Recently, as a guest performer at the Sportsmen’s Tavern in Buffalo, I was introduced to the audience as a songwriter and a middle school English teacher. The welcoming response was mostly about the teaching part, as one patron shouted “Oh no!” and another, “God Bless you!”

Middle school teaching is not my first rodeo. I spent many years as a nearly-broke musician on the margins of educational institutions in order to make ends meet. From subbing in high schools to adjunct teaching in numerous colleges here and in Colorado, I racked up a pretty unimpressive resume of low paying, high student volume jobs at dozens of educational institutions. A few years ago, after looking in the mirror and seeing some suddenly older dude, I took a regular gig at the Northern Chautauqua Catholic School in Dunkirk.

Most middle school students are from 11 to 14 years old, and they are strange creatures. In terms of psychological development, they are in the early stage of adolescence, meaning they are in the business of cutting and re-tying apron strings, of making peculiar faces and body movements in front of the mirror, and of getting socially hysterical over practically nothing. In short, all this makes for a messy state of mind.

But at least they are not little children: the prospect of changing poopy pants, or getting slimed from a snotty nose, or dealing with a child who occasionally morphs into something like a Chucky doll or a badger strikes fear into my heart.

High school and early college students – those in the late stage of adolescence – suffer from libidinal tides that ebb and flow relentlessly within. They deal with the outer world much in the same way as past generations. Jocks strut and puff and posture, popular girls pretend they’re not, nerds and geeks slay dragons and seek out anything esoteric, rads get their black on and express their disgust for the world by transforming their bodies into shadowy, psychedelic pin cushions, and the worry-warts and lonely hearts transport their inner selves into the land of Indie Folk or Emo. What they all have in common is a fixation with a handheld device, which makes me sad.

So, in the end, I’ll take the middle schoolers, to whom I affectionately refer as kids. Though not necessarily goat-like, they are often very stubborn and will eat most anything. They rarely have a digestive accident, they know how to use tissues without swiping 20 at a time, and their most frightening mutation is into something like either Lucious Malfoy or Gollum.

For girls, pop music is experienced as a sassy, sing-along melody, Swift-like, but without the burden of having been through real relationships that end crummily. For boys, it’s Ja Morant or Josh Allen or the video game PC du jour. For all, when the hormones light up, they are like cats on the ‘nip.

My apologies for the generalizations presented here. The truth is kids are like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates and we don’t really know what is inside the wrapper. Maybe a better metaphor would be a box of crayons of infinite colors. Yet we must be careful, because they are also like an anthology of poetry in which all are precious works of a creator, but some are experiencing a darkness of the soul. They are more fragile than they might appear.

I wonder if my fascination with this age group is a symptom of how I have devolved over the years into an old guy who is trying to escape all the serious crap we all have to go through as we await the last ship to sail.

Or maybe it’s just the simple fact that these kids are fun to be around. Above all else, they love to laugh. And they need to laugh. If I help them do that while instilling in them a sense of the beauty of nature and art along with an enhanced ability to communicate and create, then I will have done my job.

Pete Howard, a teacher, musician, writer and house painter, lives in Dunkirk.