They demand that their jeans be clean, but they react to a hot steaming shower much as you might expect a cat to react. If I am to believe what he tells me, there are no projects that he should start working on now and there are no papers for me to sign. You know when you've sent a check to school with a middle-schooler, because it never clears the bank. The only things you can be certain a middle-schooler will eat are the erasers on his pencils and the tips of his pens. Or something from the nacho and caffeine food groups.
Middle school is, from what the parents of boys can tell, a single-sex education.
There is more homework in middle school, but middle-school boys still believe they can finish it in 10 minutes. And they do. And it looks like it. Middle-schoolers care nothing about punctuation, and complete sentences take too long to write. But that is not what they say to me.