Being 12: The Year Everything Changes

After a year that saw high-profile police shootings plus the deadly attack on a black church in South Carolina, middle school teachers told WNYC their classrooms were abuzz with personal and sometimes difficult conversations. And they didn't always feel prepared to handle what came up. In a brief reprise of our Being 12 series, we explore the topic of talking about race and racism to children in the throes of early adolescence. One morning in May, Stephanie Caruso had a question for her seventh graders at West Side Collaborative Middle School. She wanted to know if they’d ever been stopped by police when leaving the Upper West side campus for lunch. An African-American girl named Joya Gaskin said she and her friend were once questioned by a white policeman. "It was like kind of right after like the whole Ferguson thing, so I didn’t know if it was because of our race because it kind of came off like that," she told her classmates who were listening closely. It turned out a bunch of them had similar experiences. Some wondered whether they were being stopped because of their race or because they’re kids and they weren’t in school. Caruso had been thinking about these questions a lot since the deaths of Eric Garner on Staten Island and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, at the hands of white police officers. As a humanities teacher, she regularly wove current events into her lessons but this school year, punctuated by a number of disturbing police brutality cases, really challenged her and her students. "It’s been exhausting," she said. She and her colleagues at West Side Collaborative expected race to come up in ways both profound and silly during class. Their students experienced grown-up situations, like being stopped by police, but they also called each other names like "burrito boy." More than ever, though, these teachers wanted to explore language, prejudice and racism with their kids. The year's events demanded it. As the school year came to a close, they said it had been difficult at times, not least because they were making it up as they went along. "You don’t receive training to have that type of discussion, that real discussion with your kids about that reality," said West Side Collaborative teacher Victoria Thomas. Although the school's teachers attended a session with the group Facing History and Ourselves, they had no lesson plans or ongoing support. Instead, they worked together to select reading and writing exercises relevant for 12- and 13-year-olds. This is an age when children become much more aware of how race and privilege influence all kinds of real world events. It's also when they're developing their own identities, as separate and independent young adults. Delving into these topics in a classroom setting requires teachers to have a certain comfort level. "Before you can have the conversation with young people, you have to have the conversation with yourself," said Deidre Franklin, managing director of counseling, family engagement and training for YWCA in Brooklyn. She offers training sessions for teachers where she encourages them to develop a deeper understanding of race and the dynamics that go along with it. "So if you understand racism and you understand power, you understand privilege, you can start having conversations about Ferguson." But it can be hard for public schools to find the time and money for training. That’s why many say the real experts on teaching about race and diversity are in the city’s private schools. Naila Strong (center) during a discussion on what it means to be white with her seventh grade classmates at the Bank Street School (Richard Yeh/WNYC) Anshu Wahi is the Director of Diversity and Community at the Bank Street School for Children in Manhattan where every faculty member attends a workshop on institutional racism and works with Wahi to integrate different perspectives into their lesson plans. "When I explain my job to, like, kindergartners, I say...

As issues related to race and policing reverberated through New York City classrooms this school year, WNYC spoke to a few different groups of 12-year-old New Yorkers about how their views changed. Amani Brown, who attended a recent conference on justice hosted by Global Kids, said she did not trust the police, and felt disappointed by the events this year. Brown wore a gray hooded sweatshirt which she said she always wore when walking around her Brooklyn neighborhood. "My hood is my wall," she said. "I don't feel safe without my hood on. Anytime I'm outside, I always have my hood on no matter what." Another group of tweens grappled with the issues in a different way. Students at the Cornerstone Academy for Social Action were inspired by the events in Staten Island and Ferguson to create a rap song and video, with help from arts partners called Hip Hop Saves Lives and Negusworld. Twelve year-olds at Cornerstone Academy for Social Action: (L-R) Nashawnti McDowell, LaKai Williams, Joseph Beazer, Arcalia Samuels, Alanood Alkaifi and Sydney Brooks (Beth Fertig/WNYC) Nashawnti McDowell said she was "shocked" by Ferguson. "I feel like this whole thing started over with the blacks and like...one shot for no reason," she said. Some of the boys weren't as surprised. They'd been told by adults to watch how they behave around police. LaKai Williams said his mother warned him not to have pants below his waist, or to "hang out in big crowds." And Joseph Beazer said he wasn't surprised by Ferguson. "Like I knew that at some point it would happen again," he said, adding that all he wanted was "peace in the world and for everyone to have fun."

It's no secret that being 12 years old can be tough. That's why we've created a full show about it. At 12, kids shed layers, test new roles and transform before our eyes as they explore what kind of adult they want to be. Their brains and bodies change at alarming rates. At the same time, school gets harder. And in New York City, it's the age when kids often commute to school on their own by bus and subway. Download all the WNYC stories and first-person "postcards" on why 12 is important not only for kids, but the teachers who work with them, scientists who study them, parents who are puzzled by them, not to mention the brands and musicians looking to connect.

Twelve-year-old Déjà Palmer lives with her mother and twin brother on the Lower East Side. She’s a good student at Tompkins Square Middle School, and she’s very active in an after-school program for kids who are strong in math and another program for dance and theater. But like many kids her age, Déjà is spending a lot more time lately wondering about relationships. “I definitely feel like couples have blossomed and it’s been a bigger thing,” she said, adding that many of her friends are dating now. Some are kissing but for the most part she said it’s nothing serious. She has a boyfriend, but she said that doesn’t mean she’s in love. “I wouldn’t say that we are like a teenage couple, honestly, we don’t act like one. I think we are pretty much age-appropriate," she said. "We don’t talk nasty to each other or dirty to each other in a sexual way, you know. We hug, we hold hands. We have little moments, but it’s not like we’re making out and sucking faces and we actually haven’t kissed.” Despite some peer pressure to kiss, she agrees with her mom that 12 is too young to get that involved. She also wondered if it's too soon for some kids to know their sexual identity because several girls at school have declared they’re bisexual. "I don’t really know if they’re serious about it or if they’re just using it, that excuse for attention," she said. Déjà Palmer outside Tompkins Square Middle School (Beth Fertig/WNYC) Déjà is meticulous about her appearance. She plans out her hair styles for every day of the week. She has a list of resolutions on the bright blue wall of her bedroom, one of which is “no boy drama.” Looking ahead, Déjà said she sometimes worried about how life will change when she gets older. "I love how my life is now just because it’s not like so much pressure," she explained, referring to responsibility and expectations. She also knows there will be more pressure on her in relationships with boys. "That scares me because when you get older people expect you to act differently and think differently. And I don’t really know how I’m going to change."

Not so long ago, ads for pads and tampons showed images of women in gauzy garments, doing yoga on the beach. Manufacturers left it to moms and big sisters to give young women "the talk." Today, these brands speak to girls directly: Always’ “#LikeAGirl” ad, featuring young women, ran in the last superbowl. “First Moon Party”, a humorous take on a girl’s wish to get her first period, got over 30 million views since it went up on YouTube last year. “It’s not surprising that it could be turned into something funny because it’s already something that I’m comfortable with,” said Willa, a 12-year-old Brooklynite. Direct talk and the rhetoric of female empowerment seem to be a good match for young women today. But when the product being advertised is clothing or makeup, it can raise questions. Emily Long, director of communication at The LAMP, a media-awareness organization for kids, said companies use soft-focus feminism to obscure the fact that a brand must play on a woman’s insecurities in order to sell product. She cited Dove skincare, which has a selfie campaign for teens, and Aerie, which announced last year it would stop re-touching photos of its models. “It’s still a construction, “ Long said. “They’re still creating a shot, putting them in costumes and lighting and makeup. Just because they’re not going back over it later on with something like Photoshop doesn’t mean that it hasn’t been manipulated.” Aerie says its ads are aimed at young women 15 and up. Pink by Victoria’s Secret, a rival clothing brand, says it focuses on “college-aged women” But in fact both brands are popular with tweens, because they sell fashionable underwear that fits them. A recent study by EPM Communications put tween spending power at $200 billion.

It turns out middle school teachers disliked middle school as much as the rest of us. “It’s just an awkward and difficult time,” said Peter Schmitt, a middle school math teacher at Lower Manhattan Community School. “I would not want to do it again.” But if these teachers hated middle school, why did they ever return? In interviews, we found there were three main factors that brought middle school teachers back to the sixth, seventh, and eighth grades. 1. It’s where the jobs are. Because middle school is a notoriously difficult age for kids, a lot of teachers don’t stick around: more than half leave the profession after just three years. And that means teachers stand a better shot getting a job in a middle school than they do at the elementary or high school levels. That’s especially true for posts at some of the city’s top-ranked middle schools, both district and charter alike. “It’s very hard to get into a very good high school — those are kind of locked, those people keep those jobs for decades,” said Nat Hawks, a teacher at Coney Island Prep in Brooklyn. 2. Teachers find they really like these kids — even if they didn’t expect to at first. Margaux Cornelison, who thought she wanted to teach elementary school, was surprised. “I just found middle schoolers to be the people I love teaching the most,” she said. Maryanne Purtill, who teaches middle school in Ditmas Park, said she loves loves working with middle schoolers because these three years are so critical: all the raw materials are there and now it’s time to the final product to start taking form. “They’re either going to say, ‘Yes I love school,’ or ‘This? Maybe not so much,’” Purtill said. “And it’s a great age group because most of the kids, if you give them the opportunity, they just want to do it.” 3. They’ve got what it takes. Middle schoolers are starting to figure out who they are and how they ought to behave. It can be a rough transition: middle schoolers make up one fifth of New York City’s students but account for one third of all school suspensions. “They smack the kid next to them, they see you watching them smack the kid next to them, and when you call them on it, they’re like: ‘I didn’t hit him,’” recalled teacher Amanda Xavier. “Just, you know, total denial.” So the best middle school teachers know how to reach them. More than teaching content, they’re teaching students to appreciate learning, and find their voices. “I want them to leave saying, ‘You know what, this school thing, it’s worth investing my time in,’” Schmitt said.

Abraham Esber, Brooklyn During the day, this Williamsburg native is a seventh grader at East Side Community School in Manhattan. But three days a week after school, and on Saturdays, he travels to Lincoln Center to study at the School of American Ballet. Now that he's 12, Abe said his parents are letting him travel from school to Lincoln Center by himself on the subway. He said his friends think it's cool that he danced in "The Nutcracker" but he doesn't tell everyone at school because he's not sure what they'll think. "If anybody would make fun of me I would tell them it's actually really manly and involves a lot of muscles and strength," he said. On Social Life and Dating Ethan DiPietro (Amy Pearl) A group of 12-year-old New Yorkers shared thoughts on how things changed in middle school when it came to boy-girl relations. Several of them thought it was too early to date, and others were in the throes of crushes. One boy said the tensions between girls and boys can be confusing, even scary. David Chen, Queens David Chen at his school in Flushing (Beth Fertig/WNYC) David is a sixth grader at the East-West School of International Studies, a public school in Flushing. He runs on the track team and shrieks with glee after doing a lap around the school gymnasium. David called himself an "ABC," or American-born Chinese. He lives with his parents and an older brother who was born in China. This makes David the main translator for his family. David's other responsibilities include cooking dinner, mopping the floor and doing laundry on weekends. He said he gets paid about $20 a week for his chores. Shamia Mim, Bronx Seventh grader Shamia Mim, at home in the Bronx (Beth Fertig/WNYC) Shamia Mim arrived in the U.S. from Bangladesh a year and a half ago. She now goes to Emolior Academy in the Bronx. When Shamia first got here, she worried that the other students wouldn't like her. But within a few days, she recalled, "I saw that they are so good, being good to me." There's just one thing that gets on her nerves: her fellow students don't always use "scholarly language." But Shamia admits to her own shortcomings, namely staying up very late at night watching Bollywood movies. Vicky Dorcelly, Brooklyn Vicky Dorcelly (Emerald Dorcelly) Like a lot of kids, Vicky admits to being a night owl. "Yesterday I said I was going to sleep at 1 o'clock and I ended up going to sleep at 2:30," she said. The culprit? Her phone. Bed-Stuy Kids Sound off on Bullying Jackia Brown interviewing Autumn Brown (no relation) in Bedford Stuyvesant about bullying (Veralyn Williams/Brooklyn Deep) One of the scarier aspects of middle school is bullying. The investigative journalism site BrooklynDeep.org asked kids in Bedford Stuyvesant to interview each other about it. Jackia Brown and Autumn Brown (not related) questioned Ashanti, Damani and Douglas with the help of Brooklyn Deep's managing editor Veralyn Williams. Special thanks to WNYC's Radio Rookies for their support.

In conjunction with WNYC’s Being 12 series, celebrated children’s book author Jon Scieszka will talk about getting adolescents– particularly young boys – to read, and the appeal of writing for this age group. Scieszka is the author of books for young readers like The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales, Math Curse, and The True Story of the Three Little Pigs. He is also the founder of Guys Read – a web-based literacy program for boys whose mission is "to help boys become self-motivated, lifelong readers." In 2008 he was named the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature by the Librarian of Congress. What books are you passing down to the adolescents in your life: your children, nieces and nephews, brothers and sisters? What books did you cherish when you were 12? Tell us in the comments below! Jon Scieszka's latest book (courtesy of the publisher)

If adolescence has a poster child, it's a teenager. In a car. Smoking, drinking, and driving badly while also, somehow, having sex in the back seat. But changes in the brain that lead to the famously bad choices of adolescence don't start at 16 or 17 years old. They start around 11 or 12, at the beginning of puberty. This is the dirty little secret of adolescence: The cloudy judgment and risky behavior may not last a year or two. Try a decade. To understand why, let's start with an experiment. At Temple University, psychology professor Laurence Steinberg and his team put a bunch of adolescents into an FMRI machine -- a brain scanner -- and asked them to play a driving game. "Your perspective is that of a person behind the wheel," Steinberg said, describing the set-up. "And you come to a series of intersections, and the lights turn yellow. And you have to decide whether to put the brakes on or not." Now, what do you think the adolescents did in this situation? Wrong. They did not blow through the yellow every time. "When adolescents are playing this game by themselves, they don't take any more chances than adults do when they're playing it by themselves," Steinberg said. And that's a big deal. Because the adolescent brain gets a bad rep for being consistently impulsive. Steinberg said he hopes his latest book, Age of Opportunity, will help set the record straight: Being 12 (or 17) doesn't mean a kid's hardwired to always make bad choices. Why, then, do adolescents still make so many bad choices? To find out, Steinberg added a twist to his experiment. He gave his subjects an adolescent crowd. "This doubles the number of chances that adolescents take," Steinberg said, "but has no effect on the number of chances adults take." In short, an adolescent's weakness is other adolescents. And we're not just talking about peer pressure. The mere presence of peers makes them less cautious. One reason, said B.J. Casey, a neuroscientist at Weill Cornell Medical College, is that "the brain is being marinated in gonadal hormones" during adolescence. Another big reason: The prefrontal cortex is still a work-in-progress. And it serves a vital role in our decision-making. "It helps to link past experiences to the current situation," Casey said, "and, at the same time, consider what the future consequences are of choices and actions that are made." The prefrontal cortex is our voice of reason. Steinberg called it the brain's CEO. Casey likened it to Mister Spock from Star Trek, coldly calculating a life's worth of cost-benefit analyses. Casey's analogy didn't stop there. To her, Captain Kirk is the limbic system -- the emotional center of the brain that's always on the lookout for threats and rewards. When it spots either, it sends a message to the prefrontal cortex. Because the limbic system can't make sense of these things on its own. It needs the prefrontal cortex. Kirk needs Spock. Here's the problem. For kids in adolescence, the prefrontal cortex is still developing, and it can't keep up with the limbic system, which goes into reward-seeking hyperdrive. "It's as if these emotional regions hijack the prefrontal systems," Casey said, "and it leads to a choice that they make that's a bad one. And they even know it's a bad one." Which brings us full-circle to Steinberg's driving experiment. The limbic system doesn't just flag rewards in things like alcohol and sex. A 12-year-old gets a kind of high simply by being around other adolescents. They're wired to seek each other out and develop their social skills. In the short-term, that means cloudy judgment and potentially risky behavior.

This story is part of New Tech City's series on education and technology. In this episode of our podcast: We kick off a month of podcasts on kids and technology! Exciting!We talk with listener Dierdre Shetler, a middle school tech teacher in Phoenix, Arizona. Hear how she approaches technology with more than 800 kids in a lower-income, immigrant-heavy district. ...and... best for last... We've launched a little classroom activity for schools around the country. We're pretty thrilled about it. If you're a teacher, join us! If you know any teachers, pass it along! Actually, if you know anyone with a flock of kids on hand, send it their way! Resources we mention (and a few more we just like): lesson plan and surveydanah boydtalked with her ISTE — formerly known as NETS — standardsCommon Sense MediamaterialsYouTube videoTo This Day Join Our Conversation We're going to be talking about kids, education and technology for the next few weeks of the podcast. Do you have specific questions? Thoughts? Comment below, or send them our way with a voice memo at newtechcity[at]wnyc[dot]org. And don't forget to pass our classroom activity onto the teachers in your life! Post it on Facebook and tag a few parents, Little League coaches, or Girl Scout troop leaders, won't you? Subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, or on Stitcher, TuneIn, I Heart Radio, or anywhere else using our RSS feed. A look at 12-year-old Ayelle's phone. You'll meet her over the next few weeks. (Ariana Tobin/New Tech City)

Seasoned middle school teachers and principals know what they're up against. Their students are bombarded by physical and psychological changes. The same child can show up dedicated and hard-working one day, silly and difficult the next. But if you grab their attention, educators told WNYC, there's a chance to make a difference with long-term benefits. “In the spectrum of adolescent development, 12 is really when you start to have the changeover,” said Derick Spaulding, the principal of Emolior Academy in the South Bronx. “They come in with a set of ideas, but a set of ideas that are amendable and moldable to a degree.” The key is to cut through all the distractions. On a recent morning in a social studies class, 12-year-old Elijah Harper couldn't focus. Why? “She’s just on my mind, the girl right here,” he said, sharing a photo on his phone. Derek Spaulding, principal and founder of Emolior Academy. (Beth Fertig/WNYC) "Seventh grade is a hot mess,” said Jason Borsella, Elijah’s social studies teacher. “You’ve got kids that are six-feet-tall and squeaking and then you’ve got boys and girls that are barely 4 ½ feet. You’ve got hormones galore with the girls and the boys. It’s like potpourri on 'Jeopardy' night. You never know what you’re going to get with a seventh grade.” The key to teaching middle school, he said, is learning to “be like water.” Let things flow. Be flexible. Researchers have found attendance, grades and behavior in middle school are key indicators when it comes to predicting who will drop out of high school. This is why educators say there’s a big opportunity in the middle grades. It’s a moment to reach kids before they harden their assumptions about who is and who isn’t a good student. Emolior has earned a good reputation as a small middle school that’s on the right track, despite having a difficult population and low test scores. Its 250 students are mostly poor and include many pupils with special needs and immigrants who don’t speak English. But their attendance rate is over 92 percent, and suspensions are low. One reason: attention. Staff members often stop to talk with students in the lunchroom and hallways. And, as part of the city’s Middle School Quality Initiative, the school offers extra support. For example, all sixth and seventh graders have four extra periods a week to work on their reading skills. Coaches from Generation Ready pinpoint where students are weak and coach them directly, using tablets loaded with texts catered to their individual reading levels. Social studies teacher Jason Borsella with an attentive group of seventh graders (Beth Fertig/WNYC) Seventh grader Sheiquel Kabba said the close attention of English teacher Peter Scaramuzzo helped her improve: “He tells us to keep on working, like he makes it encouraging. He don’t put us down.” Various foundations, including Carnegie, have poured a lot of money into studying what’s wrong with middle schools. New York City has gone through two iterations of middle school reform in the past decade alone. The current thinking is middle schools need to hone in on the academic deficits many students bring with them from elementary school. “We call them pushables,” Spaulding said. “Those are the kids that with very strategic intervention can get to that proficient level.” With a little push and a lot of hand holding, he said, even the most distracted or struggling students can make it through middle school.

For a lot of American adults, age 12 is probably just one more moment in the extended blur that is adolescence, located smack dab in the middle of those forgettable middle school years. We're here to argue that 12 is in fact pretty special, especially if you're a New Yorker. This is the moment when many students are commuting to school alone, navigating the city by themselves. At school, they're juggling assignments and expectations, preparing for high school. Their minds are expanding dramatically, their bodies are beginning to morph. Social life is getting messy. "It’s difficult because you’re learning all these responsibilities for the first time," said Noah Shippey, a 12-year-old at Brooklyn Prospect Charter School. "And none of this has really happened before. Adults, they do that all the time and it's easy because they’ve done it a lot. But we’re just starting." Nawal Montaser, a classmate at Brooklyn Prospect, said this year has been edifying. She started wearing the hijab, a head scarf for observant Muslim women. Choosing to wear it wasn't difficult for Nawal but, like any girl her age, she was worried what her friends would say. That first day at school was terrifying. "They were so kind and I felt so loved," she said of her friends."And I really realized who the real people in my life are."

New York City schools chancellor Carmen Farina explains why she thinks 7th grade is the single most important grade in a kid’s school life. Here's NYC schools chancellor Carmen Fariña in our studio today: pic.twitter.com/OZsCb2oCoK March 9, 2015 Some schools are experimenting with gender-separated classes for 7th graders, esp. in literacy, says NYC schools chancellor Carmen Fariña. March 9, 2015 .@NYCSchools Chancellor Carmen Fariña on @BrianLehrer: No more than 30% of teacher evaluations should be tied to student test scores March 9, 2015 "My influence stops at the suggestion level," Chancellor Farina on failing charter schools & her limits @WNYC's @BrianLehrer March 9, 2015 "I'm totally committed to working with them," Chancellor Farina on her role on NYC's charter school board, collaborating @WNYC @BrianLehrer March 9, 2015

The rising tide of digital music has threatened to sink much of the record business. But an unexpected sandbar of profit has emerged: the tween market. Turns out, kids around the age of 12 still buy music, and the tween market has become big enough and powerful enough to make stars out of their favorite singers. How big? There are almost 20 million kids between the ages of 10 and 14, according to the US Census of 2010. How powerful? Tweens account for about $200 billion (don’t look twice at that “b” – it’s not a typo) in spending each year, according to a widely-cited report from the retail group known as POPAI, Point of Purchase Advertising International. That figure includes everything tweens spend money on – video games, clothing, etc. But approximately 10 percent, or $20 billion, is music-related, and that is the kind of coin that the music industry does not see very much these days. Today’s 12-year-olds are not doing anything appreciably different from what you might have done if you were a 12-year-old in, say, 1998. It was in the late '90s that the music industry began to notice that pop music, long the domain of teenagers, was actually attracting a younger audience. Artists like N Sync and Britney Spears owed a lot of their success to tweens, who, aspiring to be like the cool teenagers ahead of them in school, bought their records. But parents found the sexuality of a Britney Spears a step too far for their 12-year-old daughters (and it was mostly daughters – read on to learn why). So exploiting the tween market would have to wait until a safer place in the pop music world could evolve for 12-year-olds. Britney Spears wearing a schoolgirl outfit in the 1998 "...Baby One More Time" music video (YouTube) Enter Disney. The Walt Disney Company was already a brand that parents knew and trusted; in the first years of this century, Disney saw an opportunity, and climbed onto that sandbar. They minted genuine pop stars like Miley Cyrus, star of their TV series Hannah Montana; and Demi Lovato, star of the series Sonny With A Chance. And as the old-school business model of the record industry failed around them, Disney drew on its decades-long experience in cross-marketing to sell music-themed merchandise, DVD, and concert events that featured their own stars as well as the singers, like Taylor Swift, featured on Radio Disney. It didn’t take long for the music business to notice. In 2006, three of the year’s top-10-selling albums were aimed at tweens: Disney’s High School Musical soundtrack, the Curious George soundtrack, and Volume 9 of the curious cross-generational negotiation known as Kidz Bop. Kidz Bop was a direct reaction to parental dismay at the questionable content of much pop music; big hits of the day were re-recorded in freshly scrubbed versions. Kids knew it wasn’t the real thing, but it was better than nothing. Now, the tween market is too big to ignore. Marketing to tweens is by itself a $17 billion a year industry. And in that industry, music is not just one of the products – it is also a major delivery system. Taylor Swift doesn’t just sell songs; she sells perfume and handbags. And she sells them to a tween audience that is overwhelmingly female. Experts have long known that girls mature faster than boys. By age 12, most are already aspiring to be like the teenagers ahead of them in school and this makes them both active consumers and voracious users of social media. Social media is where much of the tween economy takes place. Music is largely purchased via download; CDs are usually received as gifts and quickly loaded onto smartphones and played for friends. A band like Echosmith is emblematic of the power of the modern tween. A group of four siblings who began playing together in their tweens and are now in their late teens, Echosmith wrote a song called “Cool Kids.” Its refrain, “I wish that I could be like the cool kids, ‘cause all the cool kids, they seem to fit in,” will resonate with every...