Right now I am sitting in a classroom in my old middle school. The hallways are still dark and narrow. The sound of lockers slamming still echoes throughout the oddly-constructed building. An odor of sweat and warm vanilla sugar fills the air as I walk through the halls with nearly as much discomfort as I did eight years ago. Except today, the tables have turned. Today I am a teacher, not a student. Working as a substitute in my old middle school is both rewarding and terrifying as I have come to see eighth grade from a very different perspective all while getting a closer look at how I have grown in the past eight years.
Right now the class is starting to act up. Three boys just stood up and are trying to imitate some meme that I do not understand. A girl in the back puts her headphones in and has rested her head on the table, not one problem on her worksheet has been completed. A group of two girls comes up to me giggling asking me all about college. This is the middle school that I remember. A lot of people, a lot of groups of friends, and a ton of confused preteens that don’t know how to balance a need to feel powerful and a necessity of respecting their authority. In retrospect, it is a terrible place. When I look back at my middle school experience I do so with very little nostalgia. Rather I think about the decisions I made and the outfits I wore and cringe as my brain relays less-than-pleasant memories.
As I sit at the teacher’s desk with a bitter face I look up at the rowdy classroom and meet eyes with a girl sitting in the middle. She smiles and rolls her eyes a bit, signaling that she has seen her class behave like this before. She looks back down at her worksheet and continues to fill in the proper stem-changing verbs. She is familiar, she is myself in 8th grade. Her smile signals to me that I am familiar too, but of course I am merely putting metaphorical traits on an ordinary situation. But seeing her reminds me of what I was and what I have grown into. I wonder what her life is like. I wonder if she has the same worries that I had at thirteen. I wonder if she has soccer practice later that she dreads going to or if she has reading homework that she is secretly excited to get a start on.
I want to tell her to relax, that eighth grade is not nearly as stressful as she thinks it is. I want her to know that her passion for learning is important and will only grow as she matures. I want her to know that it is okay that she isn’t texting any boys like the girls who sit in front of her. I want to point out that the popular boys in eighth grade who she thinks are so cute are currently dancing to a meme. I want her to know that her not joining in at the grind line at Jess’s Bat Mitzvah doesn’t make her a prude but makes her sane (and I again cringe at the thought that grind lines were ever a thing). I want her to know that she isn’t cool by middle school standards and perhaps she never will be. I want her to know that being cool is overrated and she should be proud of what she is becoming.
But then again I can’t say any of those things to her. She isn’t me at all; she is a thirteen year old girl sitting in a classroom full of people who are equally as confused and flustered as she is -- myself included. She continues doing her classwork and I finally stand up to tell the freaking meme-dancers to calm down or else they will have to go to the office. I look at the classroom of students and realize that I am no longer their peer but I am their role model. I recall that sometimes middle school sucks, sometimes high school sucks, sometimes college sucks, sometimes life sucks. But it is okay. I remember that with enough positivity, enough drive, and enough passion many obstacles can be circumvented.
I sit back down in the teacher's desk and I breathe deeply. Today is different, the tables have turned. Today I am the teacher yet I still have so much to learn.
