Life = Mr. Smith's afternoon home room? Aarrrgh!

Life is not like high school. Life is like junior high school. Even high school is like junior high school.
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So begins a book review (a pretty good book review, as it eventually turns out, but that's not the point) in today's New York Times Book Review section.

You would not be reading this blog today if I had read those three italicized sentences, written by an apparently knowledgeable adult, while I was in junior high school. My mother would have discovered my skinny 14-year-old body hanging by its neck from an overhead pipe in the basement. Death by strangulation would have seemed a blessing to me, compared to a lifetime in junior high school.

Whoever dreamed up the junior high school (or its cousin the middle school)? Did they hate kids? Or did they hate only intelligent kids? When you're 12, a three-year sentence to junior high school means imprisonment for 25 percent of your lifetime to date. If you're an alert, curious sixth grader with an eagerness to learn, the enforced mindlessness of junior high means spending a term equal to 33 percent of your educational years to date locked into the educational equivalent of a TV game show.

Yeah, a game show. Thinking back, I'm surprised I never noticed a laugh track punctuating every inane comment by a bored teacher, every scatalogical chirp from a hormonal fellow student, every slack-jawed, glazed-eye response by an entire somnolent classroom to the 35th reiteration for the year of the proper way to multiply two fractions together.

And the teachers! Did anyone ever go to college with the hope of becoming a junior high teacher? Teachers who love kids teach elementary. Teachers who love science or math or English teach high school. You knew, even as a wet-behind-the-ears 7th grader, that junior high got the dregs of the profession. Not just teachers who didn't care or couldn't teach, but teachers who didn't care and couldn't teach to the degree that not even the most mediocre high school could put up with them.

So don't tell a kid with any dreams of future joy and achievement that "life is like junior high school." It's not, thank God. At least for most of us it's not (with the exception, I suppose, of junior high teachers). And I'd like to see that poor idealistic kid reach high school and college still alive and still in one piece.

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Rich Cohen reviewing Adam Canfield, Watch Your Back! by Michael Winerip, NY Times Book Review (3-16-08).