The Difference Between a Nightmare and an Adventure
Or how middle school could be better
I know a hard truth about middle school, but it’s not what you think.
It’s not that middle school is destined to be excruciating or traumatic. And it’s not that middle schoolers themselves are inherently difficult (nor are they served by the term “hormonal” any more than telling an adult friend that would be helpful).
It’s something else entirely.
Let me tell it through a story. Possibly your story.
If you’re willing, take yourself back to your own middle school years. Let’s say you’re 13 years old. You woke up this morning and your body is not…quite…what it was yesterday. What is happening to you? Meanwhile your emotions seem to have grown wings, one moment soaring higher than ever, the next smashing you into the ground. And your social world has gone from black-and-white to ultra-vibrant color, as you perceive vastly more of the social dynamics around you. Awash with all this new information, your brain decides that your peers are the most interesting humans on the planet.
You are in the ultimate brain and body remodeling process called puberty, the fastest your brain will change for the rest of your life.
And you are not in control. In fact, no one is. Not even your parents or teachers. Puberty seizes you when it wants, changes everything, and negotiates with no one.
And here’s where it can get hard in ways that are common but not necessary.
Imagine you don’t have anyone, or any place, where you can talk about these things. When you feel intensely stressed about that test, you assume it’s hitting you harder than anyone else. When you are completely confused by social dynamics, there’s no one to validate and normalize those feelings, since you didn’t want to tell your parents, and you’re afraid that spilling too much to friends will lead to teasing or a rumor.
What about that slow-brewing conflict with your formerly best friend, getting worse by the day? You might assume it’s something uniquely wrong with you that leads to such broken relationships.
What do we call a situation when things are out of control, accelerating, and you’re alone? There’s a word for that: a nightmare.
And there you have the reputation middle school.
How Nightmares Become Adventures
I’ve been taking a lot of time getting to my point here — I’m hoping to explain why I think that nightmare quality of middle school seems so common and obvious. And then I want to show that it was never necessary.
What’s the difference between a nightmare and an adventure? In a nightmare, things are out of control, accelerating, and you’re alone. In an adventure, some of those same qualities might be there, but you are accompanied. Because trusted friends are with you, even on hard days, you can make meaning out of your experience. Their good company softens the harsh parts of life and raises the highs. And they greatly reduce the chance you turn against yourself, feeling alone, broken, or lost.
Middle school should be an adventure. In fact it’s one of the ultimate adventures of life — a transformative leap out of childhood. It will be hard and confusing, but it would be ridiculous to characterize it entirely by that struggle, any more than you would call the zero to 5 years “a hard and confusing time.” And those are the years — the early childhood years — that neurologically most resemble the middle school years. In both eras, we can see that while rapid growth is tricky, that growth is also tremendously exciting, even borderline miraculous.
So, finally, here is the hard truth about middle school. It’s not that anything is wrong or inherently difficult with middle schoolers themselves. It’s this: Middle school is terrible because we designed it terribly.
We’ve left middle schoolers to deal with their most important and difficult problems — like learning how to make use of the massive leap in social insights, understand their bodies, renegotiate their identities, and more — largely or entirely alone.
It does not need to be this way. And I hope that makes this ultimately a very optimistic post, because most of the experience of middle school can be improved with better design.
There is so much to say about those improvements — a book-length amount, you might say! — but let me highlight just a few changes.
The experience of being accompanied — of belonging — is the foundation. That’s how you turn a nightmare into an adventure. An ideal middle school begins with a core advisory practice — a safe and brave space that helps middle schoolers make sense of life. Of course this can happen outside of advisory too. The key is a consistent group, where your belonging is assured, led by an adult who is facilitating rather than instructing.
We have to make the academics worthy of them — meaning middle schoolers deserve high levels of choice, connections with the real world which are obvious and exciting, and the chance to work socially when they want. This can happen through high-quality project-based learning, especially with a focus on student agency and co-design.
They deserve time and autonomy. Few of us would be happy if our days were entirely controlled, virtually from waking to sleeping, with scarce time to follow your interests (or time but not the means, like getting a ride to see a friend, or help finding a way to earn money). So it goes with middle schoolers. With the right ingredients around them, they’ll make choices that surprise you with their wisdom and maturity.
I know this is easy to write and harder to implement. But having helped to found and lead two innovative middle schools, I know it can be done. Middle school is not inherently horrendous — it’s inherently adventurous. And if anything defines the ideal experience of adolescence, I believe it’s an epic adventure with friends, one that gives you meaning and memories worth keeping.
In Other News…
My new book, Challenge Accepted: 50 Adventures to Make Middle School Awesome, is out in the world! It’s about exactly the spirit of shared adventure that I describe in this post, with real-world challenges that help middle schoolers feel like authors of their own story. Check it out if you haven’t yet, contact me for bulk purchases, and if you’ve already read it, I’d be thrilled if you would post a quick review on Amazon here. As a new book, reviews are one of the best signals that the book is legitimate and worth a look. Thank you!
Last week I started work on book #3, and ohh boy, this one is going to be different! There are a few writing projects on my mind, but I think what wants to come out next is turning out to be a YA novel. About a middle schooler, of course! I’m nervous — I’ve never written long-form fiction before — but it’s too fun and enlivening not to give it a try. I’m planning to post it one chapter at a time, likely on a different platform. Stay tuned!