Your memories of seventh grade, painful, weird, tumultuous, humorous, maybe awesome, hormonal, changing, smelly, ambiguous, daring. Its survival of the fittest clicks, trying to find your tribe in sense of belonging, seeking acceptance and often finding rejection. It's a testellation of feelings between a lation and rage and hope and despair. It's the end of the world. You're the center of the world and of the universe. You aren't a child anymore, nor are you an adult. You are a secret who you are and who you will become. And this is what makes you great. The seventh grade is full of the pitfalls of embarrassment, smelly, changing, burgeoning ideas, manic emotions. It's one of the hardest years of life. When searching the internet for help and surviving seventh grade, advice reads like a how to guide to avoid embarrassment. You trip in front of the boy you like, how can you recover? You throw up in front of the girl you like in all your friends, failing to test, and all your friends ace it, async a test when everyone else fails. A boy you don't like tries to kiss you. You try to hold hands with a girl you have a major crush on. Changing clothes in the locker room for the first time, going brawn, feminine, product shopping for the first time, getting dropped off at the movies or the mall, unsupervised by an adult for the first time. I wonder if we try and spend the rest of our lives avoiding the whole mess of seventh grade. When people learn I'm a seventh grade teacher, they use the recoil in disgust, in disbelief. They immediately connect to those experiences in seventh grade and wonder why would anyone want to teach such a crazy bunch of kids? Why would anyone want to return to the seventh grade? And yet sometimes I think we must. A seventh grade teacher chooses to return every day. I've been doing this eight years, and I love it. Maybe thinking I'm the crazy one. That may be true. But I think we have a lot to learn from seventh graders, like how to laugh. Seventh graders are so funny. They're goofy. It's the awkwardness like a cult trying to run. There are many slightly inappropriate things that come up in class. The easiest is Lake Tiddykaka. It's the highest navigable lake in the world at 12,500 feet. It's in the Andy's Mountains. When you get this, it's only 200 miles from Lake Pupu. Yes, this is real. And it gets real ass from seventh graders every time. At first they think I've said something bad, but then I show it to them on the map. Then the real after begins. Usually it starts out pretty suppressed. With everyone making eyes to see who will break first, it's usually me. They need to laugh at this stuff. This is innocence with some of the kids I'll tell you that don't get the joke. So then we have to stop and explain the dual meaning. Mostly I say to ask their parents. I think it's important to let this conversation go a little so that they can laugh and have fun. They love to laugh. Some of them actually fall out of their chairs. It's laughing about something funny, but not at someone in a mean way. Laughing is critical to the learning process because it alleviates the tension of what if I get something wrong. For the time students reach seventh grade, they've had a year of pushing away from the 40 and are ready to take on more responsibility for their own learning. All throughout the year, kids turn into teenagers. By the time they hit the eighth grade, it's almost too late because they think they've gotten cool over the summer. In the seventh grade, even the coolest kid is still goofy. They know shame but haven't connected it to the fear of failure. Therefore they're willing to take risks. They're willing to fail. They're willing to get the answer wrong. And so they're willing to learn. But all of these new experiences and emotions teach us, usually through the pain of social failure, how to act in order to avoid becoming ostracized. The ache I see in adult faces when they remember seventh grade is the shame and rejection that fled to the surface after many years of forgetting. This tricky socialization seems to form us for much of the rest of our lives. For some it's a gentle sanding of rough and awkward edges. For many, it's an electric sander to our core. But do we forget the good and the daring and the wonder of those in between years? Usually about the fourth week of school, parent emails start rolling in about how they no longer recognize their child. Verbal sparring has taken over their home. It is not pretty. Defiant 12 and 13 year olds demanding answers. Why do I have to eat dinner with you? Why can't I watch that? Why can't I make my own bedtime? Why can't I seem to start every conversation? And because I said so, no longer works to end it. This is incredible time of change. In elementary school, students have one teacher for all of the subjects. In middle school, it's one teacher per subject. And so they start pushing away from adults and what we tell them is true and start searching for truth on their own. This is where self-learning starts for most students. And so they ask questions, seemingly a million of them. How do I know this is true? Why do I have to learn this? Did that really happen? How many kids are you going to have? What do you think about legalizing pot? Why do countries go to war? Why are politics so boring? How do I know what the textbook is saying is true? How are students so bold as to ask these things? I think it's because questioning hasn't been scared out of them yet. They haven't been coward into thinking that questions are somehow a sign of rebellion. But it doesn't take them long to stop asking questions if curiosity isn't encouraged or even required. The seventh grade mind is curious and active, not so much in the way of kittens or young children, but rather in inquisitiveness that is fueled like that of a recent convert seeking out the truth of their new path. When the graders want to take things apart to see how they work, they want to see how something works so they can get it to do what they want it to do. They do this with people, technology, in science lab, and of course with cafeteria food. So what can we take away from this as adults? We can choose to take risks at work. We can share that next big idea. Take someone aside who hurt our feelings and telling them so. We can go with our heart and ask that person out. We can buy a plane ticket to the other side of the planet to find an adventure. You may be tired of how you look, so change it. You may want to let fear rule and be afraid. Connect to that fearless seventh grade or inside. Be bold. Stop worrying about being cool. Remember to laugh. The seventh grade is a small window of opportunity for transformation and the strange years of puberty that form us into the grown-ups will become. What can we do with this window? Embrace it in the children around us and with their help, occasionally return to that paradoxically open and inquisitive time now that we're grown-up. Thank you.