Students enter each grade a little apprehensively, straining to impress. By this time of year, they fully inhabit themselves at their grade level. Shyness has fallen away; they know the routines, they know their teachers, and they are doing what all children do in springtime: outgrowing their old selves, stretching and transforming.  In the middle school, this means that the classrooms and halls are a louder. The days are longer and warmer, and students' social lives burst into bloom.

 

Classroom activities are geared more and more often toward wrapping up, reflecting and culminating. A series of lasts are on the horizon: the last book, the last test, the last dance. In this home stretch, students are often at their most confident and expressive selves. There is a liveliness and abandon - both in and out of class - that comes from knowing that the string of lasts will soon end in summer. It's a special moment for teachers, when the class is intellectually and developmentally nearly a year older than when they first arrived. They are at their most sophisticated we will ever know them in that grade. And we know them better than we ever have. Classes feel more familial than at any other time of year.