Friday, April 11, 2014

School Days

Recently I visited the Catholic school I attended for grades 6th, 7th and 8th. The reason for which arises from my son's middle-school experience. Despite his steady academic performance, he has had difficulty adjusting to a large, public middle-school environment with a diverse demographic that draws from a large swath of our township.
Some people say we never really get out of the high-school mode. To some extent, I feel like I've never really gotten out of middle school. So, K-5 I attended public school. For 6th, 7th and 8th grades,  Catholic school. I served as an altar boy. In fact, I was pretty much like the captain of the altar boys, until I quit. The priest who was in charge didn't molest me physically, but, alas, psychologically. At any rate, now my kids want to attend the same Catholic school to which I went. So when I recently visited that school, emotions came to the fore. Some three decades-plus later, I find discomfiting the thought that that I haven't fully progressed beyond the time I spent there. After having visited, or, rather, revisited, the school I attended, I'm still partially caught in the same mind-set.
After we went there, I dug up my yearbook from that school (yes, I still have my middle-school yearbook), replete with all the messages from the girls about how we became such good friends and how they wanted me to visit them over the summer and how much they loved me.  I imagine that the girl upon whom I had a crush, all these years later, would be the same person. I've even had dreams that I was back at that school, and Sister Luke, having aged not at all, was there to greet me. It was her brother, at the time a priest,who most messed with me psychologically.
I've read articles that say kids these days spend too much time with their parents, depriving them of taking risks of their own, and I've read articles about people who home-school their kids because of the damage inflicted by the school setting itself. Primarily high school. Apparently, studies have revealed that most people on Facebook connect with their high-school friends.
Perhaps I should have learned something from having encountered, a few years out of middle school, that person upon whom I had a crush and treated badly: She didn't appear to have much recollection at all. Such is the curse of memory.
So now my own kids are at or approaching the stage that I feel I've never completely escaped. Do, experiences at this stage of life disproportionately affect who people become? And what do I do about it? Should I be supportive and engaged, or should I give them more latitude to become the people they were meant to be? So far, I've tended to be involved, largely because they seem to want me to be.
One article addresses self-perception versus the perceptions of others. I was a jock and a good student, but I never considered myself as self-assured as others did. Apparently there are ramifications that carry through to adult life. I struggle as much now as I did then, but nobody really knows. And for my own children, how do I decide when I haven't escaped middle school myself?