Middle School...Trends and Thoughts

To my surprise I looked out into my class the other day and realized that I was back in Middle School. I know that I teach Middle School kids, that is not what I mean. Instead, the trends that were popular in the early 90’s when I was in middle school are trends here, or maybe they are just eternally popular to middle school students regardless of the time period. In the last week I have had to reprimand kids for throwing koosh balls around class, writing on their clothes in permanent marker, writing on their shoes, stickers and painting their fingernails. So I know that two examples are not that strong of a point to make, but there are just the few things that I have seen in the last two weeks. In addition kids are wearing side pony tails again, a new fascination with office supplies, decorating everything with their favorite things (band, shape, movie star, sports star) and other things that are distinctly middle school behavior, if not exactly just from the early 90’s. Ok, so pretty much just the koosh balls and side pony tails come from the early 90’s. Things like video games have advanced, cell phones were never a problem in my middle school classes when I was in school and I am sure that there are a few other things in the classroom that had not even been invented yet.

There is one fascination among my students that I just do not get....they love tape. Tape you ask? Yes, scotch tape, packing tape, duct tape....they just cannot get enough of the stuff. I know that there was a fascination with duct tape a few years back in the U.S. but to be honest it is not that popular over here. The thing that really grabs the students attention is good old packing tape. They use it to “tape themselves in” to their desks, cover their desks with it, tape each other’s clothes, play with the stickyness during class and generally waste a ton of otherwise perfectly good tape on useless things. I have tried to understand the attraction and I am pretty much at a loss. I think that it probably is a result of spending too much time in class, looking for absolutely anything for entertainment. When you have reached that point where anything will do...why not tape?

I have begun to think about the trends in Chinese education more and more. I am at one of the “best” schools in China, with an equivalent reputation to the famous prep schools in New England. That said, my students are by and large uninterested in school, not prepared for the work that is expected of them and incredibly rich. This trend, that the rich are less interested in school is in some ways the opposite of what we find in the U.S. I think that typically, the lowest levels of the socio-economic spectrum in America are the ones that do not find the (at least stereotypically) value in education, that they think they are unable to tap into the resources of the education system, that they will not be able to get ahead through education, instead they turn to athletics, gangs and crime to “get ahead”. While again taking in stereotypes and trends, I have found the exact opposite to be true here. So many of my students are wealthy, leading them to complacency since they have the knowledge that they will end up with a good paying position in their parents company. They feel that they do not need to put in the work to get ahead. They will have everything handed to them on a silver platter. The poor here, however, are much like the generations of the post war era in the U.S. They really feel like they need to pay attention during school, that education is the way that they can get ahead, that they can become wealthy within the next generation. I think that optimism is something that has really captivated the country, that for the rising middle class, there is nothing that they cannot accomplish within “new China”. I think that in many ways, this optimism has been abandoned within the U.S., in fact, I do not think that Barack Obama was that far off when he claimed that the lower classes in American are bitter and angry. There is no longer the feeling that through ahrd work and education, people are able to make a better lives for themselves.

I am not saying that everyone in China feels that they can get ahead, there are many, many people that are still living in complete poverty, but there are many that do feel that through education they can get to the next stage in life...by and large though, these students are not found at my school. In their mind, these students already have it made, they are already bound for success.