Middle Schooled.

Posted on July 17, 2008

I spent last night with a middle school VBS class, giving the “what it’s like to be a writer” talk. I went in feeling confident. I left feeling O-L-D, and more than a little scared.

This has happened before, but never where discussion of books was concerned. Good lit, even young adult lit, endures forever, right? The themes touch multiple generations, and are a great unifier across the divides of age and culture. Right? Didn’t every English teacher you ever had, kindergarten to college, make that perfectly clear?

And then you have conversations like the one I had last night:

Me: So, who’s into Judy Blume?

Blank. Stares. Lots of them.

Be cool Em, be cool. Flip your hair a little. You were hired to talk to them, so it’s not like they can ban you from their lunch table.

Me: Umm…no one?

Middle School Girl: I think my Mom tried to make me read one of those, once. I couldn’t really get into it. It was really kind of old-fashioned.

Ok, try to conceal abject horror. Move on.

Me: Alright. So what recent book did you read that you did enjoy?

Middle School Girl: I’d have to say An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore.

Me: Oh. Umm…how old did you say you were, again?

Her: Twelve.

Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s good to encourage young readers to challenge themselves with “older” material. But it is possible to let a book expand your horizons to frightening lengths.

Joshilyn Jackson, one of my favorite novelists, has a great post up on her own blog about “sneak reading” –you know, pilfering adult books (no, not THAT kind of adult, just “suited for an older audience”) from your parents’ shelves. Girls of my generation, remember that dogeared copy of Forever that got passed around at fouth-grade recess? That was a sneak read. And it was a good one.

But I have to confess, my good choices of sneak reading were few and far between. More often than not, I regretted the reading almost as soon as it happened.

When I was in the second grade, my father went back to Africa for his second stint as a missionary. I snuck more than a few peeks inside the books in the growing Africa stack on my parents’ nightstand. In short order, I became convinced that my father was going to be murdered by religious zealots. Then he’d die of malaria, then ricketts, then a plane crash (one of the books was Out of Africa).

As I said, don’t get me wrong. I think Middle School Girl is a very talented young lady, and should certainly be commended for reading and comprehending An Inconvenient Truth at such a young age. But I have to wonder if, after enduring those laborious, drama-laden middle school days, she now has to spend her nights worrying about melting ice caps and the end of the world. Middle school seems enough like the end of the world as it is.