Navigating Middle School Takes Just the Right Combination of Skills

Michael Alison Chandler:

"Strike two," said Brian Hill as his stepdaughter Briana DeLeon, 11, rotated the dial on her red locker, searching for the number 39 through slightly crooked, wire-framed glasses. "Left, right, left," he coached, as she spun it around. After the third misdial, her mother gave it a go. Then Hill rolled up his sleeves. "Let me try."

After a few more strikes, a teacher parted the crowd of sixth-graders and parents at Seneca Ridge Middle School's orientation last week in Sterling and helped Briana and her family cross the first of many potential middle school hurdles to come: opening her locker.

For the first days of school, the anxieties of moving from the familiarity of the one-teacher classroom in elementary school to a bigger, more anonymous middle school can be boiled down to a three-digit combination.

Worries include "I could be late to class," "I could grab the wrong book" and a myth that Jack Berckemeyer, assistant executive director of the National Middle School Association, said is "passed down from generation to generation: 'I could get locked in there.' "

Posted by Jim Zellmer at September 4, 2007 12:00 AM
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