Man, what kind of crazy ass 5th graders to you know? By and large, these are 10-year-olds.
A friend of mine who teaches 5th grade says that for the first half of the year, the kids are regular kids. After Christmas, they start turning into little teenagers. Sure, they’re still young, but the hormones are ramping up and the long knives start to come out when it comes to social stuff. I was a pretty sheltered 5th grader, and I remember discussing kissing and make-up endlessly with my friends.
Ditto- the tweens are scarier than the teens, I swear. Even my tom boy goddaughter is getting all girly, wanting to wear make up and slutty clothes- she’s 11. :eek:
A trick question? No. And it’s not easier to be popular. Each position on the social ladder has it’s up sides and down sides. Popularity is not a fixed mark and the one on top this academic year can be the one on the bottom the next–sometimes within the school year or even within a week. Lots of kids (most I imagine) have no idea why they’re popular, so have no idea how to maintain it. To reach that pinnacle and then fall is just as hard as to not reach it. I’m not sure why you can’t see that there are other as painful dynamics working in any peer group (in school at least).
I cannot help you. I mean this nicely–you might want to talk to someone about all this. I don’t know how old you are, but this still bothers you (and if it was as bad as you say, I can see why).
Is it unfortunate that those kids picked on you and hurt you? Absolutely. They were out of line. Some of those kids were most likely nice to other kids, and friendly and able to get along with other peers as well. It is not a one way street, really. Most young kids are willing to be open to a new kid, if that kid extends him/herself to them.
I am not saying you brought it on yourself. I am saying that I find it hard to believe that someone who is a self-professed “loner” brought nothing to the table that either fostered the meanness or exacerbated the relationships. “Weird” kids can be defiantly proud of their weirdness, even playing it up (I’m not saying you did this, but I’ve seen it when I was a kid). Unconventional can be great, but when taken to extremes, it’s threatening to others. Perhaps the kids were responding to that. Perhaps they were just a bunch of jerks–day in and day out for 12 years, but even you admit that it wasn’t all the other kids–so there must have been some who either ignored you or tolerated your “weirdness”. I think we’re all pretty weird, once the surface is scratched…
The schools should do more, but it is not solely up to them. Where were your parents? What about other siblings? Where were you–did you involve figures of authority? (lots of kids who are bullied don’t). Realistically, there is only so much the school CAN do.
Wanting to wear make-up and dress girly isn’t what was discussed originally.
My suspicions are still that the number of 10-year-olds who actually act slutty (not dress like the the cultural norm which is to look like a $2.00 whore), dabble in drugs and alchohol, or even have raging hormones is teeny.
These stories all sound like “friend of a friend” urban legend crap and feed very nicely into the “kids these days” notion that the next generation is going to hell in a hand basket due to their crappy parents and generalized depraved times - something that has been with us since the Ancient Greeks.
Average age of menstration is lowering in the country, but is some time after 10. Boys hit puberty even later, so, again, raging hormones just isn’t going to be a factor in a 10-year-old. I have had 3 of such creatures grow up in my home and seen them and their friends at length from the ages of 0 to 17, 19, and 21. Compared to when I grew up (late sixties/early seventies) they and their friends are prudes.
and
In both these cases, you are describing one child inserted into a homogenous group. That is very different from what I think of as the “cousin” senario: I have a huge family (mom is one of 12, I am one of 6), and growing up, I was surrounded by people of all ages: cousins and siblings and younger aunts and uncles. This is great for social development because you get a much clearer idea of what the standards of behavior are for people a little older than you. If you are the most popular/smartest/coolest person in your age group, there are plenty of people a little older than you to cut you down to size: if you are small/shy/awkward, there are plenty of younger people who think you are the bomb because you can color inside the lines. Obviously, there are lots of really good reasons to educate kids in age groups, but in a world of small families it’s really suprisingly easy for a kid to socialize only in age groups, from school to sunday school to play groups to sports teams and camp. In these sorts of circumstances, kids learn how older kids act through TV and movies and books, not real observation.
The axiom among middle school teachers is that sixth graders get hormones for Christmas. This doesn’t mean they go out and start doing drugs and having sex, but it does mean they start transforming from fairly sensible, orderly, sweet and eager to please little people into total messes that have bizarre emotional outbreaks, react unpredictably to things, become forgetful and unpleasant and smelly. It can be a shock.
Which is why I said “in extreme circumstances.”
And I am the youngest of 5 and was consistently left out of the older sibs stuff at home and when we visited our 4 cousins. I was not that much younger (2 years) than my next sib/cousin. It was NOT one big happy family.
Having been separated by age throughout my entire schooling (until grad school), I can say it worked fine for me. There is variation within each class of almost 3 years (just turned 5 to been 6 for a few months for K, for example), plus, even in schools where they do grade centers, there is a mix of kids- grades 1-3 etc. I truly don’t see the advantage for the older kids to be surrogate teachers all the time in a scenario like you describe. Yes, they learn patience, but they also need to learn math facts and social studies etc. I wouldn’t want to see a school with 5th graders mixed with 1st–there is too much to learn and not enough hours in the day, IMO. What would be great is if and older class and a younger one were together for other activities. That just occurred to me and I need to think about it (not that I am any sort of arbiter for elementary ed!)…
I did an open school format - first through third graders shared classrooms and fourth through sixth graders shared classrooms. It was an interesting approach, but not without problems. A few of us had worked our way through the entire sixth grade curriculum by early or mid fifth grade - and since there wasn’t a provision to send us on to Junior High, we were stuck doing true independent study - which really wasn’t the utopia you’d think it would be. Many of the kids who were advanced in fifth grade when they finished then had the “opportunity” to spend a year and a half getting lazy - and took it! As it was, with all those ages in a classroom to teach (think about a one room schoolhouse), the teachers didn’t really have time to dedicate to everyone. Not that a better system couldn’t be implemented - this one struck me as poorly thought out even as a fifth grader.
The socialization for this wasn’t actually as big a deal as 'what to do with kids as they finish the program early." Since it was open school, you “hung” with kids your age, even if you were working on different units in Math.
My parents told me to ignore the bullies and not get too upset by them, but it was hard for me. I just wanted people to be nice to me or leave me alone. My little sister (my only sibling) defended me a lot when people her age (she was only two grades behind me) made fun of me. I never asked her to or tried to make it her problem…she did it because she loved me. (And people went as far as to go up to her and directly ask her things like “Why’s your sister so weird? Aren’t you embarrassed?” Multiple people did that.)
I involved authority figures in elementary school, and got labeled as a wussy crybaby for it by the mean kids, but I did it anyway because I was so miserable. In middle school, a boy made sexually explicit jokes at my expense in study hall and then grabbed my breast, and I reported him to the principal and he got suspended from school. In retaliation, his girlfriend stole my street clothes when I was in gym class and put them in the toilet, including my shoes, and I had to wear my stinky gym clothes all day. After that, I was so humiliated I never told on anyone again, even when people ganged up on me and beat me up a few times. But it wasn’t like these things didn’t happen in school, in view of teachers and other kids. They weren’t a secret; the grownups just didn’t care enough to intervene.