Off-Kilter Kids

If I hadn’t seen it, I wouldn’t believe it—Jason was sitting in his seat, eyes moving between the classroom screen and his note-taking paper, when he seemed to lose track of where he was in space. And thud! He fell to the floor.

For the third time that class period, I guided the class back to the lesson. And to draw myself back into good humor, I muttered a mantra, the one I used when I encountered clumsy teens: Remember the chocolate milk.

I repeated this mantra when a kid caught a foot on a cord, elbowed a computer off a desk, or tipped too far back in a chair. I used when kids bumped into each other and tripped over their own feet and walked into walls. This mantra reminded me of my own adolescent mishap with Great-Uncle Evan.

Everyone liked Uncle Evan. So did I. But I was also in awe of him. He had an office full of books and wrote poetry and spoke with precision and walked like a king.

So, when he beckoned to me during an afternoon picnic, I took a deep breath and walked toward him with all the poise I could gather. The trouble was that I was balancing a tray with a plate of food and a too-full tumbler of chocolate milk. Even so, I made it across the uneven yard without a spill.

It was a Sunday afternoon, and Uncle Evan was still wearing his starched white shirt and suspenders.

“Tell me, Phyllis,” he said. “What have you been reading?”

Opening my mouth must have shifted my center of gravity. The tumbler went sliding across the tray, toppled over the rim, and drenched Uncle Evan. The milk ran through his hair and over his glasses and down his face, soaking his starched white shirt.

Uncle Evan stood and shook like a wet dog. He blew on his glasses and wiped them with a napkin. He dumped the milk from his metal chair. Then he pulled up two clean chairs.

“It’ll all dry,” he said. “Now sit down and tell me what you’ve been reading.”

Not until much later did I learn the word proprioception. This word describes what growing teens often lack—the awareness of one’s body and body parts in relation to the environment.

And no wonder. They’re in the time of biggest growth since infancy, sometimes gaining as much as a half inch a day. And growth is uneven. During growth spurts, some parts of their bodies get ahead of other parts. Bones, for example, grow faster than the muscles that control them.

No wonder they don’t know how their bodies fit into the spaces around them.

Middle school rooms are full of off-kilter kids. And my chocolate-milk memory reminds me that I was once one of them.