?

Ira Glass

He's standing in front of the school with one of our producers, Brian Reed, as kids stream into the school. Ethan is wearing a button-up shirt with green and black stripes that he is not happy with.

Ira Glass

Of course, Ethan and the girls in that car in Illinois are sixth graders. In New York City, seventh graders Evelyn Benson and Alice Westerman are excited and feeling very grown up on their way to their school's Halloween dance.

Ira Glass

Some of the middle school boys got up the nerve to ask girls to be their dates to the dances. But because this is a new experience for the girls too, being asked out on a date, they don't exactly know how to handle it. Here's a girl named Autumn talking with our producer, Lisa Pollak, in Delaware, the afternoon of the dance.

Ira Glass

Of course, some of the boys are no better. During the dance in Windham, Maine, our reporter Claire Holman pulled six grader, Christopher Potter, out of the action for a chat.

Ira Glass

In Richmond, outside Moody Middle School's dance, reporter Eric Mennel spoke with Elliot German and his step-brother Jonathan Lawton. They're both eighth graders who ran through the official rules for the dance.

Ira Glass

There are rules like this at all the dances, and some more comprehensible than others. As for whether or not the kids obey the rules and what actually happens inside the dance on the actual dance floor, one of our producers, Lisa Pollak, went inside to the dance floor at the Fall Costume dance in Lewes, Delaware. And I'm going to hand it off to her.

Lisa Pollak

So the scene in the gym was pretty much the way you remember it. Older kids dancing in the middle, younger kids at the periphery, a few aimlessly wandering around, looking like they're not sure what to do. Lots of kids were dancing, jumping up and down. Occasionally, you'd see a fist pump. They danced in these tightly packed clusters, very little room between them. And outside of the clusters were chaperons, ready to step in if they saw any grinding or suggestive dancing.

Hovering outside one of the clusters was a teacher named John Gauze, and he looked perplexed.

Lisa Pollak

He actually did swoop. He plunged into the pack of kids, pulled the boy aside and talked to him. Then he told me why.

Lisa Pollak

And then comes the moment of truth, the moment that forces every kid in the room to make a decision, the moment that separates the timid from the brave, the slow song. I watch it with teacher Brian Comra.

Lisa Pollak

Some of the couples didn't have much privacy. Their friends were standing a foot away, hanging out and talking to them. And every so often, a random kid would just cut across the dance floor.

Lisa Pollak

There are a few of these slow dances, but most of the songs are fast. And then suddenly, the song, "Hit the Road Jack" starts playing, and the lights snap on.

Lisa Pollak

And he was right. The experiment in mini-adulthood that is the middle school dance was over. The same kids who, minutes earlier, were holding each other and swaying awkwardly on the dance floor, got into cars and said hi to their parents.

Ira Glass

Lisa Pollak. Coming up, surviving middle school by pretending that you are from a completely different family. That is in a minute, from Chicago Public Radio and Public Radio International, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our show of course we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme.

Today's show, Middle School. A 14-year-old from California who just got out of middle school asked for a show on the horror that is middle school.

Ira Glass

We thought, you know, that's a pretty good idea. That is a place with a lot of stories. We've arrived at Act Three of our show. Act Three, Mimis in the Middle. The place that Domingo Martinez went to middle school, they still called it junior high. And he says that his sisters did something to cope with any feelings of inferiority they might have otherwise felt in their new school with all those new kids.

Domingo Martinez

When they started junior high, my sisters, Mary and Margie, invented the Mimis. They were entering the sinister world of teenage girls, which in the mid 1980s in Brownsville, Texas, was tinged with border town racism. Instead of being ashamed of who they were, my sisters decided to create a polite fiction and invited everyone to participate.

First they died their brown-black hair blond until it turned the color and brittleness of hay. Then, they began dressing in Sergio Valente and Gloria Vanderbilt. And finally, to cap it off, they decided to call each other simply Mimi. A typical conversation between them went like this. "Mimi, do you like my new Jordache jeans?" "Yes Mimi, I do." "Do I look rich in my new Nike's Mimi?" "Mimi, you look like a tennis player, Mimi." "I know Mimi. Maybe I should make Mom buy me a racket."

It was really that simple. The Mimis made a conscious decision that they would be rich and white, even if their family wasn't. In other words, Marge and Mary had a small break from reality that we all participated in to help them through junior high. We all helped in creating the Mimis.

At the time, the rest of the family had not fully realized that our job, as relatively new Americans and, worse yet Texans, was to be as white as possible. And we honestly didn't see their delusion as anything other than another bewildering tactic in our sisters' quest for a higher level of superior fashion. Just teenage girls doing what teenage girls do.

There had been a time when our family had been rich by barrio standards because our grandpa, dad's stepfather, fought in the Korean War and used his GI money to start a trucking business when he got back. He married grandma, who was widowed from her first marriage at age 16, and gave both her and my dad citizenship.

My siblings and I, we were all born in Brownsville as Americans, but really didn't understand what that meant. Then grandpa died in 1980, and our world began to crumble. The trucking business began to disintegrate around dad, and he was started on his slow road towards desperation and religion. Meanwhile, the Mimis had made their decision to be two, blue-blooded, trust-funded, tennis buddies from Connecticut accidentally living in Brownsville, Texas, with us, a poor Mexican family they had somehow befriended while undergoing some Dickensian series of misfortunes.

No one acted like it was peculiar, especially those in the family who didn't speak English or could not understand the Mimis when they showed up at family gatherings. [SPEAKING SPANISH], one of the Mimis would say to an uncle or cousin, who more often than not would linger lasciviously around them, at first conflicted by the idea of being turned on by so young a relative. And then mentally calculating just how distantly related they were and tabulating his odds of scoring with this new white chick who just happened to show up at this barrio party.

"Mimi, how did you like my Spanish?"

"Oh Mimi, it's getting really good."

"Mimi, do you think they understood me?"

"Oh Mimi, who cares?"

Soon, the Mimis were buzzing at a fever pitch, intoxicating everyone who came near and cut a whiff of the Mimis' Anais Anais perfume. We had all seen the commercials on network television while watching Dallas or Knots Landing. And it was a forbidden fragrance for rain depressed English women with secret, muscular boyfriends who drove Jaguars dangerously through unpaved, one-laned Scottish roads. So the Mimis had to have it, and they found it at the local JC Penney and had Mom pay for it.

Me and my brother Dan, and our older sister Sylvia, we just kind of stank from the heat and dealt with it. Even Mom developed her own fascination with the Mimis, like she couldn't believe her luck now that she was related to royalty. So she was always ready for an air-conditioned trip to the mall. She took the little clothes budget reserved for us boys, my brother and me, and added it into the Mimis' wardrobe because to her, it was a sign of status for the family that the Mimis looked their best. None of the rest of us would question it, even though it felt wrong.

I was often left with the Mimis' recently stylish hand-me-downs. No one else in my grade school was remotely label conscious or capable of reading in English really, so it passed unnoticed that most of my clothes were made for glamorous, junior high school girls. Almost every child at my school came from recently immigrated families, kids so poor they'd save half their free lunch to share with their younger siblings at home, their heads shaved to rid them of lice.

My best friend, Arthur, he noticed though. He was part black and part Mexican, had just moved to Brownsville from some big city slum in Michigan where his mother's boyfriend had been employed at a GM factory, and he read labels. "Hey Dom," he said, "yo man. You're wearing a girl's shirt. Or is Esprit making baggy boy's shirts now too?" So to change the subject, I slugged him high in the chest and ran away. He chased me down to punch me back, and left me crying in my girl's blouse.

If she had any guilt about giving the Mimis the lion's share of the clothing budget, I imagine the justification my mother probably used was that my older brother and I would just ruin our clothes working with Dad under the greasy trucks. It made better sense for the Mimis to be in high fashion than for the feral boys to wreck new clothes.

"Mimi, you look just like Jennifer Beals in Flashdance. You should join the dance team at school." "I know Mimi. I think so too." "Mimi, I think you should dye your hair back to its original color, ash." "I know Mimi. I'm trying."

During this time, my brother Dan's eyesight was so bad he couldn't read the blackboard in school and constantly ran into corners or short skinny people. People thought he was Asian he squinted so much. Every photo of him taken in junior high, he looks like he's trying to see into the photographer's eyes through the camera lens. This of course goes entirely unnoticed, and it is the younger Mimi, Mary with the 20-20 vision, who gets vanity glasses with her name etched in gold script in the corner. Dan wouldn't get classes until he was in the military when he was 17.

Eventually, Dad's failure at navigating the business and providing for his family intruded on the Mimis' fantasy. Dad made a decision that as soon as school ended, Mom would take the Mimis and Sil, and drive them to California to participate in the seasonal grape harvest with Dad's cousins, people vaguely related to grandma through marriage, I think. They would be treated like adults there, paid the same as everyone else.

Mom, I remember, was horrified at the implications, at the shame of having to send her virginal and royal daughters out to the fields. Plus, Dad's extended family out in California were very different from us, wild and frightening and Californian. Texas Mexicans and California Mexicans are very different from each other, like the Scottish and the Irish. The Mimis, though, were undaunted, did not understand the complications. "Mimi, we're going to California?" "Oh my god Mimi. We're going to be Valley girls." "Mimi, gag me with a spoon Mimi." "Mimi, your roots are showing." We packed up Mom, the Mimis, and Silvia in the beige, 1980 Pontiac Bonneville, already an antique on its second engine and failing transmission. And they drove out of Brownsville.

A year later, I took this ride as well, and also ended up picking grapes for the summer. That we were migrant workers for that period didn't occur to me, nor to anyone else. That label would never stick, could never stick. We couldn't descend to that level. We just had to do it to help out Dad. That was all. But it was too much for the Mimis, the reality of this first trip.

Sadly, I think it was childhood's end for the Mimis. The vineyards had somehow inverted their secret garden, and the low door in the wall had closed shut behind them. When they first reached California, the Mimis did indeed become Valley girls, the hippest, cutest, best dressed migrant workers of that year, and very likely for many years to come.

The older Mimi, Marge, continued to dress like Jennifer Beals in Flashdance out in the fields, where the sun sizzled any inch of exposed skin. She wore a spaghetti-strapped, red and white striped Esprit top, white cotton shorts, and a matching headband with her red and white, leather Nike tennis shoes and took pictures of the vineyards and the workers with her Canon AE-1.

Eventually though, even she started dressing like the rest of the migrant workers, wearing long-sleeved collared shirts buttoned all the way to the neck, thick un-stylish denim and work boots, with a bandanna covering her nose and mouth, or else she would have died of heat stroke. There were no photos taken of that.

Mary, the younger Mimi, did not fare any better. Her vanity glasses with the fake lenses were scratched well beyond recovery. Her roots grew out, and her hair turned a lighter brown as a result of the heat and the pesticides of the grape fields of southern California. The hard work went on all summer, and eventually it became bitter enough to breach even the walls of the Mimis' perfectly constructed fantasy.

And so sadly, eventually even they were humiliated, and the illusion of wealth that had kept the family's idea of itself buoyant was deflated. When they returned to Brownsville, as happy as we were to see them, no one ever mentioned the Mimis again. They were gone, and it was Marge and Mary that returned in their place. Mary rubbing her nose with the palm of her hand from allergies, and snapping at anyone who tried to talk to her. And Marge, who never went back to California, and took a job at the bank the following summer instead.

I was sorry to see the Mimis go. We all were. When they were at their peak, the Mimis had been capable of creating a real sort of magic around them, enchanting both people and places so that you could be looking at the same dreary landscape as them, the same terrible and hopeless event. And while you might be miserable and bitter, they would be beaming, enthralled, and enthusiastically hopeful. And then, if you got near them, or were blessed enough to maybe talk to them, you would walk away feeling the same way as they felt too.

They were a gift to everyone who was lucky enough to get caught in their Anais Anais, the Mimis. They made all of us Americans.

Ira Glass

Domingo Martinez, reading an excerpt from his memoir, The Boy Kings of Texas, which is going to be published by Lyons Press next July.

Ira Glass

Act Four, Anchor Babies. So this week as we were putting together the radio show and sending reporters out into middle schools, we discovered that in schools all over the country, there already were reporters on the ground, deep inside, covering the issues that middle school kids really care about.

Ira Glass

These are student newscasters from Hart Middle School in Pleasanton, California. I myself got my start on the mic on the morning announcements. And this is what middle school morning announcements in some schools are like today. Students make these full blown video productions. Some of them have music themes. [MUSIC PLAYING] The kids stand in front of banners with their school logo, or sometimes it's a green screen backdrop so they make it look like they're on a local TV news set.

Our producer Jonathan Menjivar has been watching these newscasts all week with fascination. And he has noticed a few trends.

Jonathan Menjivar

Just like the local news, middle school newscasts tend to follow a formula. They almost all start with the pledge of allegiance.

Jonathan Menjivar

This next segment from DMS News at Dibble Middle School in Dibble, Oklahoma, is a staple of almost every broadcast I watched.

Jonathan Menjivar

This has to qualify as breaking news because it's school. There's not a lot of exciting stuff for them to report. They have to tell their fellow students what the cafeteria is serving that day, when make-up pictures are being taken, and do the weather. My favorite comes from this girl, McKenna, near Buffalo, who's clearly had enough.

Jonathan Menjivar

These newscasts are middle school in relief, like what you'd see if there was a middle school exhibit at the Natural History Museum. There are tiny kids with big ears, shy red-faced kids, jocks, computer club kids-- completely normal, super sweet, over-achieving ones. And spazzy kids, who are far too proud of their terrible jokes. They were fun to watch. I'd forgotten that middle school kids can have this over-confident goofiness.

I spent days watching kids deliver these newscasts. And I was curious what they'd be like if they actually reported on the stories that mattered the most to them, stuff they'd never say on the morning announcements, the big headlines in their school that week.

Jonathan Menjivar

So I found a school that was willing to play along. Parkville Middle School is just north of Baltimore, and the students there do their morning announcements as a six-minute show called PTV. With the help of their teacher, Ms. Davis, the kids put out a really involved production. There are three TV cameras, a control room, and the anchors sit at one of those giant news desks. It has a PTV logo on it. Behind them, there's a backdrop of downtown Baltimore.

Jonathan Menjivar

With Ms. Davis's help, I enlisted the kids in this experiment to write up a newscast with news from their lives and the stories they each cared about. And they delivered. They said they had fun doing it.

Jonathan Menjivar

Zakia Bryant decided to go hyper local with her news. She wears glasses, and she had her hair pulled back with a headband.

Jonathan Menjivar

Zakia and I talked for a while. She told me that "deuces" was just another way of saying, "peace out."

Jonathan Menjivar

The very last kid I talked to was Jaya Wadi. She sandwiched her most surprising news in between a couple other stories.

Jonathan Menjivar

Did you catch that about her better depressed friend? I asked Jaya if it was hard to write about her.

Jonathan Menjivar

Ms. Davis, the journalism teacher at Parkville Middle, is always stressing that her students be factual and truthful in their stories. The news isn't rumors and opinions. But in middle school, sometimes it's hard to remember that. It's hard to step back and look at a story from different perspectives.

Ira Glass

Jonathan Menjivar is one of the producers of our show.

Ira Glass

Act Five, Blue Kid On the Block. In September, a kid who we're going to call Leo-- not his real name-- started seventh grade at a new school. And he's having a more extreme experience. He's having a harder time finding his place in middle school than other middle school kids, because he's new to town. His family just arrived from Rochester, New York. He's got that on top of everything else.

Leo still loves Rochester. He loved his school there. He loved his friends. Suddenly, everything about his life is different, and, according to Leo, much worse.

The signature on his Gmail account now reads, "Rochester is much better" in big, red letters. Sarah Koenig knows Leo and his parents, and visited them at home to see how Leo was doing.

Sarah Koenig

This is how much Leo does not want to be here. When I got to his house, he was on the sofa with a laptop investigating Greyhound bus schedules. His mother was going to drive him and his sister back to Rochester for the Columbus Day weekend, but not until Saturday morning. And Leo wanted to get there Friday for more time with his friends. A multi-stage negotiation followed with his dad, and for one thing, a bus ticket cost money.

Sarah Koenig

Never mind that the bus takes twice as long as driving, and never mind that Leo would be alone and have to change buses, and that his parents had no intention of letting him go through with this plan. But it's the kind of negotiation you indulge when your kid is miserable. And Leo is miserable. He told me right away he was, and that he had been from the moment he got here in August.

Sarah Koenig

Back in Rochester, Leo had known all his best friends since kindergarten, or before. They played together at school, after school, on weekends. Everybody knew everybody. Everything was comfortable. And as a sixth grader in his old school, he and his friends were at the top of the heap. They wore green sashes in the morning, and got to be door monitors for the younger kids coming into the building.

So imagine now, Leo takes a school bus for the first time to his new school, a sprawling, one story building full of sixth, seventh, and eighth graders. Leo is small for his age, only a hair taller than his sister, who's only nine years old. On day one, he knows exactly no one.

Sarah Koenig

Leo is between. He's old enough to decipher Greyhound bus schedules, but not old enough to actually travel on one by himself. And old enough to know that if he's going to survive in middle school, he has to make friends, but that making those friends stands to be significantly more complicated than it was back in Rochester. Leo's sister, Auden, is in fourth grade. He says she's not having as hard a time of it.

Sarah Koenig

The day I interviewed him, Leo had had a couple of breakthroughs. He emailed his parents during the school day to tell them the first piece of good news they'd had from him. Until that day, the emails had mostly been three desperate words, "I feel awful," without even a period at the end to make the feeling finite. It was an endless awful. But on this Thursday, he wrote to tell them the mashed potatoes they serve in the cafeteria were great, followed by four exclamation points.

Second, and this was the big news, he asked another kid if he wanted to come over. Leo told me he thought about it first for a few days, and finally emailed the boy, whose name is Devin, another seventh grader. But now, Leo didn't want to call Devin's house to finalize a plan. He dreaded the awkwardness of the phone. So his dad called Devin's parents, introduced himself as Leo's father.

Sarah Koenig

I thought Leo might be upset about it, maybe get sulky. But here he was cracking up, joking with his dad. It was such a relief to hear him laugh after he'd been so solemn in our interview. And I thought this is all going to be OK. He's going to snap out of it. He's almost there. An afternoon with Devin is going to do the trick. Then Sunday came.

Sarah Koenig

Leo taught Devin how to play Dungeons and Dragons.

Sarah Koenig

On the drive home, Leo and Devin talk nonstop, a gentle rat-a-tat, one-up-manship emanating from deep inside a computer game.

Sarah Koenig

By the time they dropped Devin off, they were giggling.

Sarah Koenig

So a perfect day, right? Leo's parents were relieved, hopeful, but no.

Sarah Koenig

And this is when I realized I had underestimated the depth of Leo's gloom, that he greets every morning of every school day with dread. And not because he's being bullied or anyone's being mean to him.

Sarah Koenig

Here's the curse of being almost 13, old enough to understand his life will supposedly get better with time, but not old enough to really believe he's going to feel any differently than he does right this minute. Since making friends with Devin, Leo is one step toward being the kid he wants to be, someone with pals, someone who's comfortable again. But he says right now, he's just worried he's going to be throwing up all year.

Ira Glass

Sarah Koenig is one of the producers of our show.

Ira Glass

Act Six, Grande With Sugar. So I've been talking to educators, and one who had taught for years in high school and then moved to middle school told me that the key difference between teaching in the two environments was that in middle school, you have to be sympathetic to, and patient with, all of the emotional drama. You have to deal with that directly if you want the classroom to work. Which brings me to this next story of a student who was doing badly in a middle school in Newark, New Jersey.

Ira Glass

This is Shannon Grande, who teaches at Rise Academy Middle School, which is a public school, 91% black and Latino, and eligible for free lunches, one of the KIPP charter schools. Hence the uniforms.

I heard about this story from Elizabeth Green, who had been reporting on this school for a journalism outfit called Gotham Schools. Anyway, this teacher, Sharon Grande, says that this seventh grader would come in angry all the time.

Ira Glass

So this kid was in an unfortunate spiral. He felt isolated from the other kids just inherently, because his home situation was so bad. And then would get angry with the other kids, which then made them mad and made him more isolated. Then he got worse and worse, threw some stuff across a room, and it hit a teacher.

Ira Glass

And he couldn't explain why. Well a big problem for him, one reason that he was ostracized, he didn't wash. Kids would whisper about it, and when he would get mad and then arguments would escalate, that is where it would go. "You're dirty." "You smell." The kids would say it right to his face. Over time, the staff found all kinds of ways to address this. They found him clean clothes and a place to clean up before school.

But the bigger problem-- and that's the problem of his isolation and his anger-- Ms. Grande says it was not clear how to deal with that. They would try things, but nothing was working. And then finally one day in history class during group work, he was trash talking. And one of the best girls in the class, one of Ms. Grande's best students, ended up in an argument with him saying terrible things. And Ms. Grande felt like, really? You too?

Ira Glass

So Ms. Grande took this girl and the three other girls who had been doing group work with this boy, and she took those girls into the teacher's room. And all four of these girls were academically strong, and all of them had shown good leadership qualities in the school in the past. And she talked to them.

Ira Glass

And it really was just a couple minutes before the kids told Ms. Grande, "We can take it from here." And she left them to talk. Afterwards, the boy told Ms. Grande that it felt good. It felt good that these girls knew that he was trying to deal with his anger. And since this conversation, over time, the entire class has entered this discussion with this kid. And when this kid has an outburst, they will all talk openly about his anger.

Ira Glass

This is what the research shows, that in middle school, you listen to peers more than you listen to anybody else. And that is working with this kid. The other day, this kid got a detention for missing part of his uniform. And he started on a rant in class about how they're all against him, and all the time they're on his back, and everybody's against him. And it was the end of the world. And Ms. Grande finally asked him, "Who's they? Who's everybody?" And he started smiling. And she asked him what is he really upset about? And unlike in the past, he could untangle it. He could tell her.

Ira Glass

Well, our program was produced today by Lisa Pollak, with Ben Calhoun, Sarah Koenig, Jonathan Menjivar, Brian Reed, Robyn Semien, Alissa Shipp, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer is Julie Snyder. Production help from Mickey Meek. Seth Lind is our production manager. Emily Condon is our officer manager. Music help from Damien Grave. Our website, thisamericanlife.org.

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

This American Life is distributed by Public Radio International. WBEZ management oversight for our show by our boss, Mr. Torey Malatia, who gets so confused at the beginning of every HR meeting.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

Announcer

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