Teacher Shares The Wildest Middle School Behavior She’s Seen And What It Teaches Us About Preteens
The first warm day of April last year, I found 12 of my 7th graders huddled behind the gym bleachers after dismissal, shoulders pressed together, snickering so loud they didn’t hear me walk up. When I cleared my throat, the whole group jumped back like I’d caught them stealing midterm answers, and one boy kicked a pile of loose dirt over the small hole they’d dug with plastic sporks stolen from the cafeteria.
Mia, the quiet honor roll kid who never raises her hand even when she knows the answer, stepped forward first, brushing grass off her jeans. “We’re burying Gary,” she said, like that explained everything. “He was our giant cheese puff.”
I leaned in to look. Sticking out of the dirt above the hole was a small popsicle stick cross wrapped in silver duct tape. The hole itself was lined with torn graph paper, and when the kids moved out of the way, I saw it: a cheese puff the size of a golf ball, half wrapped in a napkin, stale from three days of being carried around in a Harry Potter pencil case. Jake, the kid who’d found it in his lunch pack, piped up that Gary had gotten too crunchy to eat, so a proper burial was the only respectful option.
In my first three years of teaching, I would’ve shut that whole thing down immediately. I would’ve given a lecture about digging holes on school property, wasting time, and being too old for silly games, and sent everyone home with a warning. That day, though, I just nodded and asked if they needed five more minutes to finish the service. They couldn’t believe I wasn’t mad. One kid gave a short, off-the-cuff eulogy about how Gary never fit in Jake’s mouth and that’s what made him special, we filled the hole back in, and everyone walked out to the car line laughing.
That wasn’t even the weirdest thing I saw that semester. A week later, I found out a group of boys were running an underground slime rental business out of their lockers, charging 50 cents an hour for passing period playtime and a $1 cleaning fee if you got slime on your uniform. Three other girls spent a full week writing a 10-page citizenship test for their secret treehouse club, where you had to pass to join – all the questions were inside jokes: “What’s the correct order of the TikTok dance we made up behind the bus loop?” “What’s the wrong answer to ‘does pineapple belong on pizza?’”
After 12 years teaching middle school, I’ve learned that all this weird, wild, seemingly pointless stuff isn’t just kids being disruptive or immature. It’s preteens testing something they don’t get to practice much in structured adult-led spaces: autonomy. Preteens are stuck in this awkward in-between. They’re too old for the unstructured pretend play of elementary school, but too young for the high-stakes social and academic pressure of high school. Every part of their day is planned by adults: what class they go to, what homework they do, what practice they attend. These weird little rituals – the funerals for snacks, the locker businesses, the secret club tests – are the first time most of them get to make something that’s entirely theirs. No grades, no adult approval, no tryouts, just their own rules.
If you’re a parent or a new teacher, the first thing you can do when you catch your kid doing something this weird is pause before you shut it down. Ask “Tell me how this started” instead of “Why are you wasting your time on this?” Most of the time, you’ll find that the quiet kid who never leads anything at school or in extracurriculars is the one organizing the whole thing. Mia, who planned Gary’s funeral, had never been the head of any group at school before. She told me later that all her other activities have adults telling her what to do every step of the way, and this was just something she got to plan all on her own. That’s low-stakes leadership practice you can’t replicate in a classroom.
The second concrete thing I tell other teachers and parents is to only step in when something is actually harmful, not just weird. If the hole is 6 inches deep behind the bleachers and they fill it back in, no harm done. If someone is being excluded or someone’s property is getting damaged, address the specific problem, not the whole weird activity. When a new girl was excluded from the treehouse club because she couldn’t get the dance question right, I didn’t ban the club. I just pulled the group aside and said, “It’s okay to have a small group of friends, but it’s not okay to make someone feel stupid for not knowing your inside joke. What can you change about your test to fix that?” They ended up adding a rule that if you get a question wrong, someone teaches you the answer, and that was that.
When the slime rental started, a teacher down the hall tried to shut it down entirely, and the kids just moved it to the bathroom stalls, leading to a whole week of slime stuck on toilet seats and hand dryers. When I talked to the kids running it, I just set three clear rules: no slime out during class, no mess left in the hall, no charging more than a quarter. They agreed, and the whole thing fizzled out on its own in three weeks anyway, like all middle school fads do.
It’s been a year now, and Gary the cheese puff is still under the dirt behind the bleachers. The slime rental is long gone, the treehouse club switched to making friendship bracelets last semester. This year, my current 7th graders started a complaint jar during recess, where they write down gripes about school lunch and homework and read one out loud every afternoon. It’s silly, it’s weird, it doesn’t fit into any lesson plan, and that’s exactly the point. Preteens don’t just need structure and grades and planned activities. They need a little space to make something that’s entirely theirs, even if that something is a funeral for a giant cheese puff. I still don’t always get the fads, but I’ve stopped shutting them down, and I’ve noticed the kids are a lot more willing to come to me with the bigger, harder stuff too. They know I don’t judge the small weird things first.
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