Ohhhh junior high

So, I am usually not a big fan of studies. It seems to me that they are a bunch of useless results that either people overreact over or no one cares anything about. I admit that’s a bit cynical, and in reality, it’s a tenuously held belief and wouldn’t be strongly defended by myself. However, when I read Just Girls by Margaret J. Finders, I found a study I actually enjoyed reading. Maybe it’s because it rang true for what I remember going through in junior high, or at least a mindset I could relate to. Maybe it was because it related to teaching practices that I could potentially put in to use in the future. Regardless, I enjoyed and appreciated it.

Finders’ describes her purpose as this: “Building on research on gender, socioeconomic class, and literacy, this study carves out how early adolescent girls use literacy in multiple contexts and, in turn, examines how social roles are shaped and mediated by diverse literate practices” (Finders 14).

My junior high experience was generally undramatic and relatively stress-free in terms of social interaction. I know from what I’ve heard in my group that that is not typical. This book definitely gave me a new vantage of the whole experience and the complicated web of pressures that some girls go through. “Students’ performances within the classroom cannot be free from sociopolitical tangles,” she claims (5). This affects what teachers know about teaching, or think they know. Often driven to create a comfort zone for students where they feel free to answer and feel comfortable around each other, teachers “[deny] the power of the peer dynamic” (5). Teachers fail to realize that a comfortable classroom to them does not necessarily take into account the accurate judgements of a student’s peers. In a time of their life where students are redefining themselves and rising into new-found social roles, personal comfort in a classroom is not always an option. In fact, a student might define “comfort” as being acceptable to peers, and not necessarily acceptable to the teacher.

These complexities come into play in Finders’ text as she urges teachers to realize the complex social world that these adolescence live in, not just the academic one. For this reason, I really appreciated Finders’ study. Although I didn’t go through nearly as harrowing a time as some of the described girls, I think everyone can relate to the concept of having peers’ opinions shape who we are even in some small way.

So, as the girls signed yearbooks (or weren’t allowed to) or gratified the bathroom walls or passed secrete notes to each other during class, something we all related to in our group, we easily recognized the stressful (and sometimes fun!) time these girls were going through!