Then there are the boys and girls who always have felt as if they didn't quite fit. Perhaps these are the touch oriented or auditory learners in a world where they're told to sit still and be quiet. Maybe they're musical and artistic dreamers out of touch with more pragmatic peers. Maybe they have differently timed learning clocks. When a child enters junior high, the trauma of adolescence is added to the school experience.
Unstable families make another volatile compound.
Anger may no longer be subdued by conventions of behavior. The child who was always just a little out of place may attack a world that, to him or her, is illogical and cruel. They make up a true curriculum because it is a body of instruction the student learns at school, just as she or he learns to write or to calculate interest rates. It is a curriculum because it is created and taught at school. Local cultural differences make up the matrix, but the covert curriculum is formed out of practices inside classrooms, hallways, libraries and cafeterias, at assemblies and school-sponsored events.