Assigned Seating Next Time

CAMBRIDGE—This summer, I’m teaching middle school, but it’s not the middle school I remember. On the first day, my literature class spent fifteen minutes hiding before shuffling into chairs, with three feet between the girls’ and the boys’ desks. “Assigned seating next time,” I thought. But I didn’t bargain for one-on-one confrontations with my students who persistently refused to sit next to anyone of the opposite sex. It is my third week as a teacher at Summerbridge Cambridge, a tuition-free enrichment program for students from Cambridge public schools. Only now can I coax and cajole my class into a boy-next-to-girl seating arrangement. One battle is won, but the war is far from over.

As soon as I put my class in groups to work on acting out a vocabulary word or preparing a debate case, they are endlessly in motion, sliding back and forth across the classroom, jumping up from their seats, running in and out of our door. They scream, whine and fight unless I let Hermela, Mercedes and Shavon be one group, while Justin, Hassan and Elon remove themselves to the other side of the room.

Oh, the good old days. When I was in 6th and 7th grade, people warned me that I was going through the hardest time. It was hard—we got graded for the first time, I felt excluded by cliques—but because I went to an all-girls’ school, I never experienced a classroom, cafeteria, or gym with boys.

Teaching at Summerbridge has been a slap in the face (picture it from an 11-year-old with a chalk-filled eraser in his hand). I’m struck daily by the difficulties of teaching, of disciplining students, of being white in a mostly minority group. But seeing what school is like with girls and boys in the same classroom makes me glad that I didn’t experience it until college.

In seventh grade at my school, we spent class time learning. But in my literature sections at Summerbridge, I see the girls trying to learn, ready with their paper and sharp pencils at the beginning of class, raising their hands with questions. The boys devilishly run away from me, insult me, jump out of their chairs, or poke each other. I can’t generalize: I know that in other classrooms at Summerbridge, not to mention in the rest of the world, girls act up and boys behave well. But I find myself expending all my energy on my male students, having time to consider my female students only when I feel a flash of guilt looking at them with their hands raised. “I can’t call on you until it’s quiet,” I say. There are activities and reading material I know would work well for the girls, but the boys will have none of it. And I know I could get the boys in my class to work happily on another type of lesson, but the girls would be sluggish. Everyone told me I was being saved from this kind of situation by going to a single-sex school. I see the benefit of my all-girls education now.

While classroom dynamics are difficult, I feel even more sorry for both sexes outside the classroom, where middle school consciousness of gender looms over my students more than anything, except maybe the MCAS. Today at lunch, my table of girls decided they weren’t going to eat lunch for fear they might gain weight. While these 11-year-old girls agonize over every sandwich, their male counterparts are showing off their muscles and manhandling smaller boys to flaunt their strength. One of my students doesn’t understand that sports aren’t everything—that physical strength can only take you so far. And dress—brands, labels, fit, color—become a matter of worry or consuming pride, a friendship maker or breaker.

At the time when they are forming identities, it seems that society is handing these middle schoolers pre-packaged gender roles. At our talent show last week, the final—and most popular—song was “Take Ya Home” by the supposed fiancé of most of my female students: the rapper Lil BowWow. The chorus, which several female students sang in the background while dancing provocatively, glorifies the rapper, ending: “I mean you run through my mind like all the time to the point that I just wanna take ya home.” I found this song and the fact that several girls were singing it to one of their male classmates, very troubling. These influences pervade any school, but I see them played out daily before me: on the basketball court where the boys won’t let the girls play and in the cafeteria where the girls tease the boy who is short.

Clearly, single-sex education is not the easy solution to rescue gender-tortured middle-schoolers. In my all-girls enclave, middle school was far from a breeze. My class dealt with eating disorders, exclusive discussions of dating and the cool jeans to wear. Although I avoided the sexual tension during classes and the need to impress my crushes during recess, identity angst will never be far from middle-schoolers.

I also happen to think that my students are lucky to be hashing out their gender identities while still in training bras. For me, learning to relate to the opposite sex had to come sometime, and while I had small jolts of it during high school, I look at the beginning of college as my middle school, condensed into a few months. The first few weeks of my first year were nerve-racking. I wondered whether it was really okay for me to see boys without taking extra care to make myself look good. I had trouble identifying flirtatious behavior. In my case, arriving at college was perhaps similar to finding oneself in a newly developing body during middle school.

I may still not be the expert on gender relations, but any help I can give my students might just lay aside some of the terrors of middle school. And maybe then, in the long run, it’s good that the boys and girls are learning how to deal with each other and societal expectations now. It doesn’t get any easier.

Claire A. Pasternack ’05, a Crimson editor, is a history and literature concentrator in Winthrop House. As a teacher this summer, she has seen more middle school boys than ever before and has fallen in love with the Cambridge Public Schools.