Students are doing a presentation. At one point, they perform a skit that takes place in a school. The student teacher explains the assignment.
"You're going to read a book about the migration of whales." Snickers throughout the audience. Even I smile. What an arbitrary topic.
A student in the the skit asks, "What do you think is in it?"
The student teacher replies without a pause, "Whales."
Raucous laughter in the audience. One young man, a constant and consistent performer who sometimes doesn't know how to get attention, falls out of his chair he's laughing so hard. More wild howls. I smile slightly, not at the joke but at everyone's joy in it.
Sixth graders are in that precarious in-between moment. They're not really children but they're certainly not teenagers. That leads to an innocence that was always lacking in my experience with eighth graders. Just two years apart and so very different. The sixth graders laugh at just about anything; eighth graders laugh at almost nothing. And it's because of this innocence, which is born out of a lack of self-awareness. Sixth graders don't worry about being cool; they don't concern themselves with the opinions of others; they don't worry that they might raise eyebrows with their silliness. They are purely and completely themselves.
But it won't last. Already, a growing awareness that they are no longer children tempers some of their behaviors. Not everyone. Not even a majority. But here and there (one or two out of a class of twenty-four, the size of most of my classes -- how fortunate I am to teach in such an environment), they are beginning to try to see themselves as others might see them, to allow themselves to be affected by that oft-mistaken self they are sure others detect in them. Already, some are beginning to realize that, in the eyes of the world, they should hide bits of themselves from others. They are losing a bit of themselves, transforming those bits into something a little more angular, a little more defensive. It's not simply maturity: it's a bit of burgeoning cynicism, that poison that corrupts us out of our childhood self-abandon and gets us thinking that perhaps all is not right with the world, that maybe there are some out there we should be wary of.
The ubiquity of social media has killed this innocence off with ever-increasing rapidity in each successive cohort, and it has done the job more thoroughly. Not only do kids these days have to worry about what those in their immediate vicinity might think about them; the surreptitiously-posted social media content makes it possible to spread their perceived social mistakes to an infinitely larger audience. Not only are their friends and acquaintances making snap judgments about them; strangers are doing the same. I anticipate a time when this pushes the boundary between childhood innocence and teenage/adult hyper self-awareness back another year, maybe two. And that will be another shameful victim of our social media obsession.