Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. The first few weeks of Donald Trump’s return to the White House have been rough for anyone who believes in common decency and the rule of law. It’s also been a tough time for middle school and middle schoolers, who have, since Trump’s election in 2016, served as a rhetorical cudgel with which to beat Trump and his acolytes. For far too many commentators, it’s not enough to condemn Trump as a fool or a monster. They have to accuse him of being an adolescent as well. As a middle school teacher, I am here to say that this middle school bashing should stop. Middle school and middle schoolers have their problems—no one who works with this age cohort every day could deny it. But the worst middle school bully is still better than Donald Trump, an adult who should really know better, and this unrelenting cultural focus on the downsides of adolescence obscures another side to middle school life, one that I am fortunate to witness almost every day. We often think of middle school as a period to simply pass through, an age to get beyond, never to be discussed again, but if we’re paying attention, I think middle schoolers can teach us a lot about how to be better versions of ourselves. Middle schoolers, in their cartoon form, are most often invoked to condemn Trump’s sense of humor, which often involves making jokes, or hurling outright insults, at the expense of others. I’ve certainly overheard some crude insults from the mouths of 12-year-olds, but reducing adolescent humor to the kinds of insults utilized by our president and his most devoted acolytes misses the fact that middle schoolers are often genuinely, authentically hilarious. Set a group of them free in the woods, as we do each year on our fall camping trip, and they’ll invent enough games to keep themselves occupied for hours, and sometimes start running around with tree branches of such size as to make a Labrador jealous. Halloween, a holiday on which we allow kids to wear costumes to school, is a constant parade of genuinely innovative costume ideas alongside occasional store-bought fare: a troupe of characters from famous insurance commercials; a remarkable homemade Edward Scissorhands; more than a few impressions of certain favorite teachers. Even middle school mischief is often more fun than it is truly problematic. Almost daily I have to admonish a child for a decision poorly made while doing my best to stifle the urge to laugh. Among the best examples I have is a group of students a few years ago who started sneaking into my classroom and turning things upside down in order to see what I would do. At first it was small items like posters or books or the little containers I use to collect pens and pencils at student tables. When I did nothing more than quietly turn these things right-side up, they moved on to more notable items like the name plate from just outside my door, the bins I use to collect student notebooks, even a chair. Only when they started turning over garbage bins did I have to intervene publicly and ask that whoever was responsible not go quite so far. Now, three years later, I’m still not sure precisely who these good-natured vandals are, and at least a few kids journey back every few weeks from the high school to catch me unawares and leave a poster or a stapler overturned, like a calling card. If only more adults could figure out how to make mischief with this degree of creativity and grace. Another refreshing aspect of working with middle school students is the remarkable earnestness with which they approach their budding intellectual lives. Our current political culture is absolutely drowning in bad-faith arguments about such huge matters as the law of the land or our moral obligations to others, to name just a few examples. I have dealt with my share of children who choose to be dishonest while trying to avoid the consequences of poor choices they’ve made. I have encountered more than a few kids trying to make it sound like they did the reading when they obviously did not. But never in my teaching career have I encountered a middle schooler making a deliberately misleading argument about a book. To many adults, books—especially history books—are simply weapons with which to beat one another in the next battle of the culture war. What matters is not your understanding of, say, the Federalist Papers, but the fact that you can go on television and hold forth as though you know what you’re talking about. For kids, though, books often still maintain an air of mystery, a residual aura of enchantment, that prevents them from being flagrantly misused in this way.Books may be boring, but they are always serious—and for kids, that makes all the difference. Claiming that books we read, like The Poet X or parts of Song of Myself, say something other than what they say isn’t just going to result in lower grades. It means leaving a puzzle unsolved, a capacity left unused. For most of my students, writing works in a similar way. Sure, they could try to get away with using ChatGPT, but my ChatGPT detection abilities are well known in our middle school, and most students don’t even try. Just as actually doing the reading involves exercising a basic capacity to make sense of the world, so too does writing still maintain an air of singular self-expression. What they write represents their thoughts, their words, something that can’t be so easily replaced by a machine. When our students gather to share poetry or other creative work to what is often raucous applause from their peers, it’s not necessarily a brilliant work of art that’s being celebrated, though we do witness some wonderful middle school creations. They’re celebrating the act of putting their thoughts out in the world in front of each other. More adults should approach reading and writing with the same degree of care. The most important lesson to take from middle schoolers, though, comes from the honesty and the joy with which they go about being themselves. It’s no surprise that middle school is so often understood as a time for figuring out who you are, that almost all young adult literature is one way or another a version of the bildungsroman. But while many young-adult novels offer neatly linear narratives of development, real-life middle schoolers aren’t quite ready to assume their mature adult forms. Instead, kids at this age often cycle through various versions of themselves, trying out different varieties of hair and clothing, hobbies and affinities, deciding that some tend to fit while jettisoning others as not quite in accordance with who they think they are. This process can certainly look deeply hierarchical and heteronormative. In some cases it is, especially when the identities to which kids aspire are those modeled by manosphere influencers or the female-coded versions thereof. But one point that middle school makes abundantly clear is that there is no natural or normal way of being yourself—even the “normal” kids are playing at identity, perhaps especially when their archetypes are deeply conventional versions of what they want to be. The work of identity exploration—of trying on different styles of yourself—is always prone to slippage, misrecognition, and re-creation. It’s obvious that identity at this age is a thing done in ways that students of gender studies might more commonly associate with drag or other forms of gender play. Girls develop meticulous hair and makeup routines and revise or reinforce them as they go along. Other girls reject these norms and develop other ways of being themselves. Boys cultivate proto-manliness of various styles, with some focusing on weights, others on soccer, others on gaming or fantasy novels or skateboards. Still other kids gleefully upend gender binaries, swapping pronouns as they see fit or trying on different names or identity markers. Some even test the boundaries of species, identifying as furries, aliens or otherkin, depending on the day. To some adults, this ferment can seem like just another kind of adolescent chaos. To a certain kind of adult, it might be chaos of the worst, most fundamental kind. But the difference between adolescents and adults when it comes to identity is not so much that adults have figured it out and kids have not; it’s that young people aren’t nearly as practiced at ignoring what’s hard or incongruous about being a human person as most adults have come to be. The consequences can sometimes be deeply profoundly awkward, what middle school educators call “middle school moments”—a social cue that goes unread, a new word completely misunderstood, a bodily function not so discreetly ignored. These are the moments we cringe at, as grownups, but this cringing is always of a retrospective kind. When my colleagues and I once watched in horror as a child grabbed a mic in front of hundreds of their peers and came out as a therian, it wasn’t that child’s shame that we experienced, for a child who confesses such a thing in public feels no shame at all. It was the shame of imagining ourselves in that position, of remembering that we were once naive and vulnerable enough to have done such a thing, that is the real source of discomfort. That discomfort is a feeling that, as adults, we go out of our way to avoid. We suppress it in ourselves, and when we see our students and children in such a position, we do our best to coach them out of it, or through it, lest the consequence be the infamy we so desperately fear. At a moment in which cruelty reigns at the highest levels of government and society, however, it’s also a fear that our leaders have come to ruthlessly exploit. The dream of Trumpism is a ruthlessly normative one—there’s no space for awkwardness, for developmental differences, for disabilities, for simply being weird. Middle school is sometimes described as education’s awkward stepchild. It lacks the cuteness of elementary school or the intellectual seriousness of high school. Kids are old enough that the hands-on play of lower grades is no longer sufficient, but the quasi-adult work of seminar discussions and lengthy essays isn’t appropriate either. No one likes to remember who they were at 13; many people, perhaps because it brings back so many memories, find it difficult to parent a kid at this age. But learning to resist the rise of authoritarianism in America might also mean learning to live with the part of ourselves we’d like to avoid. In this, middle schoolers can show us the way.