Getting used to a new school can be very unnerving. I remember how I felt when I moved from my familiar elementary school to the big high school. I was suddenly in school with much older youngsters (the seventeen and eighteen year olds were huge). I had to figure out how to get to many different classrooms, I had more homework, and I had to get used to being with children I did not know at all.
Today's poetry title explores what just such a transition is like for a girl who is going to middle school for the first time. The poems take us through her first middle school year and we share the may low and high points that she experiences.
Kristine O’Connell George
Illustrated by Debbie Tilley
Poetry
For ages 9 to 12
Clarion, 2002, 978-0618152506
It is September again and a new school year at a new
school has begun. For some it is time full of dread, and for others it is a
time that they have been looking forward to. Before the first bell rings, a
girl sees friends whom she knew when she was in elementary school. Some look
the same, and some have changed over the summer. Then the bell rings and
“everyone scatters, / each of us going / our separate ways.”
Now the
confusion begins. A locker won’t open, she gets lost, she is late because she
is lost, and by the time she finds her homeroom all she wants to do is to hide
in “the last row.” Then, when the bell rings again, the confusion starts all over
as she swims “upstream” against the flow of students to get to her next class. As
the crazy day unfolds, even the inside of the girl’s locker start to look
comfortingly cozy. At least the locker is “a space all my own.”
At lunchtime she
has no idea where to sit. Her friends from last year have changed and now there
all these new people that she has to deal with, people she doesn’t know at all.
She sees Margo, but Margo doesn’t see her and soon is gone. Then she sees Kori,
the friend from second grade who moved away but who is now back. A familiar
face at last!
Middle school is
different from elementary school on so many levels. Not only is it bigger, louder,
and very confusing, but she is soon loaded down with homework, textbooks, and a
musical instrument.
As the days go
by, some things, like math, friends, and books from the library, make her days
brighter and better. Other things, like the flute that refuses to play
properly, the gossips, and the snobs, make the days worse. Middle school is a
very yes and no, good and bad, sort of place.
Using a series
of wonderful, relatively short, poems, the author of this book takes us into
the world of a new middle school student. We follow as she falls for a boy,
takes and aces tests, learns phrases in French and Spanish from her friends,
and learns how to find her way around what, at first, is a very alien
environment. With humor, candor and sensitivity, the author gives us slices of
a year in the girl’s life, and we are left knowing that though there were hard
times, she comes out of it stronger and happier than she went in.
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