Navigating Middle School Takes Just the Right Combination of Skills
“Strike two,” said Brian Hill as his stepdaughter Briana DeLeon, 11, rotated the dial on her red locker, searching for the number 39 through slightly crooked, wire-framed glasses. “Left, right, left,” he coached, as she spun it around. After the third misdial, her mother gave it a go. Then Hill rolled up his sleeves. “Let me try.”
After a few more strikes, a teacher parted the crowd of sixth-graders and parents at Seneca Ridge Middle School’s orientation last week in Sterling and helped Briana and her family cross the first of many potential middle school hurdles to come: opening her locker.
For the first days of school, the anxieties of moving from the familiarity of the one-teacher classroom in elementary school to a bigger, more anonymous middle school can be boiled down to a three-digit combination.
Worries include “I could be late to class,” “I could grab the wrong book” and a myth that Jack Berckemeyer, assistant executive director of the National Middle School Association, said is “passed down from generation to generation: ‘I could get locked in there.’ “
