Shadowing Practice: Middle School | This American Life | Episode 449 - Learn English Speaking with Video
Choose a practice mode
Each mode opens a full-screen practice room.
933 sentences
If sentences are too short or too long, click Edit to adjust them.
1
Hey everybody, Ira Glass here.
2
So we got this email at our radio show near the end of the school year from a 14 -year -old.
3
Hello?
4
Here's this Annie.
5
Yeah.
6
I called her up at her house in California and asked her to read it.
7
Mm -hmm.
8
It says, Dear This American Life, I just escaped the whitewashed, brick -walled, iron -gated prison that is commonly known as middle school,
9
and I'm finally out for good.
10
But in all the time I have listened to your show, I have never heard an episode devoted to what goes on inside the walls of a middle school.
11
I hope you'll think about it.
12
Anonymous?
13
Yeah, you signed it anonymous, but then you actually, your email was signed with your name.
14
Yeah.
15
Yeah.
16
I had said anonymous because in middle school, everybody's so judgmental, and I didn't want the kids to judge me or anything if they heard me on the radio.
17
Mainly she says that she wrote to us because she
18
and her friends were talking right after they left eighth grade about how terrible middle school was.
19
And she wondered, was it just as bad for other people as it was for them?
20
You always wonder whether other people are going through the same thing as you.
21
And it'd be cool to, like, hear other people's stories about it and what they went through.
22
And if you had to explain to somebody, like, what are the worst things about middle school, can I ask you to just walk me through it?
23
Like, what is so bad about middle school?
24
Kids there are all in kind of socially awkward stages
25
that the drama every day can be frustrating and girl -boy things or someone like so -and -so.
26
And then no matter who you are or what you do, you'll get made fun of for it.
27
Anything, anything in the world you can get made fun of for.
28
In Annie's case, she had friends who smoked, so she got criticized for smoking.
29
But then she also was made fun of for not smoking, for being too much of a sissy to start smoking.
30
She was made fun of for coming from a bilingual elementary school where everybody learned to speak Spanish
31
and spoke it throughout the day.
32
And leaving elementary school, I guess I thought that when I got to middle school, everyone would think it was really cool that I spoke Spanish.
33
But when I got there, they mostly just thought it was dumb.
34
I don't know if they were jealous or what, but they would make fun of me for it.
35
Then they'd say we were all full of ourselves for that we spoke different languages and stuff.
36
Did it make you feel bad?
37
Yeah.
38
I didn't want to stick out in that way.
39
If I got a new sweater or something, say, for Christmas that I really liked and I would really want to wear it to school or something, but I'd be nervous because,
40
like, what if someone didn't like my sweater or someone made fun of me for wearing it?
41
It can be hard to do even the smallest things
42
because you're so nervous that people tease you or judge you from it.
43
That sweater example, is that a real example?
44
Yeah, it actually is.
45
I worried about it so much.
46
I also had a pair of moccasins that I'd never worn, and they're kind of my signature now.
47
Everybody really likes them.
48
They're like ankle -high lace -up moccasins.
49
And how long did you have the moccasins before you actually wore them?
50
A few months, like probably two months.
51
I guess I just thought if people didn't like them, they would all make fun of me for wearing them.
52
And I didn't want to stand out that much.
53
What could be done to make middle school better?
54
We talked about this for a little while.
55
She said basically everybody comes into middle school as a little kid
56
and you're going to have to grow up
57
and figure out who's in what group and who you are and who's above who.
58
And you'd have to figure that out somewhere at that age, right?
59
Might as well be middle school.
60
It was terrible, she says, but now she's in high school.
61
Whatever middle school was, it worked.
62
Everyone's a lot friendlier, and everyone's lives are a lot better now.
63
Well, today on our radio program, for Annie, we look at whatever it is that happens in those mysterious years that we call middle school.
64
As the new school year begins, we have stories today from all over the country, people lurching their way through these years when you're figuring out so, so much.
65
We go to middle school dances and classrooms and down to the Mexican border.
66
From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life.
67
I'm Ira Glass.
68
Stay with us.
69
This American Life.
70
Today's show is a rerun, one that we thought would be a nice one to run for returning to school with.
71
Act One, Life in the Middle Ages.
72
So we wanted to understand what is going on exactly physically and emotionally with middle school kids.
73
And we talked to all kinds of people about that this last few weeks.
74
And one of the producers on our staff had a very strong opinion about all this.
75
Alex Bloomberg, before he got into radio, he taught in a middle school in Chicago for four years.
76
He was a science teacher.
77
And he concluded from that experience?
78
I don't know if they learned anything.
79
Like they are so consumed with learning all these other lessons about where they fit in
80
and the social order and how their bodies are now working and who they're attracted to and who they're going to be.
81
That facts and figures and geography and all the other stuff that you teach in school, it just doesn't even penetrate.
82
Wait, wait.
83
Are you saying like we shouldn't even bother to have them in school?
84
We should just basically put them to work in the factory for two or three years?
85
Yeah.
86
I basically came away thinking, like, you're sort of wasting your time trying to teach middle school students anything.
87
If that seems just insane, Alex told me that Maria Montessori, who's the creator of the Montessori schools, who looked at what kids could learn at each developmental stage,
88
at one point in her career actually tossed out a similar suggestion.
89
Perhaps she said young adolescents would be better off at a farm school, what she called an erd kinder, where they would work with the land.
90
is he just got a great sense of humor
91
or what i am ran alex's thoughts by marion stroke the principal of evergreen academy middle school in chicago
92
which was listed as one of the best middle schools in
93
the country a school to watch by the national forum to
94
accelerate middle grades reform you have to be i have to
95
say i well i i obviously don't agree okay i think
96
that uh we definitely have a way to stick knowledge in
97
their heads it's being creative about how we do it and taking into consideration all of those other things.
98
I'm not going to lie.
99
It's not easy.
100
Can I ask you how much of the stereotype around students this age is true?
101
Are you saying that the stereotype is true?
102
You just got to deal with what it is?
103
It is true.
104
And you have to, as the adult in the situation, you have to find a way to work around it.
105
Find a way to help them to grow up.
106
They won't have to suffer if we do things right.
107
They won't have to suffer as much, let's say.
108
I mean, you're going to go through emotional changes and your body's changing.
109
That can't be helped.
110
The raging hormones, that can't be helped.
111
All of that can't be helped.
112
It's the way that we react to it that will make such a difference in their lives.
113
It's our flexibility.
114
It's our concern.
115
It's our listening to them.
116
It's our hearing them out.
117
And so what's actually happening developmentally in the bodies and brains of kids when they're in middle school?
118
Let me give the overview this way.
119
The terrible 12s are a complete analog to the terrible 2s.
120
They're just not as cute, right?
121
This is Linda Perlstein.
122
When she wrote a book called Not Much, Just Chillin', The Hidden Lives of Middle Schoolers, following five middle school students very closely for a full year,
123
she also incidentally researched everything she could find out about what is going on developmentally with kids
124
that age that makes them so different from other ages, and fascinating.
125
This is the time of biggest growth for a human being aside from infancy.
126
So your bones are growing faster than your muscles, so you can't actually sit still.
127
But your brain, your gray matter,
128
during the middle school years what happens in your early stages of puberty is this vast overproduction of brain cells and connections, far more than you actually need.
129
And only some of them are going to survive puberty.
130
This growth in your frontal cortex, it peaks at 11 for girls and 12 for boys.
131
And then what happens is the cells just fight it out for survival.
132
And the ones that last are the ones you exercise more.
133
In other words, during those years, your brain turns you into you, the adult you.
134
The stuff you don't exercise just kind of goes away.
135
And what stays?
136
So if you think about what you learned at the early stages of puberty, I don't know what that was for you.
137
For me, it was tap dancing and French.
138
You know, it sticks.
139
I know French much better than any language I learned after that and not because I had a better teacher.
140
I was learning it at the right time.
141
I can still do tap dances, though I won't, that I learned when I was 12 or 13.
142
Yeah, I can still do magic tricks that I learned at that age.
143
Exactly.
144
It's like, it's embossed in your existence.
145
It's this important time for your brain.
146
It's like this use it or lose it time.
147
Linda Pearlstein agrees that all the stereotypes about middle schoolers, everything, in fact, that Annie complained about, all of that is true.
148
But she says that there's a flip side that people don't usually talk about.
149
Middle school is when kids open up to the world.
150
It's when they think about bigger things.
151
And they haven't formed their opinions on things yet.
152
Everything is up for grabs, which is amazing to be around.
153
I just think kids that age are fun.
154
I like being around them.
155
Middle schoolers are in that real nice spot of being interesting,
156
but also being able to explain to you what's going on in their minds and why they do the things they do.
157
You know, they're self -reflective.
158
They're capable of self -reflection in a way that younger kids might not be.
159
Older kids, she says.
160
High school kids, by then they can be jaded or cynical.
161
They're settling into who they are.
162
Middle school, everything's new.
163
You're probably picking your friends for the very first time.
164
For the first time, they aren't just the kids on your block
165
or your parents' friends' kids or the kids who are around.
166
So you make a best friend one day who then you drop two weeks later.
167
You get obsessed with guitar or computers or dance for two weeks, and then two weeks later you drop it.
168
For everything that's awful about middle school, she says, That's the great thing about it.
169
You experiment.
170
Deck two, stutter steps.
171
One good place to see the experiment that is life in middle school in action is a middle school dance.
172
Last Friday, there were middle school dances all over the country, all at the same time and we sent reporters to a half dozen of them to find out how kids were doing.
173
They talked to them before the kids went inside to the field of battle and, no surprise, we found a lot of stress, a lot of uncertainty.
174
Who's nervous about tonight?
175
I am.
176
I don't know.
177
Why?
178
Well, just, I don't know.
179
We don't know what it's going to be like.
180
I'm just confused.
181
I just don't know.
182
I mean, yeah.
183
I mean, we've gone to these things before, but they've never exactly had the term dance to it.
184
These four girls are sixth graders, and they're in a car on the way to a neon -themed dance at Edgewood Middle School in Highland Park, Illinois, with their mom and reporter Rob Wildebar.
185
Who's going to dance with the boy tonight?
186
Nobody.
187
I can tell you that.
188
You don't know if it's going to be slow dancing or regular dancing.
189
That's why we are nervous.
190
Roughly 800 miles east in New Jersey, sixth grader Ethan DeRose was hoping that there would be at least one slow dance, though did he feel ready for a slow dance?
191
Nope.
192
Not at all.
193
Why not?
194
What are you worried about?
195
I just don't know how to do it.
196
Like, I'm not sure that I'll do it correctly or, yeah.
197
He's standing in front of the school with reporter Brian Reed as kids stream into the school.
198
Ethan is wearing a button -up shirt with green and black stripes that he is not happy with.
199
That was my mom.
200
She made me wear it.
201
She said that if I don't wear the two shirts that I'm wearing right now, that I can't go to the dance.
202
What are you hoping happens at this dance?
203
I'm hoping nothing bad happens,
204
like no humiliation or not something that'll be a story for the next month or two.
205
At least to me.
206
Of course, Ethan and the girls in that car in Illinois are sixth graders.
207
In New York City, 7th graders Evelyn Benson and Alice Westerman are excited and feeling very grown up on their way to their school's Halloween dance.
208
I'm really happy because last year they split the gym in half
209
so it's light on one side and pitch black on the other side.
210
All the 6th graders are kind of banned from the dark side, but that's where all the cool kids are.
211
So now we're in 7th grade and dance on the dark side, so it's like, whoop, we're cool!
212
Some of the middle school boys got up the nerve to ask girls to be their dates to the dances.
213
But because this is a new experience for the girls, too, being asked out on a date, they don't exactly know how to handle it.
214
Here's a girl named Autumn talking with our producer, Lisa Pollack, in Delaware, the afternoon in the dance.
215
Did you get asked to the dance?
216
Um, yes, I did.
217
And what did you say?
218
I said, I don't know, but I probably won't say yes.
219
Wait, you haven't told him yes or no yet?
220
No. Okay, so it's 1 .20 and the dance is at 7.
221
Yeah.
222
When do you have to let him know?
223
I probably won't answer.
224
Are you serious?
225
Yeah.
226
I just kind of want to hang out with the girls.
227
So he's the only one who asked you?
228
There was other people, too.
229
How many?
230
Probably five -ish.
231
What, five boys asked you to dance?
232
Yeah.
233
You told all these guys I don't know?
234
Yeah.
235
What if they took that as a yes?
236
Then they got the wrong answer.
237
Do you say I don't know because it feels too mean to say no?
238
Yeah.
239
I'm not mean.
240
Of course, some of the boys are no better.
241
During the dance in Windom, Maine, our reporter Claire Holman pulled 6th grader Christopher Potter out of the action for a chat.
242
Is there anyone you like at the dance?
243
There is.
244
Does she know?
245
Yes, she does.
246
We're kind of dating at the time.
247
So how's that going?
248
Good.
249
It just started like 20 minutes into this. So, yeah.
250
You asked a girl to go out during this dance?
251
No, a girl came to me and asked me out.
252
Okay, let's go minute by minute.
253
So where were you when this happened?
254
I was in the cafeteria, just got a drink of root beer, and she walks up to me and asks me to go out.
255
What did she say exactly?
256
She said, Chris, will you go out with me?
257
And were you surprised?
258
Not really.
259
We've kind of been like on and off again.
260
so it's not the first time yeah not the first time
261
but she always ask you
262
or do you ever ask her well um it's kind of weird
263
because it's always she wants me to ask her
264
so it was weird
265
that she asked me usually don't they don't last it's a middle school relationship nothing really happens what does
266
that mean like a middle school relationship what do you mean
267
doesn't last it just is destined to fail pretty much like
268
it's a middle school I mean you this This isn't like where you're starting your life with, you don't hear things about middle school sweethearts.
269
In Richmond, outside Moody Middle School's dance, reporter Eric Mendel spoke with Elliot German and his step brother Jonathan Lawton,
270
they're both eighth graders, who ran through the official rules for the dance.
271
So some of them are kind of funny, it says, I mean it's like no hands below the waist, no petting, which I thought was kind of funny.
272
No petting?
273
Yeah, yeah, no petting.
274
What does that mean?
275
No one knows.
276
Like, it was specifically on, like, the flyer that they hand out.
277
Like, they give you the dress code and then they give you, like, the rules.
278
No petting, and it's in, like, quotations, and you never know what it means.
279
It's like, do people, like, sit there at dances and just, like, pet other people?
280
Because that'd be really weird.
281
There are rules like this at all the dances, and some are comprehensible than others.
282
As for whether or not the kids obey the rules, and what actually happens inside the dance on the actual dance floor.
283
One of our producers, Lisa Pollack, went inside to the dance floor at the Fall Costume Dance in Luz, Delaware, and I'm going to hand it off to her.
284
So the scene in the gym was pretty much the way you remember it.
285
Older kids dancing in the middle, younger kids at the periphery, a few aimlessly wandering around looking like they're not sure what to do.
286
Lots of kids were dancing, jumping up and down.
287
Occasionally you'd see a fist pump.
288
They danced in these tightly packed clusters.
289
with very little room between them.
290
And outside of the clusters were chaperones, ready to step in if they saw any grinding or suggestive dancing.
291
Hovering outside one of the clusters was a teacher named John Gauze, and he looked perplexed.
292
This knot has gotten me on edge at this point.
293
Why?
294
Because they're trying to get away with stuff.
295
Like, you can tell by the way they're looking at you.
296
They have a guilty look.
297
Because you're about to see me.
298
He actually did swoop.
299
He plunged him to the pack of kids, pulled the boy aside, and talked to him.
300
Then he told me why.
301
He needed to be taken aside and told to stop being up against those girls like that.
302
That's why, you know, I don't want to jump in too much, but I just want to give him, like, the whoa, with the flat hand whoa.
303
Just whoa, just calm it down a little.
304
I mean, usually, if I see it, then they're going to stop because they see me.
305
And then comes the moment of truth.
306
The moment that forces every kid in the room to make a decision.
307
The moment that separates the timid from the brave.
308
The slow song.
309
I watch it with teacher Brian Comra.
310
So we got our slow song.
311
And just as I suspected, a majority of the students left the dance floor.
312
All the couples are in the middle of the dance floor in a cluster.
313
I suspect so they're not near an adult.
314
I love how the kids go up to the couples dancing
315
and interrupt them oh absolutely some of the couples didn't have
316
much privacy the friends were standing a foot away hanging out
317
and talking to them and every
318
so often a random kid would just cut across the dance
319
floor this girl right here just grabbed onto the back of her friend's neck
320
while the friend is dancing with the boy yeah yeah i don't know
321
if you didn't want to be left out or they came as friends
322
or i think at this stage of the game it's hard
323
when boys and girls hair off
324
and then one friend is always left behind there's a few of these slow dances
325
but most of the songs are fast
326
and then suddenly the song hit the road jack starts playing
327
and the lights snap on oh my god they just all like Yeah, it ends very abruptly.
328
It's nine.
329
It's nine o 'clock.
330
That's it?
331
That's it.
332
There's no wind down.
333
Nine o 'clock, lights come on, parents are waiting.
334
It'll be empty in another minute.
335
And he was right.
336
The experiment in mini -adulthood that is the middle school dance was over.
337
The same kids who minutes earlier were holding each other
338
and swaying awkwardly on the dance floor got into cars and said hi to their parents.
339
Lisa Pollack.
340
Coming up, surviving middle school by pretending that you are from a completely different family.
341
That is in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.
342
This is American Life, a miracle ass.
343
Each week on our show, of course, you choose a theme, bringing different kinds of stories on
344
that theme today's show a rerun on middle school a 14
345
year old from california who just got out of middle school asked for a show on the horror
346
that is middle school it'd be cool to like hear other people's stories about it
347
and how what they went through we thought you know that's a pretty good idea
348
that is a place with a lot of stories we've arrived at act three of our show act three
349
mimi's in the middle the place that domingo martinez went to middle school they still called it Junior High, and he says
350
that his sisters did something to cope with any feelings of
351
inferiority they might have otherwise felt in their new school with all those new kids.
352
When they started Junior High, my sisters Mary
353
and Margie invented the Mimis as a way to cope with any feelings of inferiority they might have otherwise experienced.
354
They were entering the sinister world of teenage girls, which, in the mid -1980s in Brownsville, Texas, was tinged with Bordertown racism.
355
Instead of being ashamed of who they were, my sisters decided to create a polite fiction and invited everyone to participate.
356
First, they dyed their brown -black hair blonde until it turned the color and brittleness of hay.
357
Then they began dressing in Sergio Valenti and Gloria Vanderbilt.
358
And finally, to cap it off, they decided to call each other simply Mimi.
359
The typical conversation between them went like this.
360
Mimi, do you like my new Jordache jeans?
361
Yes, Mimi, I do.
362
Do I look rich in my new Nikes, Mimi?
363
Mimi, you look like a tennis player, Mimi.
364
I know, Mimi.
365
Maybe I should make mom buy me a racket.
366
It was really that simple.
367
The Mimis made a conscious decision that they would be rich and white, even if their family wasn't.
368
In other words, Marge and Mare had a small break from reality that we all participated in to help them through junior high.
369
We all helped in creating the Mimis.
370
At the time, the rest of the family had not fully realized that her job, as relatively new Americans, and worse yet, Texans, was to be as white as possible.
371
And we honestly didn't see their delusion as anything other than
372
another bewildering tactic in our sister's quest for a higher level of superior fashion, just teenage girls doing what teenage girls do.
373
There had been a time when our family had been rich by barrio standards because our grandpa, dad's stepfather, fought in the Korean War and used his GI money to start a trucking business when he got back.
374
He married grandma, who was widowed from her first marriage at age 16, and gave both her and my dad citizenship.
375
My siblings and I, we were all born in Brownsville as Americans, but really didn't understand what that meant.
376
Not really, not in that area.
377
Then Grandpa died in 1980, and our world began to crumble.
378
The trucking business began to disintegrate around Dad, and he was started on a slow road towards desperation and religion.
379
Meanwhile, the Mimis had made their decision to be two blue -blooded, trust -funded tennis bunnies from Connecticut, accidentally living in Brownsville, Texas with us.
380
A poor Mexican family they had somehow befriended while undergoing some Dickensian series of misfortunes.
381
No one acted like it was peculiar, especially those in the family who didn't speak English or could not understand the Mimis when they showed up at family gatherings.
382
Yo no puedo hablaro Españolo, one of the Mimis would say to an uncle or cousin, who more often than not would linger lasciviously around them,
383
at first conflicted by the idea of being turned on by so young a relative, and then mentally calculating just how distantly related they were,
384
and tabulating his odds at scoring with this new white chick who just happened to show up at this barrio party, but only after two or three beers.
385
Mimi, how did you like my Spanish?
386
Oh, Mimi, it's getting really good.
387
Mimi, do you think they understood me?
388
Oh, Mimi, who cares?
389
Soon, the Mimis were buzzing at a fever pitch, intoxicating everyone who came near and caught a whiff of the Mimis' Anaïs Anaïs perfume.
390
We had all seen the commercials on network television while watching Dallas or Knott's Landing, and it was a forbidden fragrance for rain -depressed English women with secret,
391
muscular boyfriends who drove Jaguars dangerously through unpaved, one -lane Scottish roads.
392
So the Mimis had to have it, and they found it at the local JCPenney and had Mom pay for it.
393
Me and my brother Dan and our oldest sister Sylvia, we just kind of stank from the heat and dealt with it.
394
Even Mom developed her own fascination with the Mimi's, like she couldn't believe her luck now that she was related to royalty.
395
Feeding into their fantasy gave her one of her own, so she was always ready for an air -conditioned trip to the mall.
396
She took the little clothes budget reserved for us boys, my brother and me, and added it into the Mimi's wardrobe
397
because to her it was a sign of status for the family that the Mimi's looked their best.
398
None of the rest of us would question it even though it felt wrong.
399
I was often left with the Mimi's recently stylish hand -me -downs.
400
No one else in my grade school was remotely label conscious
401
or capable of reading in English really so it passed unnoticed
402
that most of my clothes were made for glamorous junior high school girls.
403
Almost every child at my school came from recently immigrated families.
404
Kids so poor they'd save half their free lunch to share with their younger siblings at home, their heads shaved to rid them of lice.
405
My best friend Arthur, he noticed though.
406
He was part black and part Mexican.
407
Had just moved to Brownsville from some big city slum in
408
Michigan where his mother's boyfriend had been employed at a GM factory and he read labels.
409
Hey Dom, he said.
410
Yo man, you're wearing a girl's shirt.
411
Or is the spree making baggy boy shirts now too
412
so to change the subject i slugged him high in the chest and ran away
413
he chased me down to punch me back and left me crying in my girl's blouse
414
if she had any guilt about giving the mimis the lion's
415
share of the clothing budget i imagine the justification my mother probably used was
416
that my older brother and i would just ruin our clothes, working with Dad under the greasy trucks.
417
It made better sense for the Mimis to be in high fashion than for the feral boys to wreck new clothes.
418
Mimi, you look just like Jennifer Beals in Flashdance.
419
You should join the dance team at school.
420
I know, Mimi.
421
I think so too.
422
Mimi, I think you should dye your hair back to its original color.
423
Ash.
424
I know, Mimi.
425
I'm trying.
426
During this time, my brother Dan's eyesight was
427
so bad he couldn't read the blackboard in school and constantly ran into corners of short skinny people.
428
People thought he was Asian he squinted so much.
429
Every photo of him taken in junior high he looks like
430
he's trying to see into the photographer's eyes through the camera lens.
431
This of course goes entirely unnoticed
432
and it is the younger Mimi Mary with a 20 -20
433
vision who gets vanity glasses with her name etched in gold script in the corner.
434
Dan wouldn't get glasses until he was in the military when he was 17.
435
Eventually, Dad's failure at navigating the business and providing for his family intruded on the Mimi's fantasy.
436
Dad made a decision that as soon as school ended, Mom would take the Mimis and Syl and drive them to California to participate in the seasonal grape harvest with Dad's cousins,
437
people vaguely related to Grandma through marriage, I think.
438
They would be treated like adults there, paid the same as everyone else.
439
Mom, I remember, was horrified at the implications, at the shame of having to send her virginal and royal daughters out to the fields.
440
Plus, Dad's extended family out in California were very different from us.
441
Wild and frightening and Californian.
442
The Mimis, though, were undaunted.
443
Did not understand the complications.
444
Mimi, we're going to California?
445
Oh my god, Mimi, we're going to be Valley Girls!
446
Mimi, gag me with a spoon, Mimi.
447
Mimi, your roots are showing.
448
We packed up Mom, the Mimis, and Sylvia in the beige 1980 Pontiac Bonneville already in antique on its second engine
449
and failing transmission and they drove out of Brownsville A year later,
450
I took this ride as well and also ended up picking grapes for the summer mostly out of envy
451
That we were migrant workers for that period didn't occur to me, nor to anyone else.
452
That label would never stick, could never stick.
453
We couldn't descend to that level.
454
We just had to do it to help out Dad, that was all.
455
Desperate circumstances calling for desperate measures and all that.
456
But it was too much for the Mimis, the reality of this first trip.
457
Sadly, I think it was childhood's end for the Mimis.
458
The vineyards had somehow inverted their secret garden, and the low door and the wall had closed shut behind them.
459
When they first reached California, the Mimis did indeed become Valley Girls, the hippest cutest, best -dressed migrant workers of that year, and very likely for many years to come.
460
The older Mimi, Marge, continued to dress like Jennifer Beals in Flashdance out in the fields, where the sun sizzled any inch of exposed skin.
461
She wore a spaghetti -strapped, red -and -white -striped esprit top, white cotton shorts, and a matching headband with her red -and -white leather Nike tennis shoes,
462
and took pictures of the vineyards and the workers with her Canon AE -1.
463
Her headband kept a white strip of skin on her forehead from tanning, and as a result, she was forced to wear headbands for a few months afterwards, way after headbands were out of fashion.
464
Eventually, though, even she started dressing like the rest of the migrant workers, wearing long -sleeved collared shirts buttoned all the way to the neck, thick, unstylish denim and work boots,
465
with a bandana covering her nose and mouth, or else she would have died of heatstroke.
466
There were no photos taken of that.
467
Mary, the younger Mimi, did not fare any better.
468
Her vanity glasses with the fake lenses were scratched well beyond recovery.
469
Her roots grew out, and her hair turned a lighter brown as a result of the heat
470
and the pesticides of the grape fields of Southern California.
471
The hard work went on all summer, and eventually it became bitter enough to breach even the walls of the Mimi's perfectly constructed fantasy.
472
And so sadly, eventually even they were humiliated, and the illusion of wealth that had kept the family's idea of itself buoyant was deflated.
473
When they returned to Brownsville, as happy as we were to see them, no one ever mentioned the Mimis again.
474
They were gone, and it was Marge and Mary that returned to their place, Mary rubbing her nose with the palm of her hand from allergies and snapping at anyone who tried to talk to her,
475
and Marge, who never went back to California, and took a job at the bank the following summer instead.
476
I was sorry to see the Mimis go.
477
We all were.
478
When they were at their peak, the Mimis had been capable of creating a real sort of magic around them,
479
enchanting both people and places so that you could be looking at the same dreary landscape as them, the same terrible and hopeless event.
480
And while you might be miserable and bitter, they would be beaming, enthralled, and enthusiastically hopeful.
481
And then, if you got near them, or were blessed enough to maybe talk to them, you would walk away feeling the same way as they felt too.
482
They were a gift to everyone who was lucky enough to get caught in their Anais, Anais, the Mimis.
483
They made all of us Americans.
484
Domingo Martinez reading an excerpt from his book, The Boy Kings of Texas, which is a memoir and a finalist for the National Book Award.
485
Since we first broadcast today's show, Domingo's published another memoir called My Heart is a drunken compass.
486
Act four, anchor babies.
487
So this week, as we were putting together the radio show and sending reporters out into middle schools, we discovered that in schools all over the country, there already were reporters on the ground,
488
deep inside, covering the issues that middle school kids really care about.
489
Good afternoon, Huskies.
490
It is Thursday, September 15th, 2011.
491
After today, there are only 162 school days until summer vacation.
492
I'm Taylor.
493
These are student newscasters from Hart Middle School in Pleasanton, California.
494
I myself got my start on the mic on the morning announcements.
495
And this is what middle school morning announcements in some schools are like today.
496
Students make these full -blown video productions.
497
Some of them have music themes.
498
The kids stand in front of banners with their school logo, or sometimes it's a green screen backdrop so they make it look like they're on a local TV news set.
499
Our producer Jonathan Menjivar has been watching these newscasts all week with fascination, and he has noticed a few trends.
500
Just like the local news, middle school newscasts tend to follow a formula.
501
They almost all start with the Pledge of Allegiance.
502
This next segment from DMS News at Dibble Middle School in Dibble, Oklahoma, is a staple of almost every broadcast I watched.
503
Okay.
504
We have late breaking news.
505
You will be the first to know that we have two birthdays today.
506
Happy birthday to both Gabriel Romero and Nathan Nydell.
507
This has to qualify as breaking news because it's school.
508
There's not a lot of exciting stuff for them to report.
509
They have to tell their fellow students what the cafeteria is serving that day, when makeup pictures are being taken and do the weather.
510
My favorite comes from this girl, McKenna, near Buffalo, who's clearly had enough.
511
Good morning, Ambrose Middle School.
512
This is McKenna with today's weather.
513
It's going to be how it is, like it is now, pretty much all day.
514
In the afternoon, colder, windy, and wet, with heavier rain.
515
In the evening, winds to the southwest.
516
These newscasts are middle school in relief, like what you'd see if there was a middle school exhibit at the Natural History Museum.
517
There are tiny kids with big ears, shy, red -faced kids.
518
Jocks, computer club kids, completely normal, super sweet, overachieving ones.
519
They were fun to watch.
520
I'd forgotten that middle school kids can have this overconfident goofiness.
521
I spent days watching kids deliver these nudescasts.
522
And I was curious what they'd be like if they actually reported on the stories that mattered the most to them.
523
Stuff they'd never say on the morning announcements.
524
The big headlines in their school that week.
525
Amanda, we need to get out of my shot.
526
So I found a school that was willing to play along.
527
Parkville Middle School is just north of Baltimore, and the students there do their morning announcements as a six -minute show called PTV.
528
With the help of their teacher, Ms. Davis, the kids put out a really involved production.
529
There's three TV cameras, a control room, and the anchor sit at one of those giant news desks.
530
It has a PTV logo on it.
531
Behind them, there's a backdrop of downtown Baltimore.
532
Girls, don't forget to watch your hair.
533
I see Amanda especially.
534
I see yours sitting right on your mic.
535
With Ms. Davis' help, I enlisted the kids in this experiment
536
to write up a newscast with news from their lives and the stories they each cared about.
537
And they delivered.
538
They said they had fun doing it.
539
So I've heard that there is a new Martin Luther King Jr. statue in Washington, D .C.
540
That statue doesn't even look like him.
541
It looks like he has a unibrow.
542
Our school's getting their boiler fixed, and they talked over the announcements like it was an important thing.
543
But it didn't really sound important to me.
544
But I guess they thought it was important for some students and the teachers.
545
Kids were randomly clapping at lunch, and the teachers got fed up.
546
So last week, a rule was made that you're not allowed to clap.
547
So at lunch, this one kid, Raymond, clapped.
548
I think he got suspended.
549
The U .S.
550
Department of Agriculture is banning potatoes from school lunches.
551
I love potatoes.
552
They can just make them healthier or something.
553
They don't have to ban them.
554
The weather has been terribly cold lately.
555
I've had to wear my UGG boots like five times in the past three weeks.
556
I swear, if I find any dirt on them anywhere, Mother Nature is going to hear from me.
557
So over the weekend, my best friend told me he's still going trick -or -treating.
558
He says he's going with a friend from school.
559
Personally, I think we were all too old to be trick -or -treating.
560
Well, that is all I have for today.
561
I'm Billy Cochran.
562
Have a good day.
563
Zakia Bryant decided to go hyper -local with her news.
564
She wears glasses, and she had her hair pulled back with a headband.
565
In local news, a .k .a here at Parkville Middle, there is a lot of drama going on.
566
Me personally, I lost most of my friends.
567
I really miss those chicks, but I don't think they feel the same.
568
Kaylin and Jay are my besties, and now they're gone.
569
I still love them, though.
570
They're my sisters.
571
Well, I don't really have too much more to say, because my life is kind of boring. So, deuces.
572
Zakiya and I talked for a while.
573
She told me that deuces is just another way of saying peace out.
574
Can I ask you about your friends?
575
What happened?
576
Well, it was a lot of drama going on and some things got said, and people's feelings got hurt.
577
And some of us made up, some of us didn't, but I hope that we can.
578
You know, it sucks.
579
So you're just, you're not talking to them at all?
580
Well, actually, she's not talking to me because I called her a name, and it hurt her feelings,
581
so, you know, she's very upset with me.
582
I just, I need to apologize.
583
I didn't do that yet.
584
I feel kind of bad about that, so I'm going to.
585
The very last kid I talked to was Jaya Wadi.
586
She sandwiched her most surprising news in between a couple other stories.
587
My brother goes to Penn State, and he's on the football team.
588
And I've been to all the home games, and they're a lot of fun.
589
The students are crazy, and they get dressed up in blue and white.
590
It's really cool.
591
So my friend is always depressed, and then she's, like, mad at me all the time.
592
So I don't understand that.
593
I was watching the news the other day, and they were talking about how President Obama...
594
Did you catch that?
595
About her depressed friend?
596
I asked JF.
597
It was hard to write about her.
598
Yeah, because I didn't want to, like, hurt her feelings, but she really doesn't care.
599
Because she said she wrote about me, too.
600
Oh, this is, um...
601
Zikia.
602
Yeah, yeah.
603
Oh, wow, I didn't realize that her friends she was talking about were in this class.
604
Yeah, we are.
605
But I've known her since, like, fifth grade, so we kind of fight a lot, but we always wind up being friends in the end, so.
606
What happened exactly?
607
Nothing, really.
608
Just people telling other people things, spreading rumors and drama.
609
Middle school.
610
Ms. Davis, the journalism teacher at Parkville Middle, is always stressing that her students be factual and truthful in their stories.
611
The news isn't rumors and opinions.
612
But in middle school, sometimes it's hard to remember that.
613
It's hard to step back and look at a story from the middle school from different perspectives.
614
Jonathan Manjivar, these days he's the executive producer of a new podcast from The Guardian called Stateside with Kai and Carter.
615
They're on YouTube and everywhere you get your podcasts.
616
Act five, blue kid on the block.
617
Last September, a kid that we're going to call Leo, not his real name, started seventh grade at a new school and he was having a more extreme experience.
618
He was having a harder time finding his place in middle school than other middle school kids
619
because he was new to town.
620
His family had just arrived from Rochester, New York.
621
He had that on top of everything else.
622
Leo still loved Rochester.
623
He loved his school there.
624
He loved his friends.
625
Suddenly, everything about his life was different and according to Leo, much, much worse.
626
The signature in his Gmail account read, Rochester is much better in big red letters.
627
Sarah Koenig knows Leo and his parents and visited them at home to see how Leo was doing.
628
This is how much Leo does not want to be here.
629
When I got to his house, he was on the sofa with a laptop investigating Greyhound bus schedules.
630
His mother was going to drive him and his sister back to Rochester for the Columbus Day weekend, but not until Saturday morning, and Leo wanted to get there Friday for more time with his friends.
631
A multi -stage negotiation followed with his dad.
632
For one thing, a bus ticket costs money.
633
That's not a problem.
634
Not for you.
635
No, that wasn't a problem for you.
636
No, but...
637
There isn't one.
638
There isn't one at 9 .6 .15 in the morning.
639
And you won't let me miss school on Friday.
640
The bus takes eight hours.
641
Even if you left at noon, you'd eat it.
642
Yeah, you're going to do the math.
643
That's excellent.
644
Never mind that the bus takes twice as long as driving.
645
And never mind that Leo would be alone and have to change buses.
646
And that his parents had no intention of letting him go through with this plan.
647
But it's the kind of negotiation you indulge when your kid is miserable and Leo is miserable.
648
He told me right away he was and that he had been from the moment he got here in August.
649
Is this the first time in your life where you felt like you've been sad about something for this long?
650
I think so, except for maybe when my other cat died.
651
My old cat.
652
And does this feel worse than that?
653
Yes.
654
Oh, really?
655
Mm -hmm.
656
I've never had long periods of sad until now.
657
I don't know.
658
I don't know anyone here, really, and I think it's just everything in general that's overwhelming.
659
Back in Rochester, Leo had known all his best friends since kindergarten, or before.
660
They played together at school, after school, on weekends.
661
Everybody knew everybody.
662
Everything was comfortable.
663
And as a sixth grader in his old school, he and his friends were at the top of the heap.
664
They wore green sashes in the morning and got to be door monitors for the younger kids coming into the building.
665
So imagine now, Leo takes a school bus for the first time to his new school, a sprawling, one -story building full of 6th, 7th, and 8th graders.
666
Leo's small for his age, only a hair taller than his sister, who's only 9 years old.
667
On day one, he knows exactly no one.
668
It was much louder than my old school.
669
Much louder to people talking, people closing and opening lockers, people walking.
670
It was just noise.
671
Just older kids, more kids, because my old school was tiny.
672
Leo is between.
673
He's old enough to decipher Greyhound bus schedules, but not old enough to actually travel on one by himself.
674
And old enough to know that if he's going to survive in middle school, he has to make friends.
675
But that making those friends stands to be significantly more complicated than it was back in Rochester.
676
Leo's sister, Auden, is in fourth grade.
677
He says she's not having as hard a time of it.
678
She hasn't been alive as long.
679
She hasn't made as deep connections.
680
And she's already met a friend in her school.
681
I think it's easier to make friends in elementary school than in middle school.
682
Oh, really?
683
Why?
684
Because people care less about who you are.
685
What do you mean by that?
686
The older you get, the more you judge people
687
on their looks, their backgrounds their how they act like what cool is for kids
688
because in kindergarten you could just walk up to someone
689
and say do you want to be my friend and they would then that would be it but it's harder
690
i just think people are more wary before they open up they like i don't know in first grade
691
If I met someone, I wouldn't really care who they were.
692
I would just care if they were nice or not.
693
The day I interviewed him, Leo had a couple of breakthroughs.
694
He emailed his parents during the school day to tell them the first piece of good news they'd had from him.
695
Until that day, the emails had mostly been three desperate words.
696
I feel awful.
697
Without even a.. period at the end to make the feeling finite.
698
It was an endless awful.
699
But on this Thursday, he wrote to tell them the mashed potatoes they serve in the cafeteria were great, followed by four exclamation points.
700
Second, and this was the big news, he asked another kid if he wanted to come over.
701
Leo told me he'd thought about it first for a few days, then finally emailed the boy, whose name is Devin, another seventh grader.
702
But now Leo didn't want to call Devin's house to finalize a plan.
703
He dreaded the awkwardness of the phone.
704
So his dad called Devin's parents introduced himself as Leo's father he goes to school with your son Evan
705
and we were Devin I'm
706
so sorry Devin I'm getting the evil look for my son I apologize
707
but we're hoping Devin can come over on Sunday thanks I panic
708
how'd that go not well I thought Leo might be upset about it maybe get sulky.
709
But here he was cracking up, joking with his dad.
710
It was such a relief to hear him laugh after he'd been so solemn in our interview.
711
And I thought, this is all going to be okay.
712
He's going to snap out of it.
713
He's almost there.
714
An afternoon with Devin is going to do the trick.
715
Then Sunday came.
716
Okay, now I have three health again.
717
You can tell your wolf to attack.
718
Okay, I'm going to tell my wolf to attack then.
719
Leo taught Devin how to play Dungeons and Dragons.
720
And the wolf lands on its feet.
721
Yay!
722
Go, Wolfie!
723
Go, Wolfie!
724
Go, Wolfie!
725
I am so weird.
726
On the drive home, Leo and Devin talk nonstop, a gentle rat -a -tat one -upmanship emanating from deep inside a computer game.
727
I am a blood elf warlock.
728
Warlocks are fun.
729
Can you summon your impiet?
730
Yeah, you start with him.
731
Oh, right.
732
I like, um, I had a goblin shaman.
733
I'm a night elf druid, and I can turn into a cat at level 8, which is nice.
734
And at level 12, if you get a bear.
735
Yeah.
736
By the time they dropped Devin off, they were giggling.
737
It's funny.
738
Our cat responds to whatever you call.
739
We said, his name is Pippin, and we can call him football.
740
I can respond.
741
You can call him football.
742
You're football.
743
Thanks for coming over.
744
Thanks.
745
Thank you for inviting me.
746
See you tomorrow.
747
See you.
748
So a perfect day, right?
749
Leo's parents were relieved, hopeful, but no. It's Wednesday.
750
You had your friend over on Sunday.
751
How'd it go?
752
Went okay.
753
Yeah, went okay.
754
Has it changed anything about being here?
755
A little bit.
756
I don't think very much, but a little bit, yeah.
757
What's changed?
758
What's the little bit?
759
Then I know someone at school.
760
It helps.
761
Not all that much, but sort of, yeah.
762
And this is when I realized I'd underestimated the depth of Leo's gloom, that he greets every morning of every school day with dread,
763
and not because he's being bullied or anyone's being mean to him?
764
I feel sick because I know that I have the whole day ahead of me
765
and then I have the next day and the next day
766
and the next day and the next day and the next day ahead of me.
767
Does it pass once you get to school?
768
No, not really.
769
It usually increases to a climax around lunchtime and then I
770
actually have been throwing up recently and then it just stays
771
that level sickness until i get home you're kidding me you're
772
throwing up at school yeah that's awful in the bathroom
773
or where yeah in the bathroom usually at lunch i feel really bad
774
and i go to the bathroom and i throw up has
775
that happened this week today it did do you tell your
776
parents like i don't want to go i don't want to go
777
or do you just you know you have to
778
so you don't say anything uh no i throw a screaming fit every morning yeah pretty much i didn't today
779
What was different about this morning?
780
How come you didn't today?
781
I felt resigned, and I knew that I would have to go anyways, so I gave up.
782
Here's the curse of being almost 13.
783
Old enough to understand his life will supposedly get better with time, but not old enough to really believe he's going to feel any differently than he does right this minute.
784
Since making friends with Devin, Leo is one step toward being the kid he wants to be.
785
Someone with pals.
786
Someone who's comfortable again.
787
But he says right now, he's just worried he's going to be throwing up all year.
788
Sarah Koenig.
789
In the 15th year since we first broadcast this story, Leo has transitioned.
790
She now lives in New York City and is pursuing a career in the arts.
791
She says she's not happy all the time, but things are better than they were.
792
Sarah Koenig is now the host of Serial.
793
She's working on a brand new show that I heard a draft version of.
794
I have to say it's incredible.
795
It is a total pleasure.
796
It's going to be out very soon, this fall.
797
Deck six, Grande with Sugar.
798
So I've been talking to educators, and one who had taught for years in high school
799
and then moved to middle school told me
800
that the key difference between teaching in the two environments was that in middle school, you have to be sympathetic to and patient with all of the emotional drama.
801
You have to deal with that directly if you want the classroom to work.
802
Which brings me to this next story of a student who was doing badly in a middle school in Newark, New Jersey.
803
He was a mess.
804
He would come in, his uniform would be dirty.
805
He hadn't showered.
806
He hadn't had breakfast.
807
His book bag most likely had a hole in it and all of his pens and pencils had fallen out.
808
His homework wasn't done.
809
And so, of course, he'd come in and he'd be angry.
810
This is Shannon Grande, who teaches at Rise Academy Middle School, which is a public school, 91 % black and Latino and eligible for free lunches.
811
One of the KIPP charter schools, hence the uniforms.
812
I heard about this story from Elizabeth Green, who has been reporting on this school for a journalism outfit called Gotham Schools.
813
Anyway, this teacher, Sharon Grande, says that this 7th grader would come in angry all the time.
814
And, um, and usually someone would say something little to him, like, you know, your shirt's not tucked in or the kid would.
815
Yeah.
816
Cause they, you know, they do that.
817
They like, you know, just kind of pick at each other and it was set him off.
818
And then he would just be very loud and just be like, Oh, why do you always have to say this to me and slam his stuff down?
819
I hate this place.
820
And you just go into like these very general rants.
821
And, you know, usually that's an indicator to us, like when they use those very general statements that they're not processing through their emotions, that they're feeling overwhelmed.
822
So this kid was in an unfortunate spiral.
823
He felt isolated from the other kids just inherently because his home situation was so bad.
824
And then he would get angry with the other kids, which then made them mad and made him more isolated.
825
And he got worse and worse through some stuff across a room and it hit a teacher.
826
I mean, there were points where he would come in and And he would refuse to do anything all day long.
827
And he'd just, he would cry.
828
He would break out and cry in the middle class.
829
He didn't even know why.
830
And he couldn't explain why.
831
One big problem for him, one reason that he was ostracized, he didn't wash.
832
Kids would whisper about it.
833
And when he would get mad and then arguments would escalate, that is where it would go.
834
You're dirty.
835
You smell.
836
The kids would say it right to his face.
837
Over time, the staff found all kinds of ways to address this.
838
They got him clean clothes and a place to clean up before school.
839
But the bigger problem, and that's the problem of his isolation and his anger, Ms. Grande says it was not clear how to deal with that.
840
They would try things, but nothing was working.
841
And then finally one day in history class during group work, he was trash -talking, and one of the best girls in the class, one of Ms. Grande's best students,
842
ended up in an argument with him saying terrible things.
843
And Ms. Grande felt like, really?
844
You too?
845
When I pulled the girl, and she was like, well, he brings it on.
846
You know, he gets angry, and then what am I supposed to say?
847
I was like, well, you could not say that, you know? That being.
848
That he's dirty and he smells.
849
And she's like, well, he does.
850
And I said, I was like, I think this is a bigger conversation.
851
So Ms. Grandi took this girl and the three other girls who had been doing group work with this boy, and she took those girls into the teacher's room, and all four of these girls were academically strong,
852
and all of them had shown good leadership qualities in the school in the past.
853
And she talked to them.
854
You know, I had explained to them that he struggles just to get here every day.
855
That I was like, you know, you wake up in the morning and you've got somebody that's getting you out of the door, giving you breakfast, making sure your clothes are clean, making sure you get here on time.
856
He doesn't have that.
857
Like, he has nobody doing that for him.
858
And at that time, you know, I knew that the power had been off at his house, that the week before the water was shut off,
859
that they had had part of their roof cave in.
860
um he has an elderly grandmother that he tries to take care of
861
and she had been getting up in the middle of the night
862
and wandering and he would hear her and get up
863
and carry her back upstairs what was the reaction empathy
864
and she's like i didn't know that you know
865
and the other girls there were you know talking about that
866
and i was like you know i'm telling you something
867
that i normally wouldn't tell another student this you know this is something very private
868
but I'm trusting that you're mature enough to handle this
869
and I was like so you know you're kind of breaking him down
870
when you're doing these things
871
and she's like well can we talk to him I was
872
a little nervous you know obviously I was really worried about
873
it I was like what am I doing here this could be really dangerous and backfire on me Terribly.
874
They started to talk, and they're like, you know, when you get angry, I, you know, we get angry back.
875
What do you expect us to say?
876
And it really was just a couple minutes before the kids told Ms. Grande, we can take it from here.
877
And she left them to talk.
878
Afterwards, the boy told Ms. Grande that it felt good.
879
It felt good that these girls knew that he was trying to deal with his anger.
880
And since this conversation, over time, the entire class has entered this discussion with this kid.
881
And when this kid has an outburst, they will all talk openly about his anger.
882
Like the students say, well, you've told us you're working on this.
883
What are you going to do differently now?
884
And then he'd try to explain, well, you know, I'm trying to take deep breaths.
885
You know, I'm trying to journal when I'm getting angry.
886
I'm trying to do, you know, and he'd come up with whatever solutions he's trying to do.
887
But a lot of times even it wasn't about the solution, the peer pressure itself and the feeling like, you know, he had come in and,
888
you know, he's making these general statements like everybody's against me.
889
And then he's starting to feel like, OK, maybe everybody isn't against me.
890
You know, maybe they are just frustrated with this behavior that I'm doing that I could be doing better.
891
And so that we started to see that impact of peer pressure.
892
It's like you took the entire machinery of middle school dynamics and you're harnessing it to help this kid.
893
Exactly.
894
To harness the fact that they'll listen to peers.
895
Exactly.
896
And we know they do.
897
This is what the research shows, that in middle school you listen to peers more than you listen to anybody else.
898
And that is working with this kid.
899
The other day this kid got a detention for missing part of his uniform
900
and he started on a rant in class about how they're all against him
901
and all the time they're on his back and everybody's against him
902
and it was the end of the world and Ms. Grande finally asked him, who's they?
903
Who's everybody?
904
And he started smiling.
905
And she asked him, what's he really upset about?
906
And unlike in the past, he could untangle it.
907
He could tell her.
908
We'll be right back.
909
rerun from Stone Nelson, Matt Tierney, Adrian Lilly, and Ruby Schwartz.
910
Special thanks today to Adrian Hayes, Gail Andrews, Clay Bolton, Nishad Korowaz, Zachary Barr, Gabe Spitzer, Alicia Zuckerman, Tony, and Griffin from Radio K,
911
Marcy Creaver, Aaron Trivis, Meredith Davis, and Will Yerman.
912
Thanks today to all of our This American Life partners.
913
This week, they get to hear this bonus episode that we put out that is unlike any bonus episode we've ever done.
914
It is about one of the hardest episodes of our show that we have ever produced.
915
An episode that kind of tortured the entire staff for months as we made it
916
and the topic of that particular episode the theme
917
that week the show that tortured us so much is one
918
that I think you'll be very surprised to hear was
919
so difficult to hear that bonus episode
920
and all the others also to get this newsletter with hot tips that I
921
and the other producers have been sending out the most recent
922
newsletter by the way explains how we hired two actual famous people recently for our show
923
and then some things happened to get all that stuff, sign up right now to be a Life Partner.
924
When you do this, you'll be helping us fund the show, which we need.
925
That's why we're going to all this trouble.
926
To join, go to thisamericanlife .org slash lifepartners.
927
The link is also in the show notes.
928
This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the public radio exchange.
929
Thanks as always to our program's co -founder, Mr. Troy Malatia.
930
You know, he gets
931
so confused at the beginning of every HR meeting like they give you the dress code
932
and then they give you like the rules no pending
933
and it's in like quotations i'm ira glass back next week with more stories of this american
Download App
Everything you need to speak fluently
AI PronunciationScore every sentence
IPA PracticeMaster every sound
VocabularyBuild your word bank
Vocab GameLearn while playing
Same Channel
FOR YOU
Recommend Video
B22
121 sentences
THE MIDDLE - PILOT
Daily ConversationWorking Adults
B2312 sentences
Asking 20 and 30 Year Olds About Their Biggest Regrets in Life
Daily ConversationWorking Adults
B21
236 sentences
i-D Meets: Beabadoobee
Daily ConversationWorking Adults
B23
72 sentences
Amanda Seyfried Dealt With Actual Mean Girls In High School
Daily ConversationWorking Adults
B2273 sentences
What's the most painful thing you've been told? – A Compilation of Fan Favorites
Daily ConversationWorking Adults
B22
293 sentences
Why Kids Can't Read Anymore
Daily ConversationWorking Adults
B29
32 sentences
Choosing a School for Our Daughter
American AccentDaily ConversationWorking Adults
B21
112 sentences
Why Teenagers Are So Embarrassing | Jim Gaffigan
Daily ConversationWorking Adults
B22
86 sentences
Amanda McKenna - 11 Things You Miss Most About Being a Kid, Part 1 - 11 Points Countdown
Daily ConversationWorking Adults
B22
331 sentences
English Podcast for Easy English Learning | Daily Life Conversation Practice B1- B2 | Education Talk
Business EnglishInterview EnglishDaily Conversation
B21
430 sentences
A Rural American Childhood
Daily ConversationWorking Adults
Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This speaking lesson is built on the video “Middle School”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: middle, kid, Mimi. This video has 933 sentences and 10584 words to shadow. The speech runs for 59:17. The speaker talks at a natural 179 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. 84% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| reporter noun | /ɹɪˈpoɹ.tɚ/ | Someone or something that reports. |
| producer noun | /pɹəˈdjuːsə/ | An individual or organization that creates goods and services. |
| announcement noun | /əˈnaʊns.mənt/ | An act of announcing, or giving notice. |
| awful adjective | /ˈɔːfʊl/ | Very bad. |
| pet noun | /pɛt/ | An animal kept as a companion or otherwise for pleasure, rather than for some practical benefit or use. |
| experiment noun | /ɪkˈspɛɹ.ə.mənt/ | A test under controlled conditions made to either demonstrate a known truth, examine the validity of a hypothesis, or determine the efficacy or likelihood of… |
| sixth adjective | /sɪksθ/ | The ordinal form of the number six. |
| peer noun | /pɪɹ/ | Somebody who is, or something that is, at a level or of a value equal (to that of something else). |
| trick noun | /ˈtɹɪk/ | Something designed to fool, dupe, outsmart, mislead or swindle. |
| bonus noun | /ˈbəʊ.nəs/ | Something extra that is good; an added benefit. |
| anger noun | /ˈæŋɡə/ | A strong and unpleasant feeling of displeasure, hostility, or antagonism, usually combined with an urge to yell, curse, damage or destroy things, or harm… |
| broadcast noun | /ˈbɹɔːd(ˌ)kɑːst/ | A transmission of a radio or television programme intended to be received by anyone with a receiver. |
| tennis noun | /ˈtɛnɪs/ | A sport played by two players (or four in doubles), who alternately strike the ball over a net using racquets. |
| wolf noun | /wʊlf/ | Canis lupus; the largest wild member of the canine subfamily. |
| elementary adjective | /ˌɛləˈmɛntəɹi/ | Relating to the basic, essential or fundamental part of something. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Meaning |
|---|---|
| go through verb | To travel from one end of something to the other. |
| come over verb | To affect in a sudden, unprecedented or surprising manner; to overwhelm a person's ordinarily contrary impulse. |
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. |
| get out of verb | To leave, exit or escape from; to become free of. |
| get up verb | To move in an upward direction; to ascend or climb. |
| go out verb | To leave, especially a building. |
| grow up verb | To mature and become an adult. |
| put out verb | To blind (eyes). |
Sentences worth repeating
Short, complete lines from the video that you can reuse in everyday conversation:
- Did it make you feel bad?
- Are you saying that the stereotype is true?
- Wait, you haven't told him yes or no yet?
- You told all these guys I don't know?
- How come you didn't today?
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on | has been watching · have been throwing · I've been talking |
| Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result | if people didn't like them, they would all · if you left at noon, you'd eat · If I met someone, I wouldn't really |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | have listened · haven't formed · we've gone |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | was signed · was made · could be done |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 226 contractions and reduced forms, such as don't, I'm, they're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “th” sounds: sixth /sɪksθ/, seventh /ˈsɛvənθ/, eighth /eɪtθ/, clothing /ˈkloʊðɪŋ/, thick /θɪk/
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: conscious /ˈkɑn.ʃəs/, negotiation /nɪˌɡəʊ.ʃiˈeɪ.ʃən/, quotation /kwoʊˈteɪʃn̩/, fiction /ˈfɪkʃən/, trash /tɹæʃ/
- Long words — get the stress right: experiment /ɪkˈspɛɹ.ə.mənt/, elementary /ˌɛləˈmɛntəɹi/, anonymous /əˈnɒn.ə.məs/, miserable /ˈmɪz(ə)ɹəbəl/, participate /pɑːˈtɪs.ɪ.peɪt/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like reporter, producer, announcement.
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.