What happens when we're not quite done growing

Do you remember that field trip I mentioned before?

Three resolved teachers and three brave parents took eighty-five fidgety eighth-graders to the Museum of Tolerance at the end of a long week of testing.

Learning to cherish hose rare moments when you know they're
getting it  (left on my desk after reading Gary Soto's "Oranges")

We were ready, let me tell you.

About a third of the students have been listening to a beautiful audio recording of Elie Wiesel's Night. The rest watched and read background information about the Holocaust and took on poster projects. All students have been analyzing and reflecting on bias, prejudice, the power of rhetoric, censorship, and discrimination through To Kill a Mockingbird. 

We were ready.

After traffic-mired bus ride, a jaunt around a West Hollywood park, and an inconceivably long wait in line (fifteen minutes, according to them, is forever), our intrepid scholars entered the museum and began their collective and individual journeys. 

And what journeys they were. The kids were dazzled by the interactive displays. They liked being asked their opinion. They benefitted from moving from activity to activity every five minutes or so.

But when our tour guide went on her lunch break and I realized that I had been left without a parent chaperone, it was just my twenty-six wards and I who began our trek through the Holocaust exhibit itself. What I saw in my students began to dishearten me. They were so worried about where to stand, where to sit, whom to be next to, whispering about the accents, the colors, the most insignificant details. I am strict and have expectations and was experiencing the exhibit for the first time myself. I put the students in order, separated the talkers, shepherded them from display to display as the lights and audio moved us along, clarified ill-timed questions. But it became hot. There weren't enough sits. The amount of information became greater and greater. Students were tired. Thirsty. Having difficulty concentrating.

By the time we reached the rooms that modeled an actual concentration camp, culminating in a gas chamber, I was dismayed by the students' reluctance to be absorbed by the experience. Despite warnings, they whispered through the apex of the tour, as we watched a nauseating procession of pictures and videos of actual victims undressing and walking to their deaths. The bodies afterward. The horrors exacted on them. 

We moved to the final video in the next room, the concluding question being presented ("What will you do? How will you stand up for change?"), I wondered about these kids, my kids. Was their apathy and lack of visibly being moved by what they had seen evidence that they were destined not to stand up for change? Had I failed somehow to prepare them to be empathetic participants? Were they even capable of absorbing what they were seeing?

As we swayed in our seats on the bus ride back to school, the students were noisy, silly, exhausted. A few friends launched into a round of fat jokes. Then a homeless person joke. I stopped them, exasperated, trying to lead them to make a connection between what they had just experienced and the hurtfulness of stereotyping others for the sake of getting a laugh. Repeating silently to myself over and over Their pre-frontal cortex is not developed. They are middle schoolers. Their pre-frontal cortex is not developed. They are middler schoolers. The students stopped and began jovially discussing other topics. They are good kids, I reminded myself. They had proven before that they could understand themes and abstract ideas. They were just tired today.

"Why so serious, Miss?" one student pondered my tightly drawn face with genuine concern. "Don't you want to be happy?"

And I thought about the weight of my disappointment, how I had set my expectations high, so high. Can thirteen-year-olds behave during a tiring three-hour tour? Yes. With difficulty, yes. Can they, in those circumstances, act and reflect like adults on atrocities against and by humanity? 

Probably not. Maybe a few.

My students are still growing. And they are very much verbal processors. Some of them, perhaps, saw or heard something that will stay with them and change them. Maybe they will tell stories about this field trip, its pivotal impact, when they become human rights activities and social workers. And probably most of them will remember a long, hot day on a field trip, when they got to play soccer at the park with friends, the slightly grumpy teacher, and an all together not terrible Friday.

The irony is not lost on me. After this trip to the Museum of Tolerance, I will remember more acutely what I see every day in the classroom: despite how wildly they howl in protest, junior highers are children who are only just in the process of developing an ability to be uncomfortable for the sake of others. Most of their world revolves around themselves. And it's going to be a slow, difficult journey to change that. 

Don't get me wrong. Some students are getting lunch detention next week. But all in all, I'm proud of my students. I'm going to hold them accountable to keep trying. And yet when they act very much like the kids they are, I'm going to be a little more patient. A little more tolerant.