Many of you are familiar with the NCAA College Basketball's March Madness; brackets, bets, and seeds. That's all fine and good, but it's not really madness. Madness is characterized by a complete departure from reality. For that you may need to look somewhere closer to home, like say, schools. Particularly, middle schools and junior highs.

     Schools everywhere suffer from the May Madness Malady. Summer vacation is approaching, the weather has warmed (and so have hormonal imbalances) and kids can very nearly taste the freedom mere weeks away. However, a bit like Indiana Jones' golden idol, they must first traverse the traps and pitfalls of final tests and projects, graduation requirements, performances, and evaluations. However, a bit like a mutant strain of bacteria, May Madness takes on a whole new character when it visits middle schools.

     Middle schools students are a diverse demographic; any number of a thousand different stages of mental, emotional, and physical maturity can be found within a random population of middle-school aged children. A petite young man whose adam's apple and ears have outpaced the rest of his physical development can be found groping the buttocks of a girl that, for all purposes, IS a young woman. Likewise a child might come into my class at the beginning of the year, gender to be determined, and by the end of the year, low and behold, the child has sprouted six inches and grown a beard. I can carry on a conversation with one young man that, though he has yet to sprout a single body hair darker than off-white, can speak intelligently about the Israeli-Palestine conflict. At the same time a boy six feet tall and speaking in a manly baritone will sulk moodily in the corner when I tell him that, no, he can't watch "Dragonball Z" on his laptop until he finishes the assigned reading.

     When May Madness visits an adolescent cocktail like this, it's impossible to tell how it will manifest itself. Case in point, since May 1st the homework completion in my classroom has slid. This is to be expected. However, it slid from 80% to roughly 20%. A drop like that in the NASDAQ would send executives out twenty-story windows. It's not a vindictive refusal to work either. They look at me with blank stares (a few with the obligatory downcast look of shame) and then they squint a little, as if the concept of homework has suddenly become very new to them again.They approach classwork with the same vigor (which is to say, very little) and I find myself repeating instructions four or five times out-of-hand, simply because I've found that even if they miss them the first three times, they won't even bother to ask later.

     If the kids' academics take a hard hit in the month of May, their social lives receive extra attention, and not in a good way. Hall supervision has become a nauseating experience. In the warm weather a huge contingent of girls now come to school wearing as little as humanly possible without actually qualifying as graphic. Shorts so short that they are only kept out of the lingerie category by dint of a zipper. Of course, a male teacher runs a risk in addressing young girls attire. Instead I carry a card, a simple card with one simple instruction: see the guidance counselor. Passing the buck, but it gets the job done.

    What comes hand-in-hand (or hand-in-somewhere else) with scantily clad girls? Curious boys. In fact, PDA's have become an epidemic at our school. In attempting to address this problem, we've stepped up hallway supervision, but simultaneously lowered our standards. They can be sitting on one anothers' laps slurping whip cream out of their armpits as long as they're not kissing or groping under the clothing (yes, I'm still referring to middle school). It's an unfortuante consequence of allowing kids to grow up faster that they...well, they grow up faster.

    There's a strange chemical trigger in a middle school boy's brain that seems to be flipped when May comes around. The middle-school boy regresses, not to an earlier age (like preschool) but an earlier evolutionary era (like precambrian). They literally become grunting, humping, uber-aggressive cave-boys. The bigger, stronger, alpha boys (early-bloomers, in most cases) incessantly bully the smaller Deltas (those that still have silky smooth faces, unscarred by puberty), get into constant pissing contests with one another, and seem to walk around in a strange air of entitlement; kings of the developmentally-stalled jungle. It's as if their 14 years on the planet has allowed them to decipher the pecking order of the world, and as it would have it, they're on top!

    The overall effect of Middle-level May Madness is a weird dysfunctional cauldron that makes it virtually impossible to do any real educating. In fact, if I were a documentary film-maker I think I might stand to make a lot of money by penetrating this pubescent ecosystem and bringing the mystery to light. As far as I can tell, the only real solution would be to keep the whole building at a constant 50 F, and tell them all that summer school was canceled. Of course, there's a chance May Madness would become May Mutiny. I suppose teachers will just do what they all do in May when there's no competing with the insanity...pop in a movie and hope for the best.

Photo from pennyrodgersblog.com