449: Middle School

23:30Plan required. $15 per month equivalent. Taxes and fees extra. Initial plan term only. Greater than 50 gigabytes may slow when network is busy. Includes up to 20 gigabyte hotspot. Capable device required. Availability, speed, and coverage varies. See mintmobile.com. This is American Life, America Glass. a trick on our show. Of course, we 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 to hear other people's stories about it and what they went through.

24:08We 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 Mimis 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.

24:49Instead 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 Jordache jeans? Yes, Mimi, I do Do I look rich in my new Nikes, 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 Mimis 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

25:48At 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 white 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.

26:27My 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 Mimis 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.

27:08No one acted like it was peculiar, especially those in the family who didn't speak English or could not understand the Mimis when they showed up at family gatherings. Yo no puedo hablarlo espanolo, one of the Mimis 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 chick who just happened to show up at this barrio party. But only after two or three beers.

27:44Mimi, how did you like my Spanish? Oh, Mimi, it's getting really good. Mimi, do you think they understood me? Oh, Mimi, who cares?

27:55Soon, the Mimis 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 Knott's 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 JCPenney and had Mom pay for it. Me and my brother Dan and our oldest sister Sylvia, we just kind of stank from the heat and dealt with it.

28:29Even 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 Mimis looked their best. None of the rest of us would question it, even though it felt wrong. I was often left with the Mimis' 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.

29:11Almost 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 this spree-making baggy boy shirts now, too? So to change the subject, I slugged him high in the chest and ran away.

29:45He chased me down to punch me back and left me crying in my girl's blouse.

29:56If she had any guilt about giving the Mimis the lion's share of the clothing budget, I imagine the justification my mother probably used was that my older brother and I would just ruin our clothes, working with Dad under the greasy tracks. It made better sense for the Mimis to be in high fashion than for the feral boys to wreck new clothes. Mimi, you look just like Jennifer Beals in Flashdance. 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 with short, skinny people.

30:36People 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 20-20 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 Mimis and Syl 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.

31:17They 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 Mimis, 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, your roots are showing. We packed up Mom, the Mimis, and Sylvia in the beige 1980 Pontiac Bonneville.

31:58already in antique on its second engine and failing transmission, and they drove out of Brownsville.

32:11A year later, I took this ride 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 Mimis, the reality of this first trip. Sadly, I think it was childhood's end for the Mimis. The vineyards had somehow inverted their secret garden, and the low door in the wall had closed shut behind them.

32:49When they first reached California, the Mimis 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 in Flashdance out in the fields, where the sun sizzled any inch of exposed skin. She wore a spaghetti-strapped, red-and-white striped esprit 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 Canon AE-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.

33:31Eventually, 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, unstylish denim and work boots, with a bandana covering her nose and mouth, or else she would have died 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 grape fields 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.

34:11And 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 Mimis again They were gone, and it was Marge and Mary that returned to 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 Mimis go We all were When they were at their peak, the Mimis 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.

34:59And 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. that we were a gift to everyone who was lucky enough to get caught in their Anais, Anais, the Mimis. They made all of us Americans.

35:30Domingo 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.

35:47Act four, 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 Pleasanton, 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.

36:26Students 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 backdrop so they make it look like they're on a local TV news set. Our producer Jonathan Menjivar 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.

37:04Okay. 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, Ambrose 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.

37:37In the afternoon, colder, windy, and wet, with heavier rain. In the evening, winds to the south of Asher 50. 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 newscasts, 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.

38:20Amanda, we need to get out of my shot. 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 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. Girls, don't forget to watch your hair. I see Amanda especially. I see you're sitting right on your mic. With Ms.

38:51Davis' 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.

39:24So last week, a rule was made that you're not allowed to clap. So at lunch, this one kid, Raymond, clapped. 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.

39:56Personally, I think we were all too old to be trick-or-treating. Well, that is all I have for today. I'm Billy Cochran. Have a good day.

40:06Zakiya 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, a.k.a. here at Parkville Middle, there is a lot of drama going on. Me personally, I lost most of my friends. I really miss those chicks, but I don't think they feel the same. Kaylin 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, deuces. Zakiya and I talked for a while. She told me that deuces is just another way of saying peace out.

40:40Can 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. And, you know, 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, you know, 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 Awaddy. She sandwiched from a surprising news in between a couple other stories.

41:30My 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 white. 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.

42:01Oh, this is... Zikiya. 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. So... What happened exactly? Nothing, really. Just people telling other people things, spreading rumors and drama. Middle school.

42:33Ms. 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.

42:56Jonathan Manjivar. 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.

43:09Act 5, blue kid on the block. Last September, a kid that we're going to call Leo, not his real name, started seventh grade at 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. He 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.

43:47Sarah 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...

44:19There isn't one. There isn't one at 9.6.15 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 that 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 that he had been from the moment he got here in August.

44:49Is this the first time in your life where you've 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 sad until now. I don't know. I don't know anyone here, really. And I think it's just everything in general. It's overwhelming.

45:27Back 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.

45:59On 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.

46:40He says she's not having as hard a time of it. She hasn't been alive as long. She hasn't made as deep connections, and she's 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, 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 that would be it. But it's harder.

47:24I 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.

48:03Second, and this was the big news, he asked another kid if he wanted to come over. Leo told me he'd thought about it first for a few days, then 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 from my son. I apologize, but we're hoping Devin can come over on Sunday. Thanks. I panicked.

48:41How'd that go? Not well.

48:46This is my son, Freddy. 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 health 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!

49:23Go Wolfie! I am so weird. On the drive home, Leo and Devin talk nonstop, a gentle rat-a-tat one-upmanship, emanating from deep inside a computer game. I am a blood elf warlock. Warlocks are fun. Can you summon your impet? 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 at level 12, you get a bear. Yeah. By the time they dropped Devin off, they were giggling. Yeah, you start with... Our cat responds to whatever you call. We said, his name is Pippin, and we can call him football. We can call him football.

50:05You can call him football. You're football. Thanks for coming over. Thanks. Thank you for inviting me. See you tomorrow. See you. 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, went 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 little bit? Then I know someone at school. It helps. not all that much but sort of yeah

50:56and 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 um 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.

51:38You'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. I knew that I would have to go anyway. so I gave up.

52:20Here'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.

52:51Sarah Koenig. 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 Koenig's 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.

53:16Back six, Grande with 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 in 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 hadn't showered. He hadn't had breakfast.

53:50His 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 KIPP 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.

54:30Or the kid would. Yeah, because they do that. They like, you know, just kind of pick at each other. And it would 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.

55:06And 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. Threw 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'd just, he would cry. He would break out and cry in the middle class. He 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.

55:39You're dirty. You smell. The kids would say it right to his face. Over 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 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 him saying terrible things. And Ms. Grande felt like, really?

56:12You too? When 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. That being. 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. Grinder 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 the school in the past.

56:44And 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 the 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.

57:25and 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.

58:00I 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 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 Miss 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.

58:41Like 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. I'm trying to journal when I'm getting angry. I need to 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 he'd come in and 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. Maybe they are just frustrated with this behavior that I'm doing that I could be doing better.

59:16And so 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.

59:50And 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.

1:00:22Well, today's program was produced by Lisa Pollack with Ben Calhoun, Sarah Canning, Jonathan Manjivar, Brian Reed, Robin Semme, and Alyssa Shippon, Nancy Updike. Our senior producer for today's show, Julie Snyder. Music helped today from Damien Grafe. Production off on today's rerun from Stone Nelson, Matt Tierney, Adrienne Lilly, and Ruby Schwartz. Special thanks today to Adrian Hayes, Gail Andrews, Clay Bolton, Nishad Korwa, Zachary Barr, Gabe Spitzer, Alicia Zuckerman, Tony and Griffin from Radio K, Marcy Creaver, Aaron Trevis, Meredith Davis and Will Ureman. Thanks today to all of our This American Life partners.

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