“Hi,” said an unfamiliar voice. “I’m from Stone Mill High School. Is Danielle home?”
“Yeah, this is Danielle.”
Without preamble, the woman told her that Emily had died. “There’s going to be a wake on Friday,” she said. “Counselors will be at school if you need to talk to anyone.”
Danielle was rattled. She hadn’t been sure what was wrong with Emily, but she didn’t realize it would kill her. Emily was so young to die. Danielle had known Emily for only a few months, but she still felt sad and somewhat hollow. It was “like losing something that you never really paid a lot of attention to, but when it was gone you wish it were still around.” Danielle wasn’t a crier, but Emily’s death was so unexpected that she got slightly misty-eyed.
When Danielle nervously walked into the funeral home, she recognized only one girl, who had come with someone else. As Danielle waited in the long line to talk to Emily’s parents, she looked around the room. She felt out of place. She thought it was important that she pay her respects, but she had no idea what to say to parents whose child had just died. She glanced at the open casket and tried not to look again.
After half an hour, Danielle reached the front of the line. “I am sorry for your loss,” Danielle said to Emily’s mother.
“Who are you?” the mother asked.
“I’m Danielle. I worked with Emily in school.”
“Oh!” the mother exclaimed. “That’s so nice of you to come! We always get the papers that you guys fill out about yourselves, but we rarely get to meet anyone.” She smiled at Danielle. “Did you come here by yourself?”
“Yeah.” Danielle shrugged. “I only live a couple of blocks away so it was easy to walk here.”
Emily’s mother tapped her husband. “She came here all by herself!” she said to him, sounding touched. She turned back to Danielle. “That’s so nice of you!” She enveloped Danielle in a long hug. Danielle awkwardly hugged her back. She gazed at the plain white wall behind Emily’s mother and waited until the woman pulled away.
“Thank you so much for coming,” Emily’s mother said as she let Danielle go.
“Yeah, no problem. I’m sorry again.” Danielle shook Emily’s father’s hand and walked away.
On the cold walk home, Danielle shoved her hands in her coat. She treaded carefully along icy sidewalks, thinking about the open casket. It would be easier if you couldn’t see the dead person’s chest, she mused, because then you wouldn’t keep waiting for a breath that wouldn’t come.
When Danielle got home, she called her mother at work. “Am I weird?”
“Why would you say that?” her mother asked.
“Emily’s mom was really surprised that I went there by myself. I don’t see what’s so strange about that.”
“Well, most girls your age always need to go places with someone else, but you’ve never really been like that.” Danielle’s mother sounded proud.
______
WHY SEVENTH GRADE IS THE WORST
It is likely no coincidence that the I Hate Danielle Club formed in the seventh grade. Students nationwide told me about the anguish of their seventh-grade year. Parents told me about seventh graders’ tendencies to give out personalized apparel (like sweatshirts listing the attendees) at bar mitzvahs, such that on Mondays at school, uninvited students feel excluded again from the same event.
On the first day of biology, Laura, a Californian, made the egregious mistake of sitting next to Brittany, whose best friend, Dana, was the most popular girl in the seventh grade. Brittany and Dana ridiculed Laura, and persuaded other popular kids to join in. They made fun of her red hair, her parents, and her clothes. When she wore a sweater with a fake-fur collar, they called her an animal killer. When she explained the fur was fake, they mocked her for wearing a cheap sweater. They wrote notes with expletives on blackboards and signed Laura’s name. As Laura tried to erase a note, Dana shoved her to the floor. Brittany called her a loser. Laura couldn’t talk to the teacher; Dana was the teacher’s pet.
Dana and her friends continued to torment Laura daily. Laura’s grades dropped and she became depressed. Dana’s boyfriend shot staples into her ear. When Laura stood up, the substitute biology teacher told her she had something on her back. As Laura pulled off the KICK ME HARD sign, the class laughed and pointed. Laura tried not to let them see her cry. The substitute did nothing. Even after Laura talked to administrators and switched to another class, she remained a pariah. Laura’s social life didn’t begin to improve until high school.
Middle school has the potential to shake up a kid’s world, thanks to external and internal factors hurtling toward each other that happen to collide in approximately seventh grade. Externally, the transition from elementary school to middle or junior high school brings many changes, whether it begins in sixth or seventh grade. Elementary school children typically stay in one classroom, or travel the hallways in a teacher-led line. Except for lunch and recess, they regularly interact with the same group of classmates and within the confines of a room under adult supervision. By the end of elementary school, their social circles have been established.
Then middle school splices those circles. Middle schools begin to divide students by academic performance, separating them into tracks in various rooms with various teachers. Students have to be more responsible for themselves. Middle schools might sponsor afterschool social events, such as sports, concerts, and dances, which heighten the emphasis on having something fun to do and someone to do it with.
All of these changes would be scary enough. But perhaps the most powerful adjustment in the middle school setting is the shift from socializing during classes to socializing between them. Students are no longer anchored in one consistent classroom, which may lead them to seek that consistency in a friend group. Because they have to navigate hallways several times a day, many of their most important interactions outside of the cafeteria occur in crowded, unsupervised territories. These are the easiest areas in which students can get away with being cruel; it was in the hallways that students bullied Eli.
The middle school social scene accentuates the insecurity and confusion that students are experiencing internally. As preadolescents are thrown into this larger, complicated social pool, their cognitive abilities haven’t yet caught up to their environment. They react to certain situations with a different part of the brain than do adults, which leads to more frequent emotional gut reactions.
One of the major cognitive changes at this age is that students frequently reflect about themselves and absorb other people’s perspectives. The problem is, they don’t yet have the ability to organize these thoughts properly. At the same time, peer influence peaks from age eleven to thirteen. Middle schoolers are more likely to ask, “Where do I belong?” than “Who am I?” Their identity is so collective that one psychologist called it a “wego” instead of an ego. Students often don’t recognize that in trying to form an identity independent of their families, they end up shaping that identity with the characteristics of their social group. This is one reason why children this age believe that group membership is crucial.
Social circles are most homogenous during middle school because to define themselves by their group, students want to view that group as having clear characteristics. Therefore, they are more likely to adhere to group norms and to demand that other group members conform. Psychologists have said that this period is characterized by a “strong, if not totalitarian, press for conformity to the peer group’s expectations.” These are then the standards by which middle schoolers judge each other and reorganize their social categories.
At the same time, the standards for conformity aren’t necessarily static. Students this age change their minds about everything from fads and fashions to goals, values, and dreams. They can be rigidly idealistic without knowing how to define their ideals. Worse still, they haven’t yet developed all of the skills necessary for group problem-solving, making it more challenging for their group to agree on a stan
dard of conformity in the first place. Concordia University psychology professor William Bukowski warned, “As this consensus is elusive, the struggles for power within groups may provide nearly perfect conditions for some group members who upset a tenuous consensus to be victimized.”
Puberty then complicates all of these dynamics. Middle schoolers are more likely to hang out with older students, form opposite-sex friendships, and enter romantic relationships. They might date, play hormone-driven party games, and, as the media is fond of reporting, engage in sexual activities. With puberty comes an increase in sexual harassment and harassment about gender nonconformity (boys wearing eyeliner, girls with short hair, etc.). Furthermore, children don’t hit puberty at the same rate, which means that both early maturers and late bloomers are at risk for being seen as different.
And different, in this intransigent world in which strict group boundaries reign, can have powerful repercussions. A thirteen-year-old Midwesterner pinpointed seventh grade as the year in which her ex-boyfriend and his friends daily made fun of her breasts. “[He] would call me man chest and wrote poems about me that made me cry every night. [Another] guy called me pepperoni face because I had acne. Everybody thinks we’re the perfect blue-ribbon school and we’re all friends, which isn’t true.”
Early adolescents report more antagonistic interactions both within their groups and with outsiders than do younger and older students. The rate of cyberbullying peaks in middle school. Antagonism is strong during these years because groups most want to separate themselves from other groups when the importance of group membership peaks. They create this separation by using hostility. “Kids in middle school are, in a social sense, fascists,” psychologist David Anderegg has written. “Desirability of all kinds is rigidly circumscribed by what is seen as ‘normal.’ . . . Since they cannot impose any regularity on their bodies, they impose a rigid regularity on each other. Although this social hazing now starts earlier and earlier . . . , seventh grade is at its peak. It is a time in most kids’ lives when being different from the agreed-on norm is an absolute guarantee of social death.”
It is also a time in which students are increasingly sensitive to negative evaluations from others, and the aggressive kids vocalizing these critiques are increasingly admired. Many studies show that early adolescents value dominance and aggression, which they associate with high social status. For girls, the association of popularity with these negative behaviors plateaus in the seventh and eighth grades, at about the same time that the social goals for both genders often shift from likeability to perceived popularity.
Popularity is paramount in middle school. At no other time of life is it so important to students to be in a popular group. Yet during the grades when they are most susceptible to peer influence and most concerned about social status, they are also most prone to exclusivity—meaning, groups become most important at precisely the time when it’s hardest to get into them.
High schoolers might more easily find a home. More subcultures exist in high school than in middle school, offering more places in which to belong, and the presence of older students can create a more supportive environment. Upperclassmen are less likely to feel like they have to conform to group norms because their group boundaries aren’t so strict. In addition, their social understanding has broadened enough for them to make more sophisticated distinctions among individuals and to begin to discount stereotypes when forming opinions about their peers.
By the end of high school, students are usually less concerned with popularity and group membership. They become more self-reliant and more interested in individual friendships or romantic relationships than in traveling in a pack. They are not as vulnerable to peer influence and are less bothered by criticisms. So the sting of seventh-grade exclusion is sharper than the same treatment might have been at age six or sixteen.
With all of these issues in mind, it’s no wonder that decades of studies indicate that students experience a drop in self-esteem in early adolescence, at the time that they make the transition into middle school. When these various external and internal factors converge, the resulting panicked confusion can cause some kids to take desperate coping measures to restructure their worlds—which might explain why seventh graders were so desperate to belong that they formed a group so expansive that the only person excluded was Danielle.
Chapter 9
WHY LABELS STICK: THE MOTIVATIONS OF THE NORMAL POLICE
After only a few days or weeks of unsuccessful attempts to find a table at which to fit in, some of the cafeteria fringe opt to escape the lunchroom entirely. At lunchtime, Blue ate in Ms. Collins’ room, Joy went to biology, and Danielle usually went home. Eli was fortunate to find fellow “nerds” in his senior year lunch period; as a junior, he ate in the library. Noah sat in the cafeteria, but was unhappy there.
Why do so many students believe they must sit at the same cafeteria table with the same people every day? Why don’t they view lunchtime as an opportunity to socialize with new people? Why are students convinced that once they are part of a group or cafeteria table—or shunned from one—they cannot change their situation?
Trey, a senior at an all-boys school in Connecticut, is, to his classmates, a musclehead. They use that label because he works out, takes protein supplements, talks frequently about lifting, tends to pick up heavy items—and people—and because he sometimes doesn’t think before he acts. Trey doesn’t always mind the label, however, because some classmates admire him for his strength. But there is more to Trey than weightlifting. Few people know, for example, that in his free time he sings and writes poetry.
Sometimes people exclude Trey from activities because they’re afraid he’ll hurt them. They tell him he hugs too hard. He doesn’t mean to. He doesn’t know his own strength. “Watch where you’re going, you lummox!” a student shouted when Trey turned a corner and accidentally knocked him over. Some classmates call him Caveman, insinuating that he is “big, stupid, and hairy.” For years, Trey’s older brother called him Lenny in front of his friends and said that Trey couldn’t hang out with them because he was “too much like Lenny.” Trey didn’t know what his brother was talking about until he read Of Mice and Men, and was crushed. His brother was calling him a clumsy oaf who broke or killed practically everything he touched. The worst part of the name-calling, Trey said, is that “once you gain a label, you can’t really lose it, no matter what.”
Teenagers change their minds about a lot of things. They change their minds about their favorite songs and TV shows and regularly ricochet from crush to crush. But they do not easily allow each other to change their minds about social labels. Why do those labels stick?
Many studies show that once students slap a label onto someone, they don’t want to remove it. It can be difficult for the child who was socially awkward, nerdy, timid, or odd in elementary or middle school to change his reputation, even if he alters his behavior—and especially if he attends a small school. The major exception occurs when one’s status drops; classmates are only too eager to acknowledge a peer’s downward mobility by demoting her to a so-called freak, slut, or loser.
In the early 1900s, a German gym teacher told the popular students in her class ahead of time to defy her classroom instructions. When the teacher asked her students to raise their right hands during a calisthenics exercise, the popular children instead raised their left. After class, students recalled that the unpopular students were the ones who disobeyed the teacher. Subsequent experiments conducted by psychologists have had similar results.
Here’s why. As previously discussed, when social circles form, group members inevitably develop stereotypes about each other and about outsiders’ traits and behaviors. They might initially base these assumptions on first impressions—and first impressions cling. Beyond those impressions, as University of Pennsylvania education professor Stanton Wortham has written, people “ ‘rent’ categories from the society in order to make sense of themselves and others. These categories o
f identity often come packaged in larger models that show habitual characteristics, relationships, and events involving recognizable types of people.”
One reason labels stick is that when we place someone into a category, we expect him to behave in a way that’s consistent with that category. That’s why students who defy those expectations might become cafeteria fringe or further marginalized. For some groups, the inconsistency is too confusing to handle. As a result, they also tend to interpret inconsistent behaviors more negatively than might be warranted. Many students told me a version of this description: “I feel like I have to act and look the way I am perceived. I can’t wear anything too low-cut because I’m the ‘innocent one.’ I can’t goof off because I’m the ‘smart responsible one,’ ” said a California junior. “In most ways I am those things. But sometimes, when I do things that are unlike me, I get looks as if I’m not acting like I should act.”
This reaction to inconsistency can apply to racial stereotypes as well. A Maryland high school teacher said, “Students who break away from stereotypes are often somewhat ostracized from the ‘race group’ as a whole. When black or Hispanic students do things that are considered ‘un-black’ or ‘un-Hispanic,’ they tend to lose friends,” an observation supported by many of my student interviews.
Labels stick because people want them to stick. It’s easier to sort out your social world when everyone stays in her place. Consistency is less taxing than inconsistency. It’s less work for the brain. Several studies have shown that teenagers are more likely to remember behavior that conforms to stereotypes than behavior that doesn’t. Similarly, it’s easy for our brains to misremember behavior that does not conform to our expectations, which explains why the German students assumed it was the unpopular students, rather than the popular, who had disobeyed instructions.
Psychologists have a name for this set of expectations based on social status. “Reputational bias” typically surfaces during elementary school, as children address their need to begin compartmentalizing their social environment. Adults, too, have this type of memory process. Canadian researchers asked experienced judges to score the short programs of fourteen figure skaters. Six of the judges had heard of only half of the skaters; the other six knew of only the other half. The judges gave significantly higher scores to the skaters whose names were already familiar—particularly for technical merit, a supposedly objective measure. “Why is the exact same skating performance being given higher marks when it is evaluated by judges who know the positive reputation of the athlete versus when she is unknown?” asked the researchers. The answer, they concluded, was that a reputational bias exists, despite clear official guidelines that judges should evaluate “without bias . . . uninfluenced by audience approval/disapproval, the reputation and/or the past performance of the skater.”
The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory, and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School Page 27