Being 12: The Year Everything Changes: Recent Episodes
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It's no secret that being 12 years old can be tough. At 12, kids shed layers, test new roles and transform before our eyes as they explore what kind of adult they want to be. Their brains and bodies change at alarming rates. At the same time, school gets harder. In New York City, academic performance in seventh grade largely sets a student's path in high school. New Yorkers this age often start commuting to school alone. For girls, it may be the year they buy their first bra or get their period. For everyone, it's an age for plugging in to the digital world, and tuning out adults more and more. Some may also have jobs or look after younger siblings. Friendships shift. Romantic feelings may blossom. The stakes get higher in so many ways. WNYC’s series, Being 12, brings to life the array of faces, voices and perspectives of these young New Yorkers. See what they look like. Hear what they have to say. They are the city’s future. We think you should get to know them better.
After a year that saw high-profile police shootings plus the deadly attack on a black church in South Carolina, middle school teachers told WNYC their classrooms were abuzz with personal and sometimes difficult conversations. And they didn't always feel prepared to handle what came up. In a brief reprise of our Being 12 series, we explore the topic of talking about race and racism to children in the throes of early adolescence.
And in this video, we hear directly from the students. They answer the question "who am I?" With more multi-racial, multi-cultural children than ever before, their answers surely will surprise you.
After a year that saw high-profile police shootings plus the deadly attack on a black church in South Carolina, middle school teachers told WNYC their classrooms were abuzz with personal and sometimes difficult conversations. And they didn't always feel prepared to handle what came up. In a brief reprise of our Being 12 series, we explore the topic of talking about race and racism to children in the throes of early adolescence.
One morning in May, Stephanie Caruso had a question for her seventh graders at West Side Collaborative Middle School. She wanted to know if they’d ever been stopped by police when leaving the Upper West side campus for lunch.
An African-American girl named Joya Gaskin said she and her friend were once questioned by a white policeman.
"It was like kind of right after like the whole Ferguson thing, so I didn’t know if it was because of our race because it kind of came off like that," she told her classmates who were listening closely.
It turned out a bunch of them had similar experiences. Some wondered whether they were being stopped because of their race or because they’re kids and they weren’t in school.
Caruso had been thinking about these questions a lot since the deaths of Eric Garner on Staten Island and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, at the hands of white police officers. As a humanities teacher, she regularly wove current events into her lessons but this school year, punctuated by a number of disturbing police brutality cases, really challenged her and her students.
"It’s been exhausting," she said.
She and her colleagues at West Side Collaborative expected race to come up in ways both profound and silly during class. Their students experienced grown-up situations, like being stopped by police, but they also called each other names like "burrito boy." More than ever, though, these teachers wanted to explore language, prejudice and racism with their kids. The year's events demanded it.
As the school year came to a close, they said it had been difficult at times, not least because they were making it up as they went along.
"You don’t receive training to have that type of discussion, that real discussion with your kids about that reality," said West Side Collaborative teacher Victoria Thomas.
Although the school's teachers attended a session with the group Facing History and Ourselves, they had no lesson plans or ongoing support. Instead, they worked together to select reading and writing exercises relevant for 12- and 13-year-olds. This is an age when children become much more aware of how race and privilege influence all kinds of real world events. It's also when they're developing their own identities, as separate and independent young adults. Delving into these topics in a classroom setting requires teachers to have a certain comfort level.
"Before you can have the conversation with young people, you have to have the conversation with yourself," said Deidre Franklin, managing director of counseling, family engagement and training for YWCA in Brooklyn. She offers training sessions for teachers where she encourages them to develop a deeper understanding of race and the dynamics that go along with it. "So if you understand racism and you understand power, you understand privilege, you can start having conversations about Ferguson."
But it can be hard for public schools to find the time and money for training. That’s why many say the real experts on teaching about race and diversity are in the city’s private schools.
Naila Strong (center) during a discussion on what it means to be white with her seventh grade classmates at the Bank Street School (Richard Yeh/WNYC)
Anshu Wahi is the Director of Diversity and Community at the Bank Street School for Children in Manhattan where every faculty member attends a workshop on institutional racism and works with Wahi to integrate different perspectives into their lesson plans.
"When I explain my job to, like, kindergartners, I say there are so many things that make up who we are as individuals and my job is to make sure that every single person who comes to school feels like they can be their whole selves," she said.
During a seventh grade humanities class this spring, students debated what it meant to be white. It was part of a unit on immigration but their teacher wanted them to also look at the world today. The kids discussed a cartoon showing how white teenagers were encouraged to wear a hooded sweatshirt when it’s cold, but the same outfit made a black teen look suspicious.
The kids had so much to say that their teacher, Nayantara Mhatre, barely needed to facilitate. But she said it took a long time to get to this level.
"I think when it’s embedded in the curriculum anyway, and when they feel comfortable with each other and comfortable with their teachers and they feel safe and they feel respected and trusted and they respect and trust me, we’re able to do that," she explained.
She said knows some people might question whether teachers should spend so much time tackling race and diversity issues. But Mhatre said it's unavoidable.
"They know about all this stuff so I can’t ignore it," she said. "I don’t want to ignore it and if I do ignore it, they will bring it up anyway."
In response to the year's news, more schools have reached out for help, according to several race and diversity training groups. The principal of West Side Collaborative said she’s now planning to work with the group Border Crossers to help her teachers tackle the topics that are sure to come up next year.
As issues related to race and policing reverberated through New York City classrooms this school year, WNYC spoke to a few different groups of 12-year-old New Yorkers about how their views changed.
Amani Brown, who attended a recent conference on justice hosted by Global Kids, said she did not trust the police, and felt disappointed by the events this year. Brown wore a gray hooded sweatshirt which she said she always wore when walking around her Brooklyn neighborhood.
"My hood is my wall," she said. "I don't feel safe without my hood on. Anytime I'm outside, I always have my hood on no matter what."
Another group of tweens grappled with the issues in a different way. Students at the Cornerstone Academy for Social Action were inspired by the events in Staten Island and Ferguson to create a rap song and video, with help from arts partners called Hip Hop Saves Lives and Negusworld.
Twelve year-olds at Cornerstone Academy for Social Action: (L-R) Nashawnti McDowell, LaKai Williams, Joseph Beazer, Arcalia Samuels, Alanood Alkaifi and Sydney Brooks (Beth Fertig/WNYC)
Nashawnti McDowell said she was "shocked" by Ferguson.
"I feel like this whole thing started over with the blacks and like...one shot for no reason," she said.
Some of the boys weren't as surprised. They'd been told by adults to watch how they behave around police. LaKai Williams said his mother warned him not to have pants below his waist, or to "hang out in big crowds."
And Joseph Beazer said he wasn't surprised by Ferguson. "Like I knew that at some point it would happen again," he said, adding that all he wanted was "peace in the world and for everyone to have fun."
It's no secret that being 12 years old can be tough. That's why we've created a full show about it.
At 12, kids shed layers, test new roles and transform before our eyes as they explore what kind of adult they want to be. Their brains and bodies change at alarming rates. At the same time, school gets harder. And in New York City, it's the age when kids often commute to school on their own by bus and subway.
Download all the WNYC stories and first-person "postcards" on why 12 is important not only for kids, but the teachers who work with them, scientists who study them, parents who are puzzled by them, not to mention the brands and musicians looking to connect.
Twelve-year-old Déjà Palmer lives with her mother and twin brother on the Lower East Side. She’s a good student at Tompkins Square Middle School, and she’s very active in an after-school program for kids who are strong in math and another program for dance and theater. But like many kids her age, Déjà is spending a lot more time lately wondering about relationships.
“I definitely feel like couples have blossomed and it’s been a bigger thing,” she said, adding that many of her friends are dating now. Some are kissing but for the most part she said it’s nothing serious.
She has a boyfriend, but she said that doesn’t mean she’s in love.
“I wouldn’t say that we are like a teenage couple, honestly, we don’t act like one. I think we are pretty much age-appropriate," she said. "We don’t talk nasty to each other or dirty to each other in a sexual way, you know. We hug, we hold hands. We have little moments, but it’s not like we’re making out and sucking faces and we actually haven’t kissed.”
Despite some peer pressure to kiss, she agrees with her mom that 12 is too young to get that involved. She also wondered if it's too soon for some kids to know their sexual identity because several girls at school have declared they’re bisexual.
"I don’t really know if they’re serious about it or if they’re just using it, that excuse for attention," she said.
Déjà Palmer outside Tompkins Square Middle School (Beth Fertig/WNYC)
Déjà is meticulous about her appearance. She plans out her hair styles for every day of the week. She has a list of resolutions on the bright blue wall of her bedroom, one of which is “no boy drama.”
Looking ahead, Déjà said she sometimes worried about how life will change when she gets older.
"I love how my life is now just because it’s not like so much pressure," she explained, referring to responsibility and expectations. She also knows there will be more pressure on her in relationships with boys. "That scares me because when you get older people expect you to act differently and think differently. And I don’t really know how I’m going to change."
Not so long ago, ads for pads and tampons showed images of women in gauzy garments, doing yoga on the beach. Manufacturers left it to moms and big sisters to give young women "the talk."
Today, these brands speak to girls directly:
Always’ “#LikeAGirl” ad, featuring young women, ran in the last superbowl. “First Moon Party”, a humorous take on a girl’s wish to get her first period, got over 30 million views since it went up on YouTube last year.
“It’s not surprising that it could be turned into something funny because it’s already something that I’m comfortable with,” said Willa, a 12-year-old Brooklynite.
Direct talk and the rhetoric of female empowerment seem to be a good match for young women today. But when the product being advertised is clothing or makeup, it can raise questions.
Emily Long, director of communication at The LAMP, a media-awareness organization for kids, said companies use soft-focus feminism to obscure the fact that a brand must play on a woman’s insecurities in order to sell product.
She cited Dove skincare, which has a selfie campaign for teens, and Aerie, which announced last year it would stop re-touching photos of its models.
“It’s still a construction, “ Long said. “They’re still creating a shot, putting them in costumes and lighting and makeup. Just because they’re not going back over it later on with something like Photoshop doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been manipulated.”
Aerie says its ads are aimed at young women 15 and up. Pink by Victoria’s Secret, a rival clothing brand, says it focuses on “college-aged women”
But in fact both brands are popular with tweens, because they sell fashionable underwear that fits them.
A recent study by EPM Communications put tween spending power at $200 billion.
It turns out middle school teachers disliked middle school as much as the rest of us.
“It’s just an awkward and difficult time,” said Peter Schmitt, a middle school math teacher at Lower Manhattan Community School. “I would not want to do it again.”
But if these teachers hated middle school, why did they ever return? In interviews, we found there were three main factors that brought middle school teachers back to the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades.
1. It’s where the jobs are.
Because middle school is a notoriously difficult age for kids, a lot of teachers don’t stick around: more than half leave the profession after just three years. And that means teachers stand a better shot getting a job in a middle school than they do at the elementary or high school levels.
That’s especially true for posts at some of the city’s top-ranked middle schools, both district and charter alike. “It’s very hard to get into a very good high school — those are kind of locked, those people keep those jobs for decades,” said Nat Hawks, a teacher at Coney Island Prep in Brooklyn.
2. Teachers find they really like these kids — even if they didn’t expect to at first.
Margaux Cornelison, who thought she wanted to teach elementary school, was surprised. “I just found middle schoolers to be the people I love teaching the most,” she said.
Maryanne Purtill, who teaches middle school in Ditmas Park, said she loves loves working with middle schoolers because these three years are so critical: all the raw materials are there and now it’s time to the final product to start taking form.
“They’re either going to say, ‘Yes I love school,’ or ‘This? Maybe not so much,’” Purtill said. “And it’s a great age group because most of the kids, if you give them the opportunity, they just want to do it.”
3. They’ve got what it takes.
Middle schoolers are starting to figure out who they are and how they ought to behave. It can be a rough transition: middle schoolers make up one fifth of New York City’s students but account for one third of all school suspensions.
“They smack the kid next to them, they see you watching them smack the kid next to them, and when you call them on it, they’re like: ‘I didn’t hit him,’” recalled teacher Amanda Xavier. “Just, you know, total denial.”
So the best middle school teachers know how to reach them. More than teaching content, they’re teaching students to appreciate learning, and find their voices.
“I want them to leave saying, ‘You know what, this school thing, it’s worth investing my time in,’” Schmitt said.
Abraham Esber, Brooklyn
During the day, this Williamsburg native is a seventh grader at East Side Community School in Manhattan. But three days a week after school, and on Saturdays, he travels to Lincoln Center to study at the School of American Ballet.
Now that he's 12, Abe said his parents are letting him travel from school to Lincoln Center by himself on the subway. He said his friends think it's cool that he danced in "The Nutcracker" but he doesn't tell everyone at school because he's not sure what they'll think.
"If anybody would make fun of me I would tell them it's actually really manly and involves a lot of muscles and strength," he said.
On Social Life and Dating
Ethan DiPietro (Amy Pearl)
A group of 12-year-old New Yorkers shared thoughts on how things changed in middle school when it came to boy-girl relations. Several of them thought it was too early to date, and others were in the throes of crushes. One boy said the tensions between girls and boys can be confusing, even scary.
David Chen, Queens
David Chen at his school in Flushing (Beth Fertig/WNYC)
David is a sixth grader at the East-West School of International Studies, a public school in Flushing. He runs on the track team and shrieks with glee after doing a lap around the school gymnasium.
David called himself an "ABC," or American-born Chinese. He lives with his parents and an older brother who was born in China. This makes David the main translator for his family.
David's other responsibilities include cooking dinner, mopping the floor and doing laundry on weekends. He said he gets paid about $20 a week for his chores.
Shamia Mim, Bronx
Seventh grader Shamia Mim, at home in the Bronx (Beth Fertig/WNYC)
Shamia Mim arrived in the U.S. from Bangladesh a year and a half ago. She now goes to Emolior Academy in the Bronx.
When Shamia first got here, she worried that the other students wouldn't like her. But within a few days, she recalled, "I saw that they are so good, being good to me."
There's just one thing that gets on her nerves: her fellow students don't always use "scholarly language." But Shamia admits to her own shortcomings, namely staying up very late at night watching Bollywood movies.
Vicky Dorcelly, Brooklyn
Vicky Dorcelly (Emerald Dorcelly)
Like a lot of kids, Vicky admits to being a night owl. "Yesterday I said I was going to sleep at 1 o'clock and I ended up going to sleep at 2:30," she said. The culprit? Her phone.
Bed-Stuy Kids Sound off on Bullying
Jackia Brown interviewing Autumn Brown (no relation) in Bedford Stuyvesant about bullying (Veralyn Williams/Brooklyn Deep)
One of the scarier aspects of middle school is bullying. The investigative journalism site BrooklynDeep.org asked kids in Bedford Stuyvesant to interview each other about it.
Jackia Brown and Autumn Brown (not related) questioned Ashanti, Damani and Douglas with the help of Brooklyn Deep's managing editor Veralyn Williams. Special thanks to WNYC's Radio Rookies for their support.
In conjunction with WNYC’s Being 12 series, celebrated children’s book author Jon Scieszka will talk about getting adolescents– particularly young boys – to read, and the appeal of writing for this age group. Scieszka is the author of books for young readers like The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, Math Curse, and The True Story of the Three Little Pigs. He is also the founder of Guys Read – a web-based literacy program for boys whose mission is "to help boys become self-motivated, lifelong readers." In 2008 he was named the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature by the Librarian of Congress.
What books are you passing down to the adolescents in your life: your children, nieces and nephews, brothers and sisters? What books did you cherish when you were 12? Tell us in the comments below!
Jon Scieszka's latest book (courtesy of the publisher)
A common frustration among families applying to New York City middle school is that there are only a few good schools, and everyone wants in. The popular schools get overwhelmed with applicants, stress levels rise, and very few kids are accepted. In turn, the low admissions rate feed into the school's reputation and next year the same thing happens again.
J.H.S. 259 William McKinley in Brooklyn, for example, had an admissions rate of 6.3 percent for 1,904 applicants. M.S. 260 Clinton School for Writers and Artists in Manhattan accepted 10 percent of its 855 applicants last year.
Yet, experts like Schools Chancellor Carmen Farina, school consultants, and the Inside Schools website have said there are "hidden gems" families should consider when it's application time. WNYC looked at the data to find schools with high score and fewer applications. We counted school environment, student progress and performance in the scores, as defined in the city's school quality guides and snapshots. We left out the highly selective citywide middle schools and gifted programs.
Here are some of the "gems" we found:
Dual Language Middle School: a District 3-only school on Manhattan's Upper West Side that offers bilingual Spanish/English instruction. It had 221 applicants for 85 seats which translated into an admissions rate of 38.5 percent last year. It screens students based on language skills.
The School of Integrated Learning: This is an unscreened school in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, that gives priority to students living in its zone and then to District 17 residents. It's small, with an emphasis on technology, and shares a building with two other schools. Last year, 323 students applied to 110 seats, giving it a 34 percent admissions rate.
I.S. 75 Frank Paulo: there are not many Staten Island schools that fall into this category so it's especially worth noting that I.S. 75 accepted almost 24 percent of the 138 applicants who applied for just 33 seats.
M.S. 129 Academy for Independent Learning and Leadership: Based in the Tremont section of the Bronx, this unscreened school admitted almost 39 percent of the 514 applicants to fill 200 seats. Priority goes first to families living in the school zone and then to School District 12 residents.
East West School of International Studies: An unscreened school in Flushing, Queens, with an admissions rate of 23 percent. The school has a focus on Asian languages, and is open to all residents of School District 25. It received applications from 437 students for 101 seats.
There were many more gems in Brooklyn and Manhattan than the other three boroughs. So, here are a few more notable options:
M.S. 35 Stephen Decatur: Located in Brooklyn's Bedford Stuyvesant, Decatur accepted 70 students out of 266 applicants for an admissions rate of just over 26 percent. It considers students from District 17, accepting only those who meet the requirements of high academic performance.
M.S. 131 Sun Yat Sen: There are two math-focused programs at this school in Manhattan's Chinatown. One is open to zoned residents; the other is open to any District 2 student. They both are screened, meaning they accept kids based on their academics and teacher recommendations. The admissions rates are pretty decent for a District 2 school: almost 38 percent for the zoned program and 20.5 percent for the district-wide program.
Ronald Edmonds Learning Center II: This Brownsville, Brooklyn school accepted 91 percent of its applicants last year, 89 applied for 81 seats. It's a limited unscreened school which means it gives priority to students who show an interest by signing a visitor list at the middle school fair or during a school tour.
For another take on lesser known middle schools, make sure to read this post from Inside Schools.
If adolescence has a poster child, it's a teenager. In a car. Smoking, drinking, and driving badly while also, somehow, having sex in the back seat. But changes in the brain that lead to the famously bad choices of adolescence don't start at 16 or 17 years old. They start around 11 or 12, at the beginning of puberty.
This is the dirty little secret of adolescence: The cloudy judgment and risky behavior may not last a year or two. Try a decade.
To understand why, let's start with an experiment. At Temple University, psychology professor Laurence Steinberg and his team put a bunch of adolescents into an FMRI machine -- a brain scanner -- and asked them to play a driving game.
"Your perspective is that of a person behind the wheel," Steinberg said, describing the set-up. "And you come to a series of intersections, and the lights turn yellow. And you have to decide whether to put the brakes on or not."
Now, what do you think the adolescents did in this situation?
Wrong.
They did not blow through the yellow every time.
"When adolescents are playing this game by themselves, they don't take any more chances than adults do when they're playing it by themselves," Steinberg said.
And that's a big deal. Because the adolescent brain gets a bad rep for being consistently impulsive. Steinberg said he hopes his latest book, Age of Opportunity, will help set the record straight: Being 12 (or 17) doesn't mean a kid's hardwired to always make bad choices.
Why, then, do adolescents still make so many bad choices? To find out, Steinberg added a twist to his experiment.
He gave his subjects an adolescent crowd.
"This doubles the number of chances that adolescents take," Steinberg said, "but has no effect on the number of chances adults take."
In short, an adolescent's weakness is other adolescents. And we're not just talking about peer pressure. The mere presence of peers makes them less cautious.
One reason, said B.J. Casey, a neuroscientist at Weill Cornell Medical College, is that "the brain is being marinated in gonadal hormones" during adolescence. Another big reason: The prefrontal cortex is still a work-in-progress. And it serves a vital role in our decision-making.
"It helps to link past experiences to the current situation," Casey said, "and, at the same time, consider what the future consequences are of choices and actions that are made."
The prefrontal cortex is our voice of reason. Steinberg called it the brain's CEO. Casey likened it to Mister Spock from Star Trek, coldly calculating a life's worth of cost-benefit analyses. Casey's analogy didn't stop there. To her, Captain Kirk is the limbic system -- the emotional center of the brain that's always on the lookout for threats and rewards. When it spots either, it sends a message to the prefrontal cortex. Because the limbic system can't make sense of these things on its own. It needs the prefrontal cortex.
Kirk needs Spock.
Here's the problem. For kids in adolescence, the prefrontal cortex is still developing, and it can't keep up with the limbic system, which goes into reward-seeking hyperdrive.
"It's as if these emotional regions hijack the prefrontal systems," Casey said, "and it leads to a choice that they make that's a bad one. And they even know it's a bad one."
Which brings us full-circle to Steinberg's driving experiment. The limbic system doesn't just flag rewards in things like alcohol and sex. A 12-year-old gets a kind of high simply by being around other adolescents. They're wired to seek each other out and develop their social skills.
In the short-term, that means cloudy judgment and potentially risky behavior.
This story is part of New Tech City's series on education and technology.
In this episode of our podcast:
- We kick off a month of podcasts on kids and technology! Exciting!
- We talk with listener Dierdre Shetler, a middle school tech teacher in Phoenix, Arizona. Hear how she approaches technology with more than 800 kids in a lower-income, immigrant-heavy district.
...and... best for last... * We've launched a little classroom activity for schools around the country. We're pretty thrilled about it. If you're a teacher, join us! If you know any teachers, pass it along! Actually, if you know anyone with a flock of kids on hand, send it their way!
Resources we mention (and a few more we just like): * Here's the lesson plan and survey for teachers we mention in the podcast. * Researcher and author danah boyd writes about teenagers and technology. We've talked with her before. * The ISTE — formerly known as NETS — standards are a standardized curriculum for teaching tech skills. * Common Sense Media has media literacy materials for students of all ages. * A YouTube video on Internet safety for the younger (K-3) set. * The "To This Day" project on cyberbullying.
Join Our Conversation We're going to be talking about kids, education and technology for the next few weeks of the podcast. Do you have specific questions? Thoughts? Comment below, or send them our way with a voice memo at newtechcity[at]wnyc[dot]org. And don't forget to pass our classroom activity onto the teachers in your life! Post it on Facebook and tag a few parents, Little League coaches, or Girl Scout troop leaders, won't you?
Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, or on Stitcher, TuneIn, I Heart Radio, or anywhere else using our RSS feed.
A look at 12-year-old Ayelle's phone. You'll meet her over the next few weeks. (Ariana Tobin/New Tech City)
Seasoned middle school teachers and principals know what they're up against. Their students are bombarded by physical and psychological changes. The same child can show up dedicated and hard-working one day, silly and difficult the next.
But if you grab their attention, educators told WNYC, there's a chance to make a difference with long-term benefits.
“In the spectrum of adolescent development, 12 is really when you start to have the changeover,” said Derick Spaulding, the principal of Emolior Academy in the South Bronx. “They come in with a set of ideas, but a set of ideas that are amendable and moldable to a degree.”
The key is to cut through all the distractions. On a recent morning in a social studies class, 12-year-old Elijah Harper couldn't focus. Why?
“She’s just on my mind, the girl right here,” he said, sharing a photo on his phone.
Derek Spaulding, principal and founder of Emolior Academy. (Beth Fertig/WNYC)
"Seventh grade is a hot mess,” said Jason Borsella, Elijah’s social studies teacher. “You’ve got kids that are six-feet-tall and squeaking and then you’ve got boys and girls that are barely 4 ½ feet. You’ve got hormones galore with the girls and the boys. It’s like potpourri on 'Jeopardy' night. You never know what you’re going to get with a seventh grade.”
The key to teaching middle school, he said, is learning to “be like water.” Let things flow. Be flexible.
Researchers have found attendance, grades and behavior in middle school are key indicators when it comes to predicting who will drop out of high school. This is why educators say there’s a big opportunity in the middle grades. It’s a moment to reach kids before they harden their assumptions about who is and who isn’t a good student.
Emolior has earned a good reputation as a small middle school that’s on the right track, despite having a difficult population and low test scores. Its 250 students are mostly poor and include many pupils with special needs and immigrants who don’t speak English. But their attendance rate is over 92 percent, and suspensions are low. One reason: attention.
Staff members often stop to talk with students in the lunchroom and hallways. And, as part of the city’s Middle School Quality Initiative, the school offers extra support. For example, all sixth and seventh graders have four extra periods a week to work on their reading skills. Coaches from Generation Ready pinpoint where students are weak and coach them directly, using tablets loaded with texts catered to their individual reading levels.
Social studies teacher Jason Borsella with an attentive group of seventh graders (Beth Fertig/WNYC)
Seventh grader Sheiquel Kabba said the close attention of English teacher Peter Scaramuzzo helped her improve: “He tells us to keep on working, like he makes it encouraging. He don’t put us down.”
Various foundations, including Carnegie, have poured a lot of money into studying what’s wrong with middle schools. New York City has gone through two iterations of middle school reform in the past decade alone. The current thinking is middle schools need to hone in on the academic deficits many students bring with them from elementary school.
“We call them pushables,” Spaulding said. “Those are the kids that with very strategic intervention can get to that proficient level.”
With a little push and a lot of hand holding, he said, even the most distracted or struggling students can make it through middle school.
1. Twelves are the New Face of America. The U.S. Census Bureau estimated there will be 21 million kids between the ages of 10 and 14 in the U.S. this year. This group of tweens is on the leading edge of a big demographic shift. Minorities will comprise more than half of all children by 2023. In New York City, there are almost 92,000 12-year-olds, based on local census data from 2010.
2. They’re on the Move. In New York City, 12 is the age when kids tend to travel alone more often. The city's Department of Education says there are 225,000 students attending public schools in sixth, seventh and eighth grades; 20 percent of them attend schools outside their local districts. No wonder we see so many kids lugging huge backpacks on the buses and subways.
3. Bodies are Changing. Puberty strikes. Some traditional signs of puberty have shifted earlier for girls, such as breast development, but the average age of menstruation still hovers right around 12 years old. This is when hormone levels also spike for boys — the first facial hairs may sprout. And acne is an equal opportunity visitor, announcing that change has arrived.
4. Brains are Changing More. Scientists say the brain changes more during early adolescence than at any time, except the early years of zero to three. The prefrontal cortex of the brain, which controls rational thought, is still developing. As a result, tweens have a hard time controlling their impulses and can be very emotional. But there is an upside to the chaos. “They are adaptable at this age,” said Derick Spaulding, principal of a middle school in the Bronx. “They come in with a set of ideas, but a set of ideas that are amendable and moldable, to a degree.”
5. Sex. Lots of Talk, Little Action. Sex at 12 does not involve much, but it's definitely a hot topic. "It’s that period when, even if someone has told them they are a sexual being, it sinks in what that means. People are viewing them differently and responding to them differently and they are noticing it," said Logan Levkoff, a Ph.D. in sex ed. Fewer than 2 percent of adolescents have had sexual intercourse by the time they reach 12, according to federal data. Much more likely to happen at 12: a first kiss. Levkoff says it's a wonderful time for parents to talk to their kids — and to listen. Research shows that teens make better decisions about sex when parents are involved in their lives and they have access both to reliable information and birth control. "In this world, where they are exposed to so much through the media, kids are starting to act on their desires, or there’s pressure to be acting on things," she said. "Parents have to decide what values they want to impart to their kids."
6. Trouble Makers, But Not Troubled. Since tweens are programmed to take more risks, it's not surprising that suspensions rise dramatically at this age. In New York City, there were 19,703 suspensions from middle school during the 2012-13 school year. This was 37 percent of all suspensions that year, even though middle school students accounted for 20 percent of all public school pupils. While they’re getting into more trouble, the risks of really unhealthy activity have fallen. Overall, drug, cigarette and alcohol usage has declined among children 13 and under, according to a national study. Just about 19 percent of teens reported drinking before the age of 13 and 9 percent said they smoked.
7. Moods: Boy, Do They Swing. It's typical for kids at this age to feel things with new intensity. Emotions can sneak up and overwhelm. Drama is the new normal, as any middle school teacher can attest. It's also a time for adults to watch for more serious mood changes. "It’s an age when problems like depression and general anxiety and other mental health issues may start to emerge in people who are at risk,” according to Jill Harkavy-Friedman, an associate psychiatry professor at Columbia University and vice president of research for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. Social pressures, bullying, academic frustrations — any or all of these can tip a vulnerable child over the edge if they don't have support. Luckily, Harkavy-Friedman adds, the number of suicides among kids 12 and younger is still extremely low.
8. Crunch Time in School. Homework starts to pile up in middle school and kids feel more pressure. New York City public school students have to apply to high school in the fall of eighth grade, a very competitive process, which means their classroom performance and test scores from seventh grade matter a lot. Scores on state exams tend to drop during middle school as the classroom work gets harder.
9. Middle School Mediocrity. Because test scores tend to lag, experts have worried for decades about these middle years. Middle schools were created in the 1960s to give adolescents more attention, replacing junior high schools. So it's common to see middle school classrooms with clustered desks to encourage discussion, and to have scheduled time in the week to debate social issues and current events. Some middle schools handle the social-emotional component well but others don't, sometimes with serious consequences. “This is the age when they get disengaged, they get angry,” said New York City's Chancellor Carmen Fariña, who has been trying to share successful middle school strategies across the system.
10. Buying Power. Tweens buy a lot of stuff — or at least their parents do — and they set trends. American kids ages 9 to 13 are responsible for $200 billion in sales a year, according to a 2013 study. That’s a lot of music, clothing, shoes, makeup and snacks, not to mention video games which make up 30 percent of all spending. Music, alone, counts for 10 percent of all those sales. This largely because of Disney's radio network and TV shows. It was tweens, after all, who fueled the frenzy around bestsellers like the Twilight and Hunger Games book and movie series.
11. Peers Rule. Kids this age place a lot of stock in what their peers think. Family still matters, but friends matter a lot more. It's a time in life to experiment with identity. It's when kids may change their hair or style, dump old friends and make new ones, only to do it all over again a few months later. The high-stakes social drama can lead to bullying of vulnerable kids who don’t fit in well.
12. Digital Natives. Tweens have been digital since birth. They usually have their own cell phones by age 12, enabling them access to nearly every form of media. Although most social media websites and certain games won’t allow them to join until they are 13, due to the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, that’s easy enough to get around. The site Common Sense Media advises parents to talk to their kids about what they are looking at online, but also to keep an eye on it, just in case they aren't giving you the whole picture.
Face it parents, your opinion probably doesn’t matter as much as it used to but don't give up. Your 12-year-old still needs and craves your guidance. They just don't want to admit it.
With reporting help from Gwynne Hogan
For a lot of American adults, age 12 is probably just one more moment in the extended blur that is adolescence, located smack dab in the middle of those forgettable middle school years.
We're here to argue that 12 is in fact pretty special, especially if you're a New Yorker. This is the moment when many students are commuting to school alone, navigating the city by themselves. At school, they're juggling assignments and expectations, preparing for high school. Their minds are expanding dramatically, their bodies are beginning to morph. Social life is getting messy.
"It’s difficult because you’re learning all these responsibilities for the first time," said Noah Shippey, a 12-year-old at Brooklyn Prospect Charter School. "And none of this has really happened before. Adults, they do that all the time and it's easy because they’ve done it a lot. But we’re just starting."
Nawal Montaser, a classmate at Brooklyn Prospect, said this year has been edifying.
She started wearing the hijab, a head scarf for observant Muslim women. Choosing to wear it wasn't difficult for Nawal but, like any girl her age, she was worried what her friends would say. That first day at school was terrifying.
"They were so kind and I felt so loved," she said of her friends."And I really realized who the real people in my life are."
New York City schools chancellor Carmen Farina explains why she thinks 7th grade is the single most important grade in a kid’s school life.
Here's NYC schools chancellor Carmen Fariña in our studio today: pic.twitter.com/OZsCb2oCoK
— Brian Lehrer Show (@BrianLehrer) March 9, 2015
Some schools are experimenting with gender-separated classes for 7th graders, esp. in literacy, says NYC schools chancellor Carmen Fariña.
— Brian Lehrer Show (@BrianLehrer) March 9, 2015
.@NYCSchools Chancellor Carmen Fariña on @BrianLehrer: No more than 30% of teacher evaluations should be tied to student test scores
— Chalkbeat New York (@ChalkbeatNY) March 9, 2015
"My influence stops at the suggestion level," Chancellor Farina on failing charter schools & her limits @WNYC's @BrianLehrer
— Beth Fertig (@bethfertig) March 9, 2015
"I'm totally committed to working with them," Chancellor Farina on her role on NYC's charter school board, collaborating @WNYC @BrianLehrer
— Beth Fertig (@bethfertig) March 9, 2015
The rising tide of digital music has threatened to sink much of the record business. But an unexpected sandbar of profit has emerged: the tween market. Turns out, kids around the age of 12 still buy music, and the tween market has become big enough and powerful enough to make stars out of their favorite singers.
How big? There are almost 20 million kids between the ages of 10 and 14, according to the US Census of 2010. How powerful? Tweens account for about $200 billion (don’t look twice at that “b” – it’s not a typo) in spending each year, according to a widely-cited report from the retail group known as POPAI, Point of Purchase Advertising International.
That figure includes everything tweens spend money on – video games, clothing, etc. But approximately 10 percent, or $20 billion, is music-related, and that is the kind of coin that the music industry does not see very much these days.
Today’s 12-year-olds are not doing anything appreciably different from what you might have done if you were a 12-year-old in, say, 1998. It was in the late '90s that the music industry began to notice that pop music, long the domain of teenagers, was actually attracting a younger audience. Artists like N Sync and Britney Spears owed a lot of their success to tweens, who, aspiring to be like the cool teenagers ahead of them in school, bought their records. But parents found the sexuality of a Britney Spears a step too far for their 12-year-old daughters (and it was mostly daughters – read on to learn why). So exploiting the tween market would have to wait until a safer place in the pop music world could evolve for 12-year-olds.
Britney Spears wearing a schoolgirl outfit in the 1998 "...Baby One More Time" music video (YouTube)
Enter Disney. The Walt Disney Company was already a brand that parents knew and trusted; in the first years of this century, Disney saw an opportunity, and climbed onto that sandbar. They minted genuine pop stars like Miley Cyrus, star of their TV series Hannah Montana; and Demi Lovato, star of the series Sonny With A Chance. And as the old-school business model of the record industry failed around them, Disney drew on its decades-long experience in cross-marketing to sell music-themed merchandise, DVD, and concert events that featured their own stars as well as the singers, like Taylor Swift, featured on Radio Disney.
It didn’t take long for the music business to notice. In 2006, three of the year’s top-10-selling albums were aimed at tweens: Disney’s High School Musical soundtrack, the Curious George soundtrack, and Volume 9 of the curious cross-generational negotiation known as Kidz Bop. Kidz Bop was a direct reaction to parental dismay at the questionable content of much pop music; big hits of the day were re-recorded in freshly scrubbed versions. Kids knew it wasn’t the real thing, but it was better than nothing.
Now, the tween market is too big to ignore. Marketing to tweens is by itself a $17 billion a year industry. And in that industry, music is not just one of the products – it is also a major delivery system. Taylor Swift doesn’t just sell songs; she sells perfume and handbags. And she sells them to a tween audience that is overwhelmingly female. Experts have long known that girls mature faster than boys. By age 12, most are already aspiring to be like the teenagers ahead of them in school and this makes them both active consumers and voracious users of social media.
Social media is where much of the tween economy takes place. Music is largely purchased via download; CDs are usually received as gifts and quickly loaded onto smartphones and played for friends.
A band like Echosmith is emblematic of the power of the modern tween. A group of four siblings who began playing together in their tweens and are now in their late teens, Echosmith wrote a song called “Cool Kids.” Its refrain, “I wish that I could be like the cool kids, ‘cause all the cool kids, they seem to fit in,” will resonate with every person suffering through those awkward years. It never cracked the Top 10, but it sold over a million copies (mostly through downloads), becoming one of the tween hits of last year.
Now that the music industry has identified the 600-pound gorilla in the room – the 12-year-old girl checking her Instagram page – its new mission is to figure out how to keep her. Tweens are good consumers in an industry that is starving for them. And the continued success of Taylor Swift and Demi Lovato (and yes, Miley Cyrus) is built on their ability to use social media to keep their original tween-age fans as they get older, while still reaching out to the current crop of 12-year-olds. Because after all, 12-year-olds are a renewable resource.
When we first met Jared we knew he was a bit lost. On paper the 12-year-old boy did not stand apart from his classmates at Breakthrough New York: he had good grades, strong teacher recommendations, and came from a low-income family in the South Bronx that prized education and achievement over all else.
But as he arrived for his first day of our rigorous 5-week summer program, his emotions splattered out into the hallways, classrooms and cafeteria like an abstract painting. Jared (not his real name) was sullen and serious one moment, hyperactive and clownish the next, and inconsolably angry following a redirection from a teacher. He was falling behind on his homework, missing time in class because of misbehavior, all the while alienating his peers with erratic attempts to form friendships.
At Breakthrough New York, we support Jared and roughly 275 others each year with backgrounds similar to his on their journey to a college-prep high school and eventually a four-year college. So we know what 12 looks like, and it often resembles Jared’s volatile emotions and confusion. That’s exactly why we think middle school is a critical time in a child’s life. It’s a moment when the kids are impressionable and still open to guidance.
The key ingredients to success? The willingness to work hard, to persevere, is one. Our students spend more than 200 hours per year with us in rigorous academic programming during the summers and after-school in 7th, 8th and 9th grade, and then receive continued monthly support throughout high school. Last year, 100 percent of our 8th graders gained access to college-prep high schools, and 100 percent of our graduating seniors went on to a four-year college.
But we think there’s another factor at play, unique to our program: the young role models that Jared and the rest our students have at Breakthrough. Unique among similar college-access programs in New York City, Breakthrough New York uses a students-teaching-student model whereby all of our middle schoolers are taught and tutored by outstanding college and high school students.
In his first summer with us, we paired Jared with one of our very best. Reginald Hutchins, then a sophomore at Morehouse College, came from a background similar to Jared’s, albeit having grown up in Atlanta. Reginald and Jared formed an instant bond, with Reginald checking in on Jared’s progress in between classes, during snack time and lunch, and at the end of the day during advisory class.
Reginald worked with each of his students in advisory class to build self-esteem and pride in who they are, where they came from, and where they would be in the future. He asked Jared and his other advisees to keep a business card-sized cutout in their wallets of the three adjectives they wanted people to think of when they met them. “Remember these,” he told them, “and come back to them when you don’t know who are you.”
Almost two years later, Jared still considers Reginald “my older brother that I never had.” They speak on the phone and over Facebook often, and when it came time for Jared to write his application essays for the prestigious high schools to which he was applying, he wrote about Reginald. “Describe a person you admire or who has influenced you a great deal,” one of the prompts asked.
Jared wrote movingly of how he identified closely with Reginald’s struggles – other Black peers teasing him for “acting too white”; having ambitious goals of leadership and scholarship that seemed difficult to square with current circumstances; and finally the lack a young figure in his life who could demonstrate what it meant to be African-American, proud, and high-achieving all at once. Until, of course, he met Reginald.
Why are role models so important to students such as Jared? Certainly many of his struggles were specific to his family and circumstances. But if think you can find a 12-year-old without angst, you’re living on a different planet.
In our experience, working with pre-teens and teens, the predominant similarity across social class, ethnicity and gender is the paradoxical longing to be accepted among a peer group while also forming a unique identity. Adolescents want to discover who they are, but they also want their friends to love who they are. When they can look up to older adolescents for cues, advice, and inspiration, 12 year-olds feel comforted that they are not alone – that it really does get better, and easier, over time.
Walk into a middle school and it may feel like you’ve stepped into a foreign land, a world where young people are self-consumed, where a minor situation to an adult feels huge and devastating to a student trying to find her bearings at school and in the larger world.
Remember what it was like? Adapting to new ways of learning in subject-specific classrooms, feeling self-conscious about physical changes. Peers and friendships rose in importance. Parental relationships were tested.
It hasn’t changed much. As an educator and parent, I’ve come to see these years, in particular grade seven, as a watershed moment for youth development well deserving of our attention, best thinking and planning.
According to John Lounsbury, dean emeritus of the John H. Lounsbury School of Education at Georgia College and former editor of the Association for Middle Level Education, these are the most important years for the individual and, as an extension, for society.
“These are the years when youngsters crystallize their beliefs about themselves and firm up their self-concepts, their philosophies of life and their values – the things that are the ultimate determinants of behavior,” he wrote earlier this year.
This is why, as chancellor of the New York City Department of Education, I’ve focused on middle schools, and seventh grade in particular. It’s a key moment in which to inspire a life-long love of learning and study but to do this well, we must build environments that meet the needs of the whole child —academic, social and emotional.
While peers begin to take on larger than life roles for these tweens, so do key adults. We are essential guides to model healthy relationships. This requires flexibility on our part, a willingness to know when to be firm and when to give them more latitude.
This is also a time when we as adults make a fair share of mistakes. But that’s okay. We should let students know when we change our minds and shift to Plan B. It is a powerful statement for students to know we are all learning and growing together — and mistakes happen.
Most importantly, these growing adolescents want to be taken seriously by the adults in their lives. They want to be heard, and they want to follow their ideas and interests as they make sense of the world around them.
For adults this may feel risky or messy. Brain research tells us that the 12-year-old brain is still evolving; the ability to assess risks is not yet fully developed. How then can this child accurately predict the consequences of their actions?
In all honestly, they can’t. We should provide rich laboratories of learning where they safely test out their ideas, explore options and through their subjects come to see the connection between choices and consequences.
We can provide a safe haven for understanding their emotional sensibilities and teach ways to understand their thoughts and feelings — and keep a sense of humor in the process.
Our classrooms must be a place for the exciting dynamic students crave in middle school, where teachers intentionally tap into their interests and curiosity. We want to elevate their ability to ask questions and to engage in real-world opportunities, because this is how they come to know who they are and what matters to them.
As a seventh grader tutors a fifth grader in study skills or interviews a senior about New York City in the 1940s, these youth see that their actions and their studies matter. Middle schoolers, especially seventh graders, need additional outlets provided by robust athletic and arts programs—interwoven during school and seamlessly into after school hours—where creativity and collaboration are at the forefront, and every child can succeed.
Every day our educators are standing on the front lines with our children. Our job at the department is to support them with professional development, real-world learning opportunities, and mentoring — all the while assessing and demanding accountability.
These are exciting times. As we learn more from researchers about how young people think and develop, we will be ever more prepared to eagerly embrace those who, after all, are just being 12.
"Being 12 means being a kid, a mature kid." Hear what these 12-year-olds think about navigating the most awkward, essential year of their life.