This American Life - 449: Middle School

Episode Date: September 7, 2026

As the new school year begins, we have stories today from all over the country about people lurching their way through their middle school years – the years when you're figuring out so, so much. We go to school dances and classrooms, and down to the Mexican border.  Visit thisamericanlife.org/lifepartners to sign up for our premium subscription.(00:00:00) Prologue: Host Ira Glass interviews a 14-year-old named Annie, who emailed us asking if we would do a show about middle school. She explains why exactly the middle school years can be so daunting. (4 minutes)(00:05:42) Act One: In an effort to understand the physical and emotional changes middle school kids experience, Ira speaks with reporter Linda Perlstein, who wrote a book called Not Much Just Chillin' about a year she spent following five middle schoolers. Then we hear from producer Alex Blumberg, who was a middle school teacher in Chicago for four years before getting into radio. Alex's takeaway? We shouldn't even try teaching kids at this age. Marion Strok, principal of a successful Chicago school, disagrees. (6 minutes)(00:11:49) Act Two: We sent correspondents straight to the epicenters of middle school awkwardness: school dances. We spoke with kids across the country during the nervous moments leading up to the dances, and even ventured inside, to the dance itself. (9 minutes)(00:21:51) Act Three: When Domingo Martinez was growing up in a Mexican-American family in Texas, Domingo's two middle school-aged sisters found a unique way of coping with feelings of inferiority. (11 minutes)(00:33:42) Act Four: We realized that there are already reporters on the ground, embedded inside middle schools: the kids who report the daily announcements. Producer Jonathan Menjivar wondered what would happen if instead of announcing sports scores and the daily cafeteria menu, the kids reported what's really on their minds. Students at Parkville Middle School outside Baltimore, along with their journalism teacher Ms. Davis, agreed to try out this experiment. (7 minutes)(00:40:01) Act Five: Producer Sarah Koenig reports on a kid we'll call Leo, whose family moved away from Rochester, NY, leaving behind all of Leo's friends and stranding him in a new — and in his opinion, much worse — middle school. (10 minutes)(00:50:59) Act Six: Ira speaks with Shannon Grande, a teacher at Rise Academy in Newark, about a seventh grader who had all sorts of problems with behavior, hygiene, and schoolwork. To help turn him around, Grande had to harness the power of peer pressure for good. (7 minutes)Transcripts are available at thisamericanlife.org / This American Life privacy policy. / Learn more about sponsor message choices.

Hey, everybody. I have a glass here. So we got this email at our radio show near the end of the school year from a 14-year-old. Hello? Here's this Annie. Yeah. I called her up at her house in California and asked her to read it. Mm-hmm. It says, Do this American Life, I just escaped the whitewashed, brick-walled, iron-gated prison that is commonly known as middle school.

And I'm finally out for good. But in all the time I have listened to your show, I have never heard an episode devoted to what goes on inside the walls of a middle school. I hope you'll think about it. Anonymous. Yeah, you signed it anonymous, but then you actually, your email was signed with your name. Yeah. Yeah. I had said anonymous because in middle school, everybody's so judgmental,

and I didn't want the kids to judge me or anything if they heard me on the radio. Mainly she says that she wrote to us because she and her friends were talking, right after they left eighth grade, about how terrible middle school was. And she wondered, was it just as bad for other people? people as it was for them. You always wonder whether other people are going to the same thing as you. And it'd be cool to, like, hear other people's stories about it and what they went through. And if you had to explain to somebody, like, what are the worst things about middle school?

Can I actually just walk me through it? Like, what is so bad about middle school? Kids there are all in kind of socially awkward stages that the drama every day can be frustrating. and girl boy things or someone like so-and-so and then no matter who you are or what you do, you'll get made fun of for it, anything in the world you can get made fun of for. In Annie's case, she had friends who smoked,

so she got criticized for smoking. But then she also was made fun of for not smoking for being too much of a sissy to start smoking. She was made fun of for coming from a bilingual elementary school of everybody learned to speak Spanish and spoke it throughout the day. And leaving elementary school, I guess I thought that when I got to middle school, everyone would think it was really cool that I spoke Spanish.

But when I got there, I mostly just thought it was dumb. I don't know if they were jealous or what, but they would make fun of me for it. Then they'd say we were all full of ourselves for that we spoke different languages and stuff. Did it make you feel bad? Yeah. I didn't want to stick out in that way. If I got a new sweater or something, say, for Christmas that I really liked and I would really want to wear it to school or something,

but I'd be nervous because, like, what if someone didn't like my sweater or someone made fun of me for wearing it? It can be hard to do even the smallest things because you're so nervous that people tease you or judge you from it. That sweater example, is that a real example? Yeah, it actually is. I worried about it so much. I also had a pair of moccasins that I'd never worn

and they're kind of my signature now. Everybody really likes them. They're like ankle high, lace up moccasins. And how long did you have the moccasins before you actually wore them? A few months, like probably two months. I guess I just thought if people didn't like them, they would all make fun of me for wearing them. And I didn't want to stand out that much.

What could be done to make middle school better? I don't think you can really do anything. Anything about it? Nothing. We talked about this for a little while. She said, basically, everybody comes into middle school as a little kid, and then you're going to have to grow up and figure out who's in what group and who you are and who's above who. And you'd have to figure that out somewhere at that age, right?

Might as well be middle school. It was terrible, she says, but now she's in high school. Whatever middle school was, it was. worked. Everyone's a lot friendlier and everyone's lives are a lot better now. What a day on our radio program for Annie? We look at whatever it is that

happens in those mysterious years that we call middle school. As the new school year begins, we have stories today from all over the country. People lurching their way through these years when you're figuring out so, so much. We go to middle school dances and classrooms and down to the Mexican border. From WBEC Chicago, it's This American Life.

I'm our glad. Stay with us. It's American Life. Today's show is a rerun, one that we thought would be a nice one to run for returning to school with. Act 1, life in the Middle Ages. So we wanted to understand what is going on exactly physically and emotionally with middle school kids. And we talked to all kinds of people about that this last few weeks. And one of the producers and our staff had a very strong opinion about all this. Alex Bloomberg, before he got into radio, he taught in a middle school in Chicago for four years.

He was a science teacher. And you can go to it from that experience? I don't know if they learned anything. Like they are so consumed with learning all these other lessons about where they fit in and the social order and how their bodies are now working and who they're attracted to and who they're going to be. That facts and figures and geography and all the other stuff that you teach in school, it just doesn't even penetrate.

Wait, wait. Are you saying like we shouldn't even bother to have them in school? we should just basically put them to work in the factory for, you know, two or three years? Yeah. I basically came away thinking, like, you're sort of wasting your time trying to teach middle school students anything. If that seems just insane, Alex told me that Maria Montessori, who's the creator of the Montessori schools, who looked at what kids could learn at each developmental stage. At one point in her career actually tossed out a similar suggestion.

Perhaps she said young adolescents would be better off at a farm school, what she called an erred kinder, where they would work with the land. Is he just got a great sense of humor or what? I am. Ran Alex's thoughts by Marion Stroke, the principal of Evergreen Academy Middle School in Chicago, which was listed as one of the best middle schools in the country, a school to watch by the National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform. You have to be, I have to say, well, I obviously don't agree.

Okay, I think that we definitely have a way to stick knowledge in their heads. It's being creative about how we do it and taking into consideration, of those other things. I'm not going to lie. It's not easy. Can I ask you how much of the stereotype around students this age is true? Are you saying that the stereotype is true? You just got to deal with what it is? It is true. And you have to, as the adult in the situation, you have to find a way to work around it. Find a way to help them to grow up. They won't have to suffer if we do things right. They won't have to suffer as much, let's say. I mean, you're going to go through emotional changes and your body's changing. That can't be helped. The raging hormones, that can't be

helped. All of that can't be helped. It's the way that we react to it that will make such a difference in their lives. It's our flexibility. It's our concern. It's our listening to them. It's our hearing them out. And so what's actually happening, developmentally, in the bodies and brains of kids when they're in middle school? Let me give the overview this way. The terrible 12s are a complete analog to the terrible twos. They're just not as cute, right? This is Linda Pearlstein, when she wrote a book called Not Much Just Chilling, The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers, following five middle school students very closely for a full

year. She also incidentally researched everything she could find out about what is going on developmentally with kids that age. That makes them so different from other ages and fascinating. This is the time of biggest growth for a human being aside from infancy. So your bones are growing, your bones are growing faster than your muscles, so you can't actually sit still. But your brain, your gray matter, during the middle school years, what happens in your early stages of puberty is this vast overproduction of brain cells and connections far more than you actually need. and only some of them are going to survive puberty. This growth in your frontal cortex, it peaks at 11 for girls and 12 for boys, and then what happens is the cells just fight it out for survival.

And the ones that last are the ones you exercise more. In other words, during those years, your brain turns you into you, the adult you. The stuff you don't exercise just kind of goes away. And what stays? So if you think about what you learned at the early stages of puberty, I don't know what that was for you. For me, it was tap dancing and French. You know, it sticks.

I know French much better than any language I learned after that and not because I had a better teacher. I was learning it at the right time. I can still do tap dances, though I won't, that I learned when I was 12 or 13. Yeah, I can still do magic tricks that I learned at that age. Exactly. It's like it's embossed in your existence.

It's this important time for your brain. It's like this use it or lose it time. Linda Pearlstein agrees that all the stereotypes about middle schoolers, everything, in fact, that Annie complained about. All of that is true. But she says that there's a flip side that people don't usually talk about. Middle school is when kids open up to the world. It's when they think about bigger things.

And they haven't formed their opinions on things yet. Everything is up for grabs, which is amazing to be around. I just think kids that age are fun. I like being around them. middle schoolers are in that real nice spot of being interesting, but also being able to explain to you what's going on in their minds and why they do the things they do. They're self-reflective.

They're capable of self-reflection in a way that younger kids might not be. Older kids, she says, high school kids, by then they can be jaded or cynical. They're settling into who they are. Middle school, everything's new. you're probably picking your friends for the very first time. For the first time, they aren't just the kids on your block or your parents' friends' kids or the kids who are around. So you make a best friend one day who then you drop two weeks later.

You get obsessed with guitar or computers or dance for two weeks, and then two weeks later you drop it. For everything that's awful about middle school, she says, that's the great thing about it. You experiment. Back two, stutter steps. One good place to see the experiment that is life in middle school in action is a middle school dance. Last Friday, there were middle school dances all over the country, all at the same time,

and we sent reporters to a half dozen of them to find out how kids were doing. They talked to them before the kids went inside to the field of battle, and no surprise. We found a lot of stress, a lot of uncertainty. Who's nervous about tonight? I am. I don't know. Why? Well, just, I don't know.

We don't know what's going to be like. I'm just confused. I just don't know. I mean, yeah. I mean, we've got to these things before, but they've never exactly had the term dance to it. These four girls are sixth graders, and they're in a car on the way to a neon-themed dance

at Edgewood Middle School in Highland Park, Illinois, with their mom and reporter Rob Wildebar. Who's going to dance with a boy tonight? Nobody. I don't know. I can tell you that. You don't know what's going to be, like, slow dancing or regular dancing. That's why we are nervous.

Roughly 800 miles east in New Jersey. Sixth grader Ethan DeRose was hoping that there would be at least one slow dance, though, did he feel ready for a slow dance? Nope. Not at all. Why not? What are you worried about? I just don't know how to do it.

I'm not sure that I'll do it correctly, Yeah. He's standing in front of the school with reporter Brian Reed as kids stream into the school. Ethan is wearing a button-up shirt with green and black stripes that he is not happy with. That was my mom. She made me wear it. She said that if I don't wear the two shirts that I'm wearing right now, that I can't go to the dance. What are you hoping happens at this dance? I'm hoping I don't, like, nothing bad happens, like, no humiliation or,

or not something that'll be a story for the next month or two. At least to me. Of course, Ethan and the girls have been that Carr in Illinois are sixth graders. In New York City, seventh graders, Evelyn Benson and Alice Westerman, are excited and feeling very grown up on their way to their school's Halloween dance. I'm really happy because, like, last year, they, like, split the gym in half, so it's, like, light on one side and, like, pitch black on the other side. All the sixth graders are kind of, like, banned from the dance.

dark side, but that's where like all the cool kids are. So now we're in seventh grade. We're going to dance on the dark side. So it's like, we're cool. Dance on the dark side. Some of the middle school boys got up the nerve to ask girls to be their dates to the dances. But because this is a new experience of the girls too, being asked out on a date, they don't exactly know how to handle it. Here's a girl named Autumn talking with our producer, Lisa Pollock, in Delaware. You have to turn to the dance. Did you get asked to the dance? Um, yes, I did. And what did you say? I said I don't know, but I probably won't say yes.

Wait, you haven't told him yes or no yet? No. Okay, so it's 120 and the dances at 7? Yeah. When do you have to let him know? I probably won't answer. Are you serious? Yeah.

I just kind of want to hang out with the girls. So he's the only one who asked you? There was other people too. How many? Probably five-ish. Five boys asked you to the dance? Yeah. You told all these guys I don't know?

Yeah. What if they took that as a yes? Then they got the wrong answer. Do you say I don't know because it feels too mean to say no? Yeah, I'm not mean. Of course, some of the boys are no better. During the dance in Windham Mayn, a reporter Claire Holman pulled his sixth grader Christopher Potter out of the action for a chat. Is there anyone you like at the dance?

There is. Does she know? Yes, she does. We're kind of dating at the time. So how's that going? Good. It just started like 20 minutes into this. So, yeah.

You asked a girl to go out during this dance? No, a girl came to me and asked me out. Okay, let's go by minute. So where were you when this happened? I was in the cafeteria, just got a drink of root beer, and she walks up to me and asks me to go out. What did she say exactly? She said, Chris, will you go out with me?

And were you surprised? Not really. We've kind of been like on and off again. So it's not the first time? Yeah, not the first time. But she always asked you, or do you ever ask her? Well, it's kind of weird because it's always she wants me to ask her, so it was weird that she asked me. Usually they don't last. It's a middle school relationship. Nothing really happens.

What does that mean like a middle school relationship? What do you mean doesn't last? It just is destined to fail pretty much. It's a middle school. I mean, this isn't like where you start at your life with. You don't hear things about middle school sweethearts. In Richmond, outside Moody Middle School's dance, reporter Eric Mantle spoke with Elliot German and his stepbrother Jonathan Lawton, they're both eighth graders, who ran through the official rules for the dance.

So some of them are kind of funny, it says, I mean, it's like no hands below the waist, no petting. Yeah. Which I thought it was kind of funny. No petting? No petting. What does that mean? No one knows.

Like, it was specifically all, like, the flyer that they hand out, like they give you the dress code, and then they give you, like, the rules. No petting. and it's in like quotations, and you never know what it means. It's like, do people, like, sit there at dances and just, like, pet other people? Because I do really weird. There are rules like this at all the dances, and some are more comprehensible than others. As for whether or not the kids obey the rules and what actually happens inside the dance on the actual dance floor,

one of our producers, Lisa Pollock went inside to the dance floor at the fall costume dance in Luz, Delaware, and I'm going to hand it off to her. So the scene in the gym was pretty much the way you remember it. older kids dancing in the middle, younger kids at the periphery, a few aimlessly wandering around looking like they're not sure what to do. Lots of kids were dancing, jumping up and down, occasionally you'd see a fist pump. They danced in these tightly packed clusters, very little room between them. And outside of the clusters were chaperones, ready to step in if they saw any grinding or suggestive dancing.

Hovering outside one of the clusters was a teacher named John Gauze, and he looked perplexed. This knot has got me on edge at this point. Why? Because they're trying to get away with stuff. You can tell by the way they're looking at you. They have a guilty look. Because you're about to see me. Swoop.

He actually did swoop. He plunged him to the pack of kids, pulled a boy aside, and talked to him. Then he told me why. He needed to be taken aside and told to stop being up against him. those girls like that. That's why, you know, I don't want to jump in too much, but I just want to give them like the, the woe with the flat hand,

whoa, just whoa, just calm it down a little. I mean, usually if I see it, then they're going to stop because they see me. And then comes the moment of truth, the moment that forces every kid in the room to make a decision, the moment that separates the timid from the brave, the slow song. I watch it with teacher Brian Kamra.

So we got our slow song. And just as I suspected, a majority of the students left the dance floor. All the couples are in the middle of the dance floor in a cluster. I suspect so they're not near an adult. I love how the kids go up to the couples dancing and interrupt them. Oh, absolutely. Some of the couples didn't have much privacy. The friends were standing a foot away, hanging out and talking to them.

And every so often, a random kid would just cut across the dance floor. Just grabbed down to the back of her friend's neck while the friends' neck while the friends were. friend is dancing with the boy. Yeah, yeah. I don't know if you didn't want to be left out, or they came as friends, or I think at this stage of the game it's hard when boys and girls pair off, and then one friend is always left behind. There's a few of these slow dances, but most of the songs are fast.

And then suddenly, the song hit the road jack starts playing, and the light snap on. Oh, my God, they just all, like, oh, my God. Yeah, it ends very abruptly. It's nine. It's nine o'clock. That's it? That's it. There's no wind down.

Nine o'clock. Lights come on. Parents are waiting. It'll be empty in another minute. And he was right. The experiment in many adulthood that is the middle school dance was over. The same kids who minutes earlier were holding each other and swaying awkwardly on the dance floor,

got into cars, and said hi to their parents. Lisa Pollock. Coming up, surviving middle school by pretending that you are from a completely different family that is in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. It's American Life, Ameri Glass. Each we're going to show, of course, you choose a theme, bringing different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, a rerun on middle school. A 14-year-old from California who just got out of middle school asked for a show on the horror that is middle school.

It'd be cool, like, hear other people's stories about it and what they went through. We thought, you know, that's a pretty good idea. That is a place with a lot of stories. We've arrived at Act 3 of our show, Act 3, Mimi's in the Middle. The place that Domingo Martinez went to middle school, they still called it Junior High. And he says that his sisters did something to cope with any feelings of inferiority they might have otherwise felt in their new school with all those new kids.

When they started junior high, my sisters Mary and Margie invented the Mimi's as a way to cope with any feelings of inferiority. they might have otherwise experienced. They were entering the sinister world of teenage girls, which, in the mid-1980s in Brownsville, Texas, was tinged with border town racism. Instead of being ashamed of who they were, my sisters decided to create a polite fiction and invited everyone to participate. First, they dyed their brown-black hair blonde until it turned the color and brittleness of hay. Then they began dressing in Sergio Valenti and Gloria Vanderbilt, and finally, to cap it off, they decided to call each other simply Mimi.

The typical conversation between them went like this. Mimi, do you like my new Jor-Dash jeans? Yes, Mimi, I do. Do I look rich in my new Nike's Mimi? Mimi, you look like a tennis player, Mimi. I know, Mimi. Maybe I should make Mom buy me a racket. It was really that simple. The Mimi's made a conscious decision that they would be rich and white, even if their family wasn't.

In other words, Marge and Mare had a small break from reality that we all participated in to help them through junior high. We all helped in creating the Mimis. At the time, the rest of the family had not fully realized that her job, as relatively new Americans, and worse yet, Texans, was to be as wide as possible. And we honestly didn't see their delusion as anything other than another bewildering tactic in our sister's quest for a higher level of superior fashion, just teenage girls doing what teenage girls do. There had been a time when her family had been rich by barrio standards because her grandpa, dad's stepfather, fought in the Korean War and used his GI money to start a trucking business when he got back. He married Grandma, who was widowed from her first marriage at age 16, and gave both her and my dad citizenship. My siblings and I, we were all born in Brownsville as Americans, but really didn't understand what that meant. Not really, not in that area.

Then Grandpa died in 1980, and our world began to crumble. The trucking business began to disintegrate around Dad, and he was started on a slow road towards desperation and religion. Meanwhile, the Mimi's had made their decision to be two blue-blooded, trust-funded tennis buddies from Connecticut, accidentally living in Brownsville, Texas, with us. A poor Mexican family, they had somehow befriended while undergoing some Dickensian series of misfortunes. No one acted like it was peculiar, especially those in the family who didn't speak English, or could not understand the Mimi's when they showed up at family gatherings. Yo no Puedo, Ablaro, Españolo, one of the Mimi's would say to an uncle or cousin,

who more often than not would linger lasciviously around them, at first conflicted by the idea of being turned on by so young a relative, and then mentally calculating just how distantly related they were, and tabulating his odds at scoring with this new white check who just happened to show up at this barrio party, but only after two or three beers. Mimi, how did you like my Spanish? Oh, Mimi, it's getting really good. Mimi, do you think they understood me? Oh, Mimi, who cares?

Soon, the Mimi's were buzzing at a fever pitch, intoxicating everyone who came near and caught a whiff of the Mimi's Anais Anais perfume. We had all seen the commercials on network television while watching Dallas or Nauts Landing, and it was a forbidden fragrance for rain-depressed English women with secret muscular boyfriends who drove jaguars dangerously

through unpaved one-lane Scottish roads so the Mimi's had to have it and they found it at the local JC Penny and had Mom pay for it. Me and my brother Dan, in our oldest sister Sylvia, we just kind of stank from the heat and dealt with it. Even Mom developed her own fascination with the Mimi's like she couldn't believe her luck

now that she was related to royalty. Feeding into their fantasy gave her one of her own so she was always ready for an air-conditioned trip to the mall. She took the little clothes budget reserved for us boys, my brother and me, and added it into the Mimi's wardrobe, because to her it was a sign of status for the family that the Mimi's looked their best. None of the rest of us would question it, even though it felt wrong. I was often left with the Mimi's recently stylish hand-me-downs.

No one else in my grade school was remotely label-conscious or capable of reading in English, really, so it passed unnoticed that most of my clothes were made for glamorous junior high school girls. Almost every child at my school came from recently immigrated families. Kids so poor, they'd save half their free lunch to share with their younger siblings at home,

their heads shaved to rid them of lice. My best friend Arthur, he noticed, though. He was part black and part Mexican. Had just moved to Brownsville from some big city slum in Michigan, where his mother's boyfriend had been employed at a GM factory, and he read labels. Hey, Dom, he said.

Yo, man, you're wearing a girl's shirt. or is his spree-making baggy boy shirts now too? So to change the subject, I slugged him high in the chest and ran away. He chased me down to punch me back and left me crying in my girl's blouse. If she had any guilt about giving the Mimi's the lion's share of the clothing budget, I imagined the justification my mother probably used was that my older brother and I would just ruin our clothes, working with Dad under the greasy trucks.

It made better sense for the Mimi's to be in high fashion than for the feral boys to wreck new clothes. Mimi, you look just like Jennifer Beals and Flash Dance? You should join the dance team at school? I know, Mimi, I think so too. Mimi, I think you should dye your hair back to its original color. Ash! I know, Mimi, I'm trying. During this time, my brother Dan's eyesight was so bad

he couldn't read the blackboard in school and constantly ran into corners or short, skinny people. People thought he was Asian, he squinted so much. Every photo of him taken in junior high, he looks like he's trying to see into the photographer's eyes through the camera lens. This, of course, goes entirely unnoticed, and it is the younger Mimi Mary,

with a 2020 vision who gets vanity glasses with her name etched in gold script in the corner. Dan wouldn't get glasses until he was in the military when he was 17. Eventually, Dad's failure at navigating the business and providing for his family intruded on the Mimi's fantasy. Dad made a decision that as soon as school ended, mom would take the Mimi's and sill

and drive them to California to participate in the seasonal grape harvest with Dad's cousins. people vaguely related to grandma through marriage, I think. They would be treated like adults there, paid the same as everyone else. Mom, I remember, was horrified at the implications, at the shame of having to send her virginal and royal daughters out to the fields. Plus, dad's extended family out in California were very different from us, wild and frightening and Californian.

The Mimi's, though, were undaunted, did not understand the complications. Mimi, we're going to California? Oh my God, Mimi, we're going to be Valley Girls. Mimi, gag me with a spoon, Mimi. Mimi, you're just showing. We packed up Mom, the Mimi's, and Sylvia in the beige 1980 Pontiac Bonneville, already in antique on its second engine and failing transmission,

and they drove out of Brownsville. A year later, I took this right as well, and also ended up picking grapes for the summer, mostly out of envy. That we were, Migrant workers for that period didn't occur to me, nor to anyone else. That label would never stick, could never stick. We couldn't descend to that level.

We just had to do it to help out Dad. That was all. Desperate circumstances calling for desperate measures and all that. But it was too much for the Mimi's, the reality of this first trip. Sadly, I think it was childhood's end for the Mimi's. The vineyards had somehow inverted their secret garden, and the low door and the wall had closed shut behind them. When they first reached California, the Mimi's did indeed become Valley Girls,

the hippest, cutest, best-dressed migrant workers of that year, and very likely for many years to come. The older Mimi, Marge, continued to dress like Jennifer Beals and Flashdance out in the fields, where the sun sizzled any inch of exposed skin. She wore a spaghetti-strapped, red-and-white striped, espree top, white cotton shorts, and a matching headband with her red-and-white leather Nike tennis shoes and took pictures of the vineyards and the workers with her cannon. A.E.1. Her headband kept a white strip of skin on her forehead from tanning, and as a result,

she was forced to wear headbands for a few months afterwards, way after headbands were out of fashion. Eventually, though, even she started dressing like the rest of the migrant workers, wearing long-sleeved collared shirts buttoned all the way to the neck, thick, unstilished denim and work boots, with a bandana covering her nose and mouth, or else she would have dyed of heatstroke. There were no photos taken of that. Mary, the younger Mimi, did not fare any better. Her vanity glasses with the fake lenses were scratched well beyond recovery. Her roots grew out, and her hair turned a lighter brown as a result of the heat and the pesticides of the grapefields of Southern California.

The hard work went on all summer, and eventually it became bitter enough to breach even the walls of the Mimi's perfectly constructed fantasy. And so sadly, eventually even they were humiliated, and the illusion of wealth that had kept the family's idea of itself buoyant was deflated. When they returned to Brownsville, as happy as we were to see them, no one ever mentioned the Mimi's again. They were gone, and it was Marge and Mary that returned in their place, Mary rubbing her nose with the palm of her hand from allergies and snapping at anyone who tried to talk to her, and Marge, who never went back to California, and took a job at the bank the following summer instead. I was sorry to see the Mimi's go. We all were. When they were at their peak, the Mimi's had been capable of creating a real sort of magic around them, enchanting both people

and places so that you could be looking at the same dreary landscape as them, the same terrible and hopeless event. And while you might be miserable and bitter, they would be beaming, enthralled, and enthusiastically hopeful. And then, if you got near them, or were blessed enough to maybe talk to them, you would walk away feeling the same way as they felt too. They were a gift to everyone who was lucky enough to get caught in their Anais, Anais, the Mimis. They made all of us Americans. Dominga Martinez, reading an excerpt from his book, The Boy Kings of Texas, which is a memoir,

and a finalist for the National Book Award. Since we first broadcast today's show, Domingo's published another memoir, Called My Heart as a Drunken Compass. Act 4. Anchor Babies. So this week, as we were putting together the radio show and sending reporters out into middle schools, we discovered that in schools all over the country,

there already were reporters on the ground, deep inside, covering the issues that middle school kids really care about. Good afternoon, Huskies. It is Thursday, September 15, 2011. After today, there are only 162 school days until summer vacation. I'm Taylor. These are student newscasters from Hart Middle School in Pleasant in California. I myself got my start on the mic on the morning announcements,

and this is what Middle School morning announcements. in some schools are like today, students make these full-blown video productions. Some of them have music themes. The kids stand in front of banners with their school logo, or sometimes it's a green screen backdrops, so they make it look like they're on a local TV news set. Our producer Jonathan Menhivar has been watching these newscasts all week with fascination, and he has noticed a few trends. Just like the local news, middle school newscasts tend to follow a formula.

They almost all start with the Pledge of Allegiance. This next segment from DMS News at Dibble Middle School in Dibble, Oklahoma, is a staple of almost every broadcast I watched. Okay. We have late breaking news. You will be the first to know that we have two birthdays today. Happy birthday to both Gabriel Romero and Nathan Nydell. This has to qualify as breaking news because it's school. There's not a lot of exciting stuff for them to report.

They have to tell their fellow students what the cafeteria is serving that day, when makeup pictures are being taken, and do the weather. My favorite comes from this girl, McKenna, near Buffalo, who's clearly had enough. Good morning, every's middle school. This is McKenna with today's weather. It's going to be how it is like it is now pretty much all day. In the afternoon, colder, windy and wet, with heavier rain. In the evening, Wednesday, the south of us. These newscasts are middle school in relief, like what you'd see if there was a middle school exhibit at the Natural History Museum. There are tiny kids with big ears, shy, red-faced kids, jocks, computer club kids,

completely normal, super sweet, overachieving ones. They were fun to watch. I'd forgotten that middle school kids can have this overconfident goofiness. I spent days watching kids deliver these nudescasts, and I was curious what they'd be like if they actually reported on the stories that mattered the most to them, stuff they'd never say on the morning announcements, the big headlines in their school that week.

So I found a school that was willing to play along. Parkville Middle School is just north of Baltimore, and the students there do their school. the students there do their morning announcements as a six-minute show called PTV. With the help of their teacher, Ms. Davis, the kids put out a really involved production. There's three TV cameras, a control room, and the anchor sit at one of those giant news desks. It has a PTV logo on it. Behind them, there's a backdrop of downtown Baltimore.

With Ms. Davis's help, I enlisted the kids in this experiment to write up a newscast with news from their lives. and the stories they each cared about. And they delivered. They said they had fun doing it. So I've heard that there is a new Martin Luther King Jr. statue in Washington, D.C. That statue doesn't even look like him. It looks like he has a unibrow. Our school's getting their boiler fixed,

and they talked over the announcements like it was an important thing. But it didn't really sound important to me. But I guess they thought it was important for some students and the teachers. Kids were randomly clapping at lunch, and the teachers got fed up. So last week, it was made that you're not allowed to clap. So on lunch, this one kid Raymond crept. I think he got suspended. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is banning potatoes from school lunches.

I love potatoes. They can just make them healthier or something. They don't have to ban them. The weather has been terribly cold lately. I've had to wear my ugg boots like five times in the past three weeks. I swear if I find any dirt on them anywhere, Mother Nature is going to hear from me. So over the weekend, my best friend told me he's still going trick-or-treating. He says he's going with a friend from school.

personally. I think we were all too old to be trick or shooting. Well, that is all I have for today. I'm Billy Cochran. Have a good day. Zika Bryant decided to go hyper-local with her news. She wears glasses and she had her hair pulled back with a headband. In local news, aka here at Parkville Middle, there is a lot of drama going on. Me personally, I lost most of my friends. I really missed those chicks, but I don't think they feel the same. Kaelin and Jay are my besties, and now they're gone. I still love them though, they're my sisters. Well, I don't really have too much more to say

because my life is kind of boring. So, deuses. Zakiya and I talked for a while. She told me that deuses is just another way of saying peace out. Can I ask you about your friends? What happened? Well, it was a lot of drama going on.

Some things got said and people's feelings got hurt. And some of us made up, some of us didn't, but I hope that we can. It sucks. So you're just, you're not talking to them at all? Well, actually, she's not talking to me because I called her a name and it hurt her feelings. So, yeah, she's very upset with me.

I just, I need to apologize. I didn't do that yet. I feel kind of bad about that, so I'm going to. The very last kid I talked to was Jay Awati. She sandwiched her most surprising news in between a couple other stories. My brother goes to Penn State, and he's on the football team. And I've been to all the home games, and they're a lot of fun.

The students are crazy, and they get dressed up in blue and light. It's really cool. So my friend is always depressed, and then she's, like, mad at me all the time, so I don't understand that. I was watching the news the other day, and they were talking about how President Obama... Did you catch that? About her depressed friend? I asked JF it was hard to write about her. Yeah, because I didn't want to hurt her feelings, but she really doesn't care because she said she wrote about me too.

Oh, this is... Zika. Yeah, yeah. Oh, wow, I didn't realize that her friends she was talking about were in this class. Yeah, we are. But I've known her since, like, fifth grade, so we kind of fight a lot, but we always wind up being friends in the end. What happened exactly? Nothing, really.

Just people telling other people, they... spreading rumors and drama. Middle School. Ms. Davis, the journalism teacher at Parkville Middle, is always stressing that her students be factual and truthful in their stories. The news isn't rumors and opinions. But in middle school, sometimes it's hard to remember that. It's hard to step back and look at a story from different perspectives. Jonathan Mayhivar, these days he's the executive producer of a new podcast from The Guardian

called Stateside with Kai and Carter. They're on YouTube and everywhere you get your podcasts. Act 5, Blue Kid on the Block. Last September, a kid that we're going to call Leo, not his real name, started seventh grade in a new school, and he was having a more extreme experience. He was having a harder time finding his place in middle school than other middle school kids because he was new to town.

His family had just arrived from Rochester, New York. He had that on top of everything else. Leo still loved Rochester. He loved his school there. loved his friends. Suddenly everything about his life was different and according to Leo, much, much worse. The signature in his Gmail account read, Rochester is much better in big red letters. Sarah Koenig knows Leo and his parents and visited them at home to see how Leo was doing. This is how much Leo does not want to be here. When I got to his house, he was on the sofa with a

laptop investigating Greyhound bus schedules. His mother was going to drive him and his sister back to Rochester for the Columbus Day weekend, but not until Saturday morning, and Leo wanted to get there Friday for more time with his friends. A multi-stage negotiation followed with his dad. For one thing, a bus ticket costs money. That's not a problem. Not for you. No, that wasn't a problem for you. No, but. There isn't one that's not a 6.15 in the morning. And you won't let me miss school on Friday. The bus takes eight hours. Even if you left at noon, you'd eat it. Yeah, you're going to do the math. That's excellent. Never mind that the bus takes twice as long as driving. and never mind that Leo would be alone and have to change buses,

and then his parents had no intention of letting him go through with this plan. But it's the kind of negotiation you indulge when your kid is miserable, and Leo is miserable. He told me right away he was, and then he had been from the moment he got here in August. Is this the first time in your life where you felt like you've been sad about something for this long? I think so, except for maybe when my other cat died, my old cat. And does this feel worse than that?

Yes. Oh, really? Mm-hmm. I've never had long periods of said until now. I don't know. I don't know anyone here, really. And I think it's just everything in general. That's overwhelming. Back in Rochester, Leo had known all his best friends since kindergarten or before.

They played together at school, after school, on weekends. Everybody knew everybody. Everything was comfortable. And as a sixth grader in his old school, he and his friends were at the top of the heap. They wore green sashes in the morning and got to be door monitors for the younger kids coming into the building. So imagine now, Leo takes a school bus for the first time to his new school, a sprawling, one-story building full of sixth, seventh, and eighth graders. Leo's small for his age, only a hair taller than his sister, who's only nine years old.

On day one, he knows exactly no one. It was much louder than my old school. Much louder. People talking, people closing and opening lockers, people walking. It was just noise. Just older kids, more kids, because my old school was tiny. Leo is between. He's old enough to decipher Greyhound bus schedules,

but not old enough to actually travel on one by himself. And old enough to know that if he's going to survive in middle school, he has to make friends. But that making those friends stands to be significantly more complicated than it was back in Rochester. Leo's sister, Auden, is in fourth grade. He says she's not having as hard a time of it. She hasn't been alive as long.

She hasn't made us deep connections, and she already met a friend in her school. I think it's easier to make friends in elementary school than in middle school. Oh, really? Why? Because people care less about who you are. What do you mean by that? The older you get, the more you judge people on their looks, their background, their, how they act, like what cool is for kids.

Because in kindergarten, you could just walk up to someone and say, do you want to be my friend? And they would, then that would be it. But it's harder. I just think people are more wary before they open up. They like, I don't know, in first grade, if I met someone, I wouldn't really care who they were. I would just care if they were nice or not.

The day I interviewed him, Liot had a couple of breakthroughs. He emailed his parents during the school day to tell them the first piece of good news they'd had from him. Until that day, the emails had mostly been three desperate words, I feel awful. Without even a period at the end to make the feeling finite, it was an endless awful. But on this Thursday, he wrote to tell them the mashed potatoes they serve in the cafeteria were great, followed by four exclamation points. Second, and this was the big news.

He asked another kid if he wanted to come over. Leo told me he thought about it first for a few days, and finally emailed the boy, whose name is Devin, another seventh grader. But now, Leo didn't want to call Devin's house to finalize a plan. He dreaded the awkwardness of the phone. So his dad called Devin's parents, introduced himself as Leo's father. He goes to school with your son, Evan, and we were...

Devin, I'm so sorry, Devin. I'm getting the evil look for my son. I apologize. But we're hoping Devin can come over on Sunday. Thanks. I panic. How'd that go? Not well. I thought Leo might be upset about it, maybe get sulky.

But here he was cracking up, joking with his dad. It was such a relief to hear him laugh after he'd been so solemn in our interview. And I thought this is all going to be okay. He's going to snap out of it. He's almost there. An afternoon with Devin is going to do the trick. Then Sunday came. Okay, now I have three helps again.

I could tell you a wolf to attack. Okay, I'm going to tell my wolf to attack then. Leo taught Devin how to play Dungeons and Dragons. And the wolf lands on its feet. Yay, go Wolfie, go Wolfie, go Wolfie. I am so weird. On the drive home, Leo and Devin talk nonstop, a gentle rat-tat-tat one-upmanship, emanating from deep inside a computer game.

I am a blood elf warlock. Lord Elf warlock? Warlocks are fun. Can you summon your imp yet? Uh, yeah, you start with him. Oh, right. I like, um, I had a goblin shaman. I'm a night elf druid, and I can turn into a cat at level 8, which is nice.

And it level 12, you get a bear. Yeah. By the time they dropped Evan off, they were giggling. It's funny. Our cat responds to whatever you call. We said, his name is Pipman, well, he can call him football. He can call him football. You can go on football.

You can go on football. Thanks for coming over. Thanks. Thank you for inviting me. So a perfect day, right? Leo's parents were relieved, hopeful, but no. It's Wednesday. You had your friend over on Sunday.

How'd it go? Went okay. Yeah, when okay. Has it changed anything about being here? A little bit. I don't think very much, but a little bit, yeah. What's changed? What's the last?

little bit. Then I know someone at school. It helps. Not all that much, but sort of, yeah. And this is when I realized I'd underestimated the depth of Leo's gloom, that he greets every morning of every school day with dread, and not because he's being bullied or anyone's being mean to him. I feel sick because I know that I have the whole day ahead of me, and then I have the next day and the next day, and the next day, and the next day, and the next day ahead of me. Does it pass once you get to school? No, not really. It usually increases to a climax around lunchtime,

and then I actually have been throwing up recently, and then it just stays that level of sickness until I get home. You're kidding me, you're throwing up at school? Yeah. That's awful. In the bathroom, or where? Yeah, in the bathroom. Usually at lunch, I feel.

really bad and I go to the bathroom and I throw up. Has that happened this week? Today it did. Do you tell your parents like I don't want to go? I don't want to go or do you just, you know you have to so you don't say anything? No, I throw a screaming fit. Every morning? Yeah, pretty much. I didn't today. What was different about this morning? How come you didn't today?

I felt resigned and I knew that I would have to go anyways, so I gave up. Here's the curse of being almost 13. Old enough to understand his life will supposedly get better with time, but not old enough to really believe he's going to feel any differently than he does right this minute. Since making friends with Devin, Leo is one step toward being the kid he wants to be. Someone with pals, someone who's comfortable again. But he says right now, he's just worried he's going to be throwing up all year. Sarah Kanig.

In the 15 years since we first broadcast this story, Leo has transitioned. She now lives in New York City and is pursuing a career in the arts. She says she's not happy all the time, but things are better than they were. Sarah Kain is now the host of Serial. She's working on a brand new show that I heard a draft version of. I have to say it's incredible. It is a total pleasure. It's going to be out very soon this fall.

X-6. Grande was sugar. So I've been talking to educators and one who had taught for years in high school and then moved to middle school, told me that the key difference between teaching and the two environments. was that in middle school, you have to be sympathetic to and patient with all of the emotional drama. You have to deal with that directly if you want the classroom to work. Which brings me to this next story of a student who was doing badly in a middle school in Newark, New Jersey. He was a mess. He would come in. His uniform would be dirty. He had it showered. He hadn't had breakfast. His book bag most likely had a hole in it and all of his pens and pencils had fallen out. his homework wasn't done.

And so, of course, he'd come in and he'd be angry. This is Shannon Grande, who teaches at Rise Academy Middle School, which is a public school, 91% black and Latino and eligible for free lunches, one of the KIP charter schools, hence the uniforms. I heard about this story from Elizabeth Green, who has been reporting on this school for a journalism outfit called Gotham Schools. Anyway, this teacher, Sharon Grande, says that this seventh grader would come in angry all the time. And usually someone would say something little to him like, you know, your shirt's not tucked in or... Another kid would. Yeah.

Because they, you know, they do that. They like, you know, just kind of pick at each other. And it was set him off. And then he would just be very loud and just be like, oh, why do you always have to say this to me and slam his stuff down? I hate this place. And you just go into like these very general rants. And, you know, usually that's an indicator to us. like when they use those very general statements,

that they're not processing through their emotions, that they're feeling overwhelmed. So this kid was in an unfortunate spiral. He felt isolated from the other kids just inherently because his home situation was so bad. And then he would get angry with the other kids, which then made them mad and made him more isolated. And he got worse and worse.

Through some stuff across a room and it hit a teacher. I mean, there were points where he would come in and he would refuse to do anything all day long. And he would cry. He would break out and cry in the middle class. You didn't even know why. And he couldn't explain why. One big problem for him, one reason that he was ostracized,

he didn't wash. Kids would whisper about it. And when he would get mad and then arguments would escalate, that is where it would go. You're dirty. You smell. The kids would say it right to his face. Every time, the staff found all kinds of ways to address this.

They got him clean clothes and a place to clean up before school. But the bigger problem, and that's the problem of his isolation. and his anger. Ms. Grande says it was not clear how to deal with that. They would try things, but nothing was working. And then finally one day in history class during a group work, he was trash talking, and one of the best girls in the class, one of Ms. Grande's best students, ended up in an argument with them saying terrible things. And Ms. Grande felt like, really? You two? When I pulled, I pulled the girl, and she was like, well, he brings it on. You know, he gets angry,

and then what am I supposed to say? I was like, well, you could not say that, you know? And Betty's dirty and he smells. And she's like, well, he does. And I said, I was like, I think this is a bigger conversation. So Ms. Gronde took this girl and the three other girls who had been doing group work with this boy. And she took those girls into the teacher's room. And all four of these girls were academically strong. And all of them had shown good leadership qualities in school in the past.

And she talked to them. You know, I had explained to them that he struggles just to get here every day. that I was like, you know, you wake up in the morning and you've got somebody that's getting you out of the door, giving you breakfast, making sure your clothes are clean, making sure you get a hair on time. He doesn't have that. Like, he has nobody doing that for him. And at that time, you know, I knew that the power had been off at his house, that the week before the water was shut off, that they had had part of their roof cave in. He has an elderly grandmother that he tries to take care of. And she, had been getting up in the middle of the night and wandering, and he would hear her and get up and carry her back upstairs. What was the reaction? Empathy. And she's like, I didn't know that, you know, and the other girls there were, you know, talking about that. And I was like, you know, I'm telling you something that I normally wouldn't tell another student this, you know, this is something very private, but I'm trusting that you're

mature enough to handle this. And I was like, so, you know, you're kind of breaking him down when you're doing these things. And she's like, well, can we talk to him? I was a little nervous, you know, obviously. I was really worried about it. I was like, what am I doing here? This could be really dangerous and backfire on me terribly. They started to talk and they're like, you know, when you get angry, I, you know, we, we get angry back. What do you expect us to say? And it really was just a couple minutes before the kids told Ms. Grande, we can take it from here. And she left them to talk. Afterwards, the boy told Ms. Grundy that it felt good.

It felt good that these girls knew that he was trying to deal with his anger. And since this conversation, over time, the entire class has entered this discussion with this kid. And when this kid has an outburst, they will all talk openly about his anger. Like the students say, well, you've told us you're working on this. What are you going to do differently now? And then he'd try to explain, well, you know, I'm trying to take deep breaths, you know. I'm trying to journal when I'm getting anger. I'm trying to do, you know, and he'd come up with whatever solutions he's trying to do.

But a lot of times even it wasn't about the solution, the peer pressure itself and the feeling like, you know, he'd come in and, you know, he's making these general statements like, everybody's against me. And then he's starting to feel like, okay, maybe everybody isn't against me. You know, maybe they are just frustrated with this behavior that I'm doing that I could be doing better. And so that, we started to see that impact of peer pressure. It's like you took the entire machinery of middle school dynamics and you're harnessing it to help this kid. Exactly. To harness the fact that they'll listen to peers.

Exactly. And we know they do. This is what the research shows. That in middle school you listen to peers more than you listen to anybody else. And that is working with this kid. The other day, this kid got a detention for missing part of his uniform and he started on a rant in class about how they're all against him and all the time, they're on his back and everybody's against him. and it was the end of the world, and Ms. Grande finally asked him, who's they? Who's everybody?

And he started smiling. And she asked him, what's he really upset about? And unlike in the past, he could untangle it. He could tell her. Today's program was produced by Lisa Pollock with Ben Calhoun, Sarah Canding, Jonathan, Manhevor, Brian, Reed, Robin, Semi, and Alyssa, and Nancy Updike. Our senior producer for today's show, Julie Snyder, music help today from Damien Grafe.

Production album on today's rerun from Stone Nelson, Matt Tierney, Adrian Lilly, and Ruby Schwartz. Special thanks today to Adrian Hayes, Gail, Andrews, Clay Bolton, Nishad, Corwa, Zachary Bar, Gabe Spitzer, Alicia Zuckerman, Tony, and Griffin from Radio K, Marcy Crever, Erin Trivis, Meredith Davis, and Will Yerman. Thanks today to all of our This American Life Partners. This week, they get to hear this bonus episode that we put out that is unlike any bonus episode we've ever done. It is about one of the hardest episodes of our show that we have ever produced, an episode that kind of tortured the entire staff for months as we made it. And the top of the top of the show, and the top of that particular episode, the theme that week, the show that tortured us so much,

is one that I think you'll be very surprised to hear was so difficult to hear that bonus episode and all the others. Also to get this newsletter with hot tips that I and the other producers have been sending out. The most recent newsletter, by the way, explains how we hired two actual famous people recently for our show. And then some things happened to get all that stuff. Sign up right now to be a life partner. When you do this, you'll be helping a fund the show, which we need. That's why we're going to all this trouble to join. Go to this Americanlife.org slash life partners.

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I'm Ira Glass. Back next week. with more stories of this American life.