Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life (movie review)

Looking for a movie to see with your teen or tween this weekend? Our guest contributor, Antonio Buehler, says this film is worth your while. Antonio is the founder of Abrome, a K–12 school just west of Austin that offers a program of “Emancipated Learning” for students age 5 to 18.
 

Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life (PG) revolves around a young man named Rafe who has a wild imagination that flows through the drawings he keeps in a special notebook. He also has not had the best experiences at school, seemingly due to behavioral issues, and is on his third school since his younger brother died from leukemia. He understands that this is his last shot at public school, and the threat of being sent away to a military school looms on the horizon if he does not make it work at Hills Village Middle School (HVMS). 

His first day of school does not get off to a great start. After staying up all night drawing cartoons in his notebook, he is stopped by the principal as he is approaching the front doors of the school. Principal Dwight informs Rafe that the clothes he is wearing violates one of many school rules. While he is droning on, telling Rafe to get to know all of the rules in his rule book, Rafe’s friend Leo shows up behind the principal and mocks his every gesture. Rafe is thrilled to see Leo, who says that he was pushed out of his old school, too.

In class, the first thing Rafe experiences is laughter from his classmates when they find out what his last name is, and then a student tells him, “Welcome to hell.” Bullying is baked into the environment at HVMS through the common structures of schooling, which include age-based segregation, competitive testing and grades, and the oppression of restrictive rules and abusive adults (e.g., Principal Dwight). The social conditions within the school and society also contribute to a bullying culture. While giving a pitch for his student council campaign at a school assembly, a male student encourages people to vote for him because “my dad is super rich and my mom is smoking hot.”

While bullying contributes to the misery of schooling, so does standardized testing. At the aforementioned assembly, Principal Dwight attempts to rally the students to focus on the upcoming B.L.A.A.R. (Baseline Assessment of Academic Readiness) test. Unfortunately for Rafe, a fellow student grabs his notebook while he is drawing up a sketch that mocked Principal Dwight’s focus on the B.L.A.A.R., and this brings the assembly to a tense halt. In retaliation, Principal Dwight destroys Rafe’s notebook.

Distraught, Rafe holes himself up in his room at home. Fortunately, Leo comes to the emotional rescue and encourages Rafe to seek revenge by engaging in a campaign to undermine Principal Dwight’s oppressive rule. Leo convinces Rafe to figuratively destroy Principal Dwight’s rule book. With eight weeks left until the B.L.A.A.R., Rafe and Leo begin to plan and execute elaborate pranks that systematically violate each of Principal Dwight’s beloved rules.

As Rafe and Leo carry out prank after prank, with the outcome always seen by an amused audience of students, many older viewers will be brought back to their middle school years, wishing that they could have done something about the needless limits imposed on their freedoms, while younger viewers may find themselves imagining taking on The Man in their schools in their own ways.

Just beyond the pranks, the B.L.A.A.R. is a constant, brewing threat. Not just for the students in terms of a stressful waste of time, but even more so for Principal Dwight and Vice Principal Stricker, who are judged based on the scores of their students. Rafe recognizes how pointless the B.L.A.A.R. is and comments at one point, “I’m learning more by breaking the rules than by preparing for some dumb test.” Principal Dwight, on the other hand, is willing to expel students in an effort to boost the test scores for the school, much like many public schools have been documented pushing out poorly performing students or those with disciplinary issues.

In the course of breaking all the rules at school, Rafe falls for a social justice oriented classmate named Jeanne while trying to navigate around a bully named Miller. At home, Rafe and his little sister Georgia have a complicated relationship, likely complicated by the passing of their brother, while they both suffer through socially painful interactions with their mom’s obnoxious boyfriend, Carl. The acting is not as moving as the story, although I doubt many people can get through it without shedding some tears, particularly during a moving plot twist toward the end of the movie.

All in all, the movie does a fine job of highlighting some of the problems inherent in conventional schooling. Rafe’s homeroom teacher asks at one point, “What is this obsession with testing and categorizing kids?”—which, hopefully, plants a seed in the mind of every student and parent who sees the movie. Unfortunately, the movie does not take this question to its logical conclusion, given the reality that traditional schools will continue to test and categorize young people for the foreseeable future. Fortunately, for those who are willing to pursue an answer, there are many alternatives to conventional schooling, including progressive alternative schools, homeschooling, and unschooling.

I encourage people to go see this movie, preferably as a family, and then discuss the themes it raises.

Antonio Buehler

 

Media Monday: For the pirate, the paleontologist, or the pianist in your girl—Magazines that empower

You may have seen some recent stories making the rounds on Facebook about the one-dimensional offerings in Girls’ Life vs. Boys’ Life magazines. And you may also have caught a mention here and there of Kazoo, a brand-new magazine for girls ages 5 to 10 that explicitly takes a feminist stance. Kazoo encourages girls to “make some noise” and features stories about science, exploration, sports, and other topics to engage young minds. There are no advertorials about fancy hairstyles or makeup here. Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls website—a fountain of pro-girl information, says Kazoo is required reading, and I agree. The latest issue, focused on nature and the great outdoors, looks like it will be out in mid-October.

Kazoo is a labor of motherly love, created by Erin Bried and funded by a record-breaking Kickstarter campaign. Bried just couldn’t find any magazines her daughter liked at the newsstand. “Every single title on the rack sends the message that there’s only one right way for a girl to look, dress, and act, and it’s usually like a princess. My daughter happens to prefer pirates, so we left empty-handed.”

Currently, Kazoo is only available in print and only published four times a year, at a fairly pricey $12.50 per issue or $50 per year.  But it’s possible the number of issues will go up, and the price will come down a little as it gets more established. I only wish Bried’s team would launch a companion magazine for girls ages 11 to 16, since we all know that those are the years when girls tend to lose their confidence and assertiveness, often retreating from their interest in pirates. You can follow Kazoo on Facebook to find out the latest info.

Seeing Kazoo and the great welcome it seems to have received among parents and the press inspired me to look around a little for other magazines for girls—and also by girls and boys. Here are a few I found that are worth looking at with your kids:

Shameless is a Canadian teen magazine aimed at girls and also trans youth. The topics tend toward culture and politics, and each issue usually includes profiles of cool women, a little sports, crafts, tech, and other on-trend topics. Unfortunately, it only comes out three times a year and is rare in U.S. bookstores, but the great thing is that you can download full issues from their site at only $5 each. The blog that goes with the magazine offers tons of unique articles, and the diversity of the bloggers is a major plus. Definitely worth a look if your kid likes music, the arts, politics, and Canadians—well, who doesn’t like Canadians? And they take art and story pitches from readers!

New Moon Girls is by and for girls ages 9 to 16 and has been around since the 1990s. The magazine takes a community focus, with an online component that connects girls and offers intellectual and emotional support during the tough tween and teen years. The magazine features an amazing variety of stories looking at girls’ lives worldwide, fiction, health, crafts, careers, science—and actively encourages submissions from young writers. It’s published six times a year, with a $40 subscription.

I also ran across an online news site called Teen Voices, which is an offshoot of the nonprofit Women’s eNews. Apparently, there used to be a print version, but it doesn’t seem to be published anymore. This site offers an opportunity for teen girls to write and report on stories they are passionate about and has an expansive global vision.

For girls and boys:

You’re probably familiar with the Cricket media empire for kids—they produce high-quality educational magazines for all ages. One I was not familiar with, but which is focused on the sciences, with a little history and archaeology thrown in for good measure sometimes, is MUSE, for kids ages 9 to 14. They offer a sample issue to check out with your kids and publish nine issues a year, with reasonably priced print and digital subscriptions.

And there’s a great Texas-based magazine, Creative Kids, for ages 8 to16, that includes art, essays, and stories submitted by kids and for kids. It’s a quarterly paper magazine, but there is a limited online version and a blog. I love the way this one encourages young writers and artists and takes them seriously as creators.

I’d like to do a full blog post soon about the wealth of opportunities out there for kids to publish their fiction and artwork, so please let me know if there are print or online magazine that you recommend!

 
Shelley Sperry

Media Monday: Crash Course

I’m a fairly recent convert to the wonders of YouTube as part of my regular media diet, but like many converts, I’m now an evangelist. For my own work, I take advantage of YouTube regularly to watch clips from nature and science documentaries, with the BBC and NOVA as the gold standards. But often, it’s just a 5- to 15-minute “explainer” young learners need, and YouTube has got ’em by the thousands. Today I’d like to point you toward a couple of channels that specialize in short science videos aimed specifically at kids.

The Crash Course Kids channel is full of clever, colorful, animated videos on science topics designed for elementary-school-age kids at about fifth-grade level. What is gravity? What’s the difference between weathering and erosion? What do plants need to grow? The answers are here, usually in 5-minute chunks that are easily added into a school day or study time at home.  Host Sabrina Cruz is terrific— enthusiastic, funny, and proud to call herself a nerd.

If Neil deGrasse Tyson is the reigning rock star of the astronomy world, Phil Plait is its Pied Piper. I would follow Phil anywhere. His Crash Course Astronomy series is information-packed and addictive. The format of a host who uses illustrations and animations to explain a scientific concept is similar to that of the Crash Course Kids channel, but Phil’s explanations are designed for middle and high school students and adults, with lessons usually 10–15-minutes long. He covers things like cyclical phenomena in the universe, how telescopes work, and everything you ever wanted to know about binary and multiple stars but were afraid to ask.

Watch and listen to Sabrina and Phil, respectively, explaining different kinds of stars:
 

The Crash Course empire on YouTube was started by YA novelist John Green and his environmental scientist/musician brother Hank. It now includes courses in history, psychology, literature, economics, and any number of other topics, so if you like the science channels above, you may want to check out more. Happy watching!

Shelley Sperry
 

Media Monday: Slate’s podcast on getting into college

Envelope by iStock. Photo illustration by Holly Allen.

This is the first entry in our new Media Monday series, in which contributor Shelley Sperry briefly reviews noteworthy media coverage of education issues and other resources of interest to our readers. Shelley is a writer, editor, and researcher based in Alexandria, Virginia, who was recently spotted in Yellowstone National Park working on assignment for National Geographic.
 

Because it’s that time of year, when many high school students are thinking about college, I want to alert you to a new podcast designed to help students and their parents navigate common questions.

Getting In is a podcast from Slate magazine that follows a diverse group of high schoolers through the process of applying to colleges. The host, Julie Lythcott-Haims, is a former Stanford University dean, and she brings in terrific, plain-talking experts to answer listener questions.  The episodes are short (around 15 minutes), but packed with real-life drama, the voices of students themselves, and practical advice on topics ranging from the value of extracurricular activities to “easy As vs. hard Bs” and writing the dreaded college essay.

Check it out via your favorite podcast app or on the home page here.
 

Examining our exam mania: A review of “The Test” by Anya Kamenetz

Shelley Sperry is a writer, editor, and researcher who lives in Alexandria, Virginia. She's currently writing an article about volcanoes for National Geographic's Explorer kids magazine and having a blast.

Anya Kamenetz is a veteran reporter on the education beat and the mother of a daughter on the verge of entering preschool. In her new book, The Test: Why Our Schools Are Obsessed with Standardized Testing—But You Don’t Have to Be, Kamenetz is driven by her need as a journalist to assemble evidence and anecdotes to make her case. But her work is equally inspired by her desire as a parent to protect her child’s “innate resilience, curiosity, and joy.” What she ends up with is a valuable read for anyone who wants to understand the role standardized tests have in the lives of the vast majority of American children today—a role that is becoming even stronger with the implementation of new Common Core tests in the majority of states this year. Texas is one of a handful of states that have not adopted Common Core testing.

Parents of public school students will find the final section of the book especially useful. Kamenetz provides a checklist of strategies to help families cope with mandated testing—from how to emotionally prepare kids for hours of test prep and the tests themselves to how to approach and implement a decision to opt out of testing entirely. The rest of the book includes a fascinating history of how early intelligence tests evolved into school achievement tests, how and why testing went off the rails in the past 20 years, and innovative suggestions for getting our schools back on track.

Texas was on the cutting edge of the modern high-stakes testing movement in the 1990s. The use of carrots and sticks to push states to adopt stricter, more frequent tests to measure achievement became national policy under No Child Left Behind in 2001. NCLB is still the law of the land, but Congress is now debating various ways to revise and improve the law’s approach. There is fairly broad agreement that the tests most states use in assessing students each year are ineffective and actually may be counterproductive in promoting quality teaching and learning. Unfortunately, Common Core and other attempts to reform the system in recent years ignore that consensus.

The intentions of the policymakers and educators who embarked on NCLB and the standardized testing experiment were noble for the most part, but were based on false premises, according to Kamenetz.  In the 1980s, reports of failing public schools and a “rising tide of mediocrity” were probably the result of inaccurate data, but the belief that the United States was falling behind other countries played on Cold War–era fears, so policymakers ignored or suppressed questions about the data. The 1980s and ’90s stock market and tech booms influenced the business-management and number-crunching mindset that now permeates education reform: collect and analyze data, provide incentives to improve performance, and demonstrate to shareholders (also known as taxpayers) that investments in public education are sound.

What’s more, all that data collection, test writing, and test prep provided a huge windfall—now in the billions of dollars—for a few big publishers and testing corporations. Now, of course, those corporations lobby for maintaining and expanding their business. Academic and charitable institutions—especially the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (the 800-pound gorilla of education philanthropy)—also contribute mightily to the demand for more quantitative assessments of kids and teachers.

As demonstrated in last week’s protests in New York in which thousands of families opted out of spring testing, we are approaching a point when demands for change may reach a critical mass. Kamenetz outlines several possible solutions for schools that are testing the wrong things, wasting teachers’ and students’ precious time, and driving good teachers away from the profession.

The Test’s look at alternatives to NCLB, Common Core, and standardized testing in general will ring true for parents who are already involved in the alternative education movement. Kamenetz suggests that we need approaches—two of which she labels the “butterfly” and “unicorn” models—that encourage students to be creative and collaborative and to embrace their own unique learning styles and interests. As an ideal goal, she favors a “multiple-measures” system for public schools, akin to that promoted by Stanford researcher Linda Darling-Hammond, that can assess and help guide students to meet their potential as learners. She offers many examples of schools that are experimenting with new visions, including mindfulness and meditation, student assessments based on video games, and more humanistic ways of “doing school” that include peer review, portfolios, and self-reflection. Teachers should also be evaluated using multiple measures, she says.

Kamenetz argues that change “has to come from families who are not only fed up, but also can see the alternatives clearly.” Those alternatives look an awful lot like innovative schools operating right now in Austin and across the country:

Students work together and separately to build, make, read, write, conduct experiments, solve problems, and present their work. ‘How am I doing?’ is a question answered continuously, by self-reflection, teacher feedback, peer review, and public exhibition as well as by referring to external standards such as the Common Core.

There is still a place for national, standardized assessments, she thinks, but only administered sparingly.

Kamenetz makes a strong case for reform of student and teacher assessment, and reform looks achievable if a broad coalition of parents, teachers, and policymakers agree to pursue it, especially because there is now some bipartisan agreement in Washington that something must be done to reform the testing system. Unfortunately, what seems less likely is that a broad coalition will be able to agree on the “kind of world we are creating for our children,” which Kamenetz suggests is also essential to debates about school reform. “Child welfare, foster care, juvenile justice, and maternal health are all part of this conversation. So are minimum wage, the pay gap, and maternity leave.”

Kamenetz notes that a 2013 study demonstrated that in North Carolina 85 percent of school performance issues can be explained by the economic well-being of a child’s family, as measured by eligibility for subsidized lunches. Today, of the 50 million students in American public schools, almost half receive free and reduced-price lunches, and only 14 of 50 states attempt to give poor schools more aid than rich schools.

If you have questions about the standardized testing and anti-testing movements, it’s likely that you'll hear the answer in the video below. It was taped at Politics & Prose, a bookstore and community center in Washington, D.C., where Kamenetz recently gave a fascinating talk about her book and how high-stakes testing is affecting learners everywhere.
 

Shelley Sperry

The Six Seasons: Empowering kids to deal with climate change

That environmentalists need the goodwill of children would seem self-evident—but more often
than not, children are viewed as props or extraneous to the serious adult work of saving the world.

—Richard Louv, Last Child in the Woods

I recently attended a preview performance of The Six Seasons, a uniquely beautiful and moving play about climate change. Glass Half Full Theatre adapted its original award-winning show aimed at adult audiences into this brilliant production for ages seven and up. Using tiny puppets, ingenious sets made of recycled materials, gorgeous music from around the world, and simple language that made complex socio-ecological processes come to life, these artist-environmentalists earned the goodwill of the children watching with me.

Presented on ZACH Theatre’s Kleberg Stage, the story depicts people and ecosystems all over the planet coping with the very real effects of climate change: polar bears stranded by melting Arctic ice, families in Texas and Malawi forced to leave their farms because of severe drought, villages and entire islands disappearing in the Sunderbans of India and Bangladesh as sea levels rise and uproot mangroves no longer able to hold coastlines together. Heavy stuff for children, right?

Concerned parents and educators struggle to find the right tone, the right images, the right amount of detail when talking to kids about the climate crisis. Most experts agree that kids can handle scary truths, presented in age-appropriate terms, as long as they’re also given the chance to do something with that information. As Alfie Kohn, best known as a crusader for more humane education, writes in his book Unconditional Parenting, “Empowered kids are in the best position to deal constructively with disempowering circumstances.”

Zach Scott education director Nat Miller and his team are working hard to make sure that the young (and older) people who see The Six Seasons feel empowered. Immediately following both family shows and special performances for school groups, they lead “talkback” sessions to draw out questions and concerns. They’ve also created a free study guide that parents and educators can use to help kids delve deeper into the geographic, historical, social, economic, and ecological issues the play addresses.

Most importantly, the talkbacks include suggestions for specific actions that young people can take to address the causes and effects of climate change. Some of these suggestions came out of a post-performance discussion I participated in along with other invited audience members representing local environmental organizations, including Austin Citizens Climate Lobby, Environment Texas, Keep Austin Beautiful, and TreeFolks. Miller and Caroline Reck, the play’s director, writer, and puppet designer, asked these leaders important questions and listened carefully to their input on the kinds of direct action that are most effective.

Also in the audience were students and teachers from the Austin Ecoschool. This was an especially appropriate group to preview the play, as EcoSchool kids are accustomed to learning in the company of very small puppet-like figures they call “peeps” every Thursday in their ongoing role-playing curriculum called Game of Village. During their talkback, the students were engaged and forthcoming. Clearly, they not only enjoyed the play (especially the polar bears, which the kids mentioned repeatedly) but also really got it. Some remarked that parts of the story were sad. And indeed they were.

But the play’s later scenes are more hopeful, imagining futures in which people come together creatively to build more resilient communities and where concrete cities become revegetated. Finally, the puppeteers circle back to the beloved polar bears we met in the first scene, reminding us that their habitat remains precarious and precious.

Grab a kid, or a bunch of them, and head over to see The Six Seasons while you can. Tickets are available for Saturday family shows through January 31 and weekday school group performances through February 13. And let’s keep the conversations about climate change going—with our kids and with each other. 

Teri