I've been reading the first batch of journals from my sixth graders, and much of it is what you'd expect: cutely amusing from the girls; generally fairly lackluster from the boys.
And then I read Z's journal. Her family went through some tough times a couple of years back, and it caused her to be very insecure, she wrote, and she confessed that that manifested itself in a meanness that most would never expect from her. She worked her way through it, but it made her into the person she is today, she concluded. She is, in her words, someone who "give[s] grace to mean people" because one never knows what they've been through.
That's a lesson most adults don't seem to learn let alone an eleven-year-old girl.